Guns, Land, and Chickens Won’t Save You

Guns, Land, and Chickens Won’t Save You

by | Sep 25, 2020 | Culture of Resistance

As the book Deep Green Resistance reminds us, there are certain aspects of collapse that are positive (declining oil demand, for example) and others that are negative (e.g., rising patriarchal, racist elements). This piece from Vince Emanuele  argues that individualist survivalism is often an anti-social response to the social problems we are facing, and that we must organize as communities to survive.

Guns, Land, and Chickens Won’t Save You

by Vincent Emanuele / Counterpunch

“We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it… But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity.”

– David Watson, Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology

Following the Great Recession of 2008, many of my friends started talking about “living off the land.” At the time, I didn’t give their words much thought. After all, Obama was in the White House; Neoliberalism was on the rise; imperial wars raged abroad, and the antiwar movement was falling apart.

During those dark and tumultuous years, my primary focus was building the sort of left institutions that could prevent the situation in which we now find ourselves: a nation on the brink of collapse, civil war, or some combination of the two. Sometime around 2010, I started reading about the connections between climate change and the U.S. empire and militarism, which led me to research and learn more about ecological devastation and biodiversity loss.

The global picture was much grimmer than I had imagined.

Not only was capitalism and empire destroying human life, but it was also destroying the planet. At that point, I began to better understand my friends’ urge to “move to the countryside,” but I didn’t agree with their vision. To me, it seemed like a uniquely white and middle to upper-middle-class thing to do. It also seemed like the easy way out.

I remember thinking, “I don’t know too many black or Hispanic people who are starting small farms.” And I still don’t. That’s not because they’re not interested in doing so. Black and Hispanic Americans simply don’t have the material resources to start small farms, which require land (money), equipment (money), time (money), specialized skills (access), and various other resources (money and access).

Plus, I don’t know too many black or Hispanic people who are champing at the bit to live in Southern Indiana, northern Wisconsin, or rural Montana, whereas many of my white friends wouldn’t blink an eye moving to those regions. And I sure as hell don’t know of any poor people who have the resources to do any of the above. They’re happy if they can go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant once a month.

If we’re genuinely interested in building multiracial coalitions of working-class people who are capable of combating capital, the military-industrial complex, corporate power, state repression, and rightwing nationalism, we can’t do it from the isolated countryside. We can’t do it from the safety of a family farm, totally detached from the day-to-day realities facing the very people, disproportionately black and Hispanic, but also poor whites, we need to build relationships with if we hope to win.

Urban communities, churches, schools, workplaces, bars, social and sporting clubs, recreational centers, community centers, and neighborhoods provide fertile organizing terrain for leftists. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly 80% of Americans live in urban areas. By 2050, studies suggest that 66% of the global population will live in cities. Those numbers will only grow with time.

If you live in rural Iowa, you depend on people in New York City, Mexico City, and Tokyo.

You’re not some sort of lone-ranger-cowboy-farmer: you’re wholly dependent upon petroleum-based products, including everything from fertilizers and fuel to equipment and cleaning products. Multinational corporations produce those goods. International banks finance production. All of this requires international agreements, governments, legal apparatuses, and the like. Global supply chains provide your equipment. And the fuel that runs your equipment is extracted, refined, shipped, and distributed on a global scale. You’re not living a ‘sustainable life’ — you’re just as part of the global economic system as anyone else, hell, even more so than low-wage workers who live in cities.

Whoever controls the cities and, to some degree, the suburbs, will control the nation. Cities are the lifeblood of capitalism. Capital dwells in cities, not rural areas. Lockheed Martin depends on Wall Street. BP depends on Lockheed Martin. Corporate headquarters, executives, and lenders are located in cities. The bulk of their customers reside in cities. The economic activity that takes place in cities supports the flow of capital which facilitates capitalism.

Our enemies, both visible (corporations, governments, militarized police) and invisible (capital) reside in cities, not the countryside.

Furthermore, think about the past 20 years of social movements and political uprisings: the ‘Battle For Seattle’ (urban environment); the antiwar movement (largely based in urban environments); Occupy Wall Street (cities), the pro-union occupation in Madison, Wisconsin, (urban environment/college town), Black Lives Matter uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, (urban/suburban environment), and the current wave of Black Lives Matter uprisings, occupations, marches, and the like (yes, throughout the country, but primarily based in urban environments). The only notable exception is Standing Rock. Even the teachers’ strikes that swept the nation a few years ago were based in cities and suburban school districts. The same is true of insurgent socialist electoral campaigns.

At some point, I realized that many of the people, including my friends, who’ve moved to the countryside to start small farms aren’t interested in building political movements, fighting back against corporate and government power, or creating a better world. They’re interested in survival, yet they know nothing about survival. They didn’t grow up in the woods. They don’t live off the land. They use power tools. They use cars, and fuel, and technology, and all the rest. To the degree they’re able to “live off the land,” it’s only because modernity has allowed them to do so with minimal risk.

They believe, näively, that they can survive as a small family unit in a world of 7.8 billion people. They can’t even organize their family members or close friends to get on the same page, let alone function as a tribe or small community, yet they believe they’re going to live in some sort of self-sustainable fantasy land of yesteryear? It’s a joke, but it’s also dangerous.

The ‘back-to-the-land’ movement in the U.S. has a long history.

For the sake of time and courtesy, I won’t bore you by revisiting its history. In today’s context, however, the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement operates comfortably within the framework of Neoliberal ideology. Hyper-individualism is the religious dogma that fuels the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement. Only someone totally detached from the broader global community would be able to convince themselves that they can survive in this world with minimal social cooperation.

The same people who talk about ‘living off the land’ are the same people who say things like, “I’ve gotta look out for mine,” or “My family is the only thing that matters.” This parochial worldview is not uncommon in the U.S., especially since the Reagan Revolution. The Cult of Individuality infects virtually every aspect of modern U.S. culture, from politics and economics to sports, film, art, and social relations. This is evident when I see pictures of my friends hiding out in their quasi-secluded countryside homes, tending to chickens and growing tomatoes, while the country and world collapse in real-time.

Speaking of collapse, the people who think they’re going to hide out in relative safety as the world crumbles around them are so detached from reality that it’s hard to seriously consider where they’re coming from, but I’ll try.

Let’s say you live 60-120 miles outside a major city (this would apply to many of my friends in Northwest Indiana or Southwest Michigan who own property). If the economy collapses (due to any number of factors), or if the country devolves into a civil war, perhaps even a revolution, or a nuclear war, or a cataclysmic ecological disaster, you’re fucked. If cities become unlivable, you’re fucked. If suburbs become unlivable, you’re fucked.

You and the family are going to hunker down at the homestead, and the hundreds of thousands or millions of people who live within a week’s walk aren’t gonna discover your property? Oh, you have guns? So what? Have you ever used them in a combat situation? How often do you and your family drill? How often do you shoot? How big is your family? Big enough to fend off hoards of people traversing the countryside in search of food, shelter, and safety?

What are you going to do if we can’t stop governments (U.S., Israel, Pakistan, India) from triggering a nuclear conflict? As one Wired headline put it, “Even a Small Nuclear War Could Trigger a Global Apocalypse.’ You can’t stop nuclear wars from your chicken coup. You can’t stop nuclear wars with your daddy’s shotgun. You can’t stop nuclear wars with organic produce. And you can’t stop nuclear wars with gluten-free home-cooked bread.

Only internationally coordinated political campaigns and movements can stop a potential nuclear war.

What are you and your family going to do when tens of millions of Americans are migrating across the U.S. as a result of runaway climate change and rapidly changing weather patterns, ecologies, and natural landscapes? What’s your plan? To mow down thousands of people fleeing natural disasters? Is that how you want to live? Do you think they’re not going to shoot back? Do you think your property won’t, at some point, also become uninhabitable due to climate disaster?

My advice to people who think they’re going to survive a collapsing society? Take a flight to Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or Yemen, then tell me about your absurd and childlike ‘collapse’ fantasies. Nothing is inspiring, humane, or decent about living in a fractured and crumbling society. The glorification of violence, destruction, and death in U.S. culture is, to say the least, quite disturbing. There’s nothing cool or sexy about banditry, religious mobs, sectarian violence, terrorism, torture, or wanton violence. Americans (mostly white people who grew up in the suburbs) hoping for collapse should spend more time in places that have experienced collapse. It’s not like the movies (or your imagination).

In the end, there’s no hiding from what’s coming.

Climate change is a global problem. Capitalism, the primary driver of climate change, is a global economic system. Each of us lives within its grips, unfortunately. The only way to stop or mitigate what’s coming is through collective action on a massive global scale. Either we make it out of this mess together, or none of us make it out alive. It’s that simple. Our collective challenges require national and international solidarity. We must build relationships, bonds, trust, and networks across geographical, ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries.

Regional or local solutions won’t suffice. Regional and local solutions will contribute, but we need an international vision to address 21st-century challenges. And that international vision won’t be cultivated by those living ‘off the grid.’ Any international vision worth considering must prioritize large-scale (global) projects. Large-scale solutions can only be developed democratically and equitably through collective decision-making processes that incorporate diverse political movements from around the globe.

I became a leftist because Marx’s and Engels’s writings, particularly those in the Communist Manifesto, resonated with me on a very deep level. Their writings didn’t encourage me to run away to the countryside and relive some sort of 18th-century ‘back-to-the-land’ fantasy. Their writings inspired me to build relationships and organize with working-class people around the globe in the hope that, someday, we will overthrow this terrible system (capitalism).

Today, we need a vision that’s inspiring, complex, and flexible (always willing to adapt to changing circumstances), but also principled.

Without a principled vision of how to proceed, we’ll continue to spin our tails resisting the latest excesses of capitalism, empire, or racism, without accomplishing much. People joined socialist and communist movements because those movements inspired poor and working-class people through ideology and action.

If our vision doesn’t include those who don’t have the means to escape ‘back-to-the-land,’ what sort of vision is it? The left should seek to include, not exclude, people. I’m not interested in building more walls (visible or invisible), internal borders, or tribal social relationships. The right does a fine job of inciting reactionary worldviews.

The left’s vision should be about more than simply surviving the coming storm. We need a vision that inspires and motivates people from around the world to join our movements, campaigns, and organizations. That can’t happen in seclusion. It can only happen through intentionally building broad, deep, and sustained social relationships with people from around the globe.

Vincent Emanuele writes for teleSUR English and lives in Michigan City, Indiana. He can be reached at vincent.emanuele333@gmail.com.

This article was originally published in Counter Punch on September 11, 2020. You can read the article here:

Guns, Land, and Chickens Won’t Save You

 

Vince Emanuele—Veteran, Activist, and Organizer (Resistance Radio)

Vince Emanuele—Veteran, Activist, and Organizer (Resistance Radio)

by | Jul 12, 2020 | Movement Building & Support

In this episode of resistance radio Derrick Jensen interviews Vince Emanuele about his experiences, values and activism.

Vince Emanuele is a writer, activist, and combat veteran who currently lives in Michigan City, Indiana, where he and Sergio Kochergin run a community-cultural space called P.A.R.C. – Politics Art Roots Culture. In 2006, Vince refused a third deployment to Iraq, left the United States Marines Corps, and joined the antiwar movement, working with antiwar military veterans and activists around the globe, including Iraqi and Afghan refugees.

Since then, he has spent the past 14 years working with a wide range of left wing political movements, including labor campaigns, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, local environmental campaigns, the Standing Rock Occupation, anti-prison campaigns, cultural projects, and the Bernie 2020 campaign.

In this episode, Vince talks about:

1:20 Organizing

  • his inspiration for the anti war campaign
  • how the Covid-19 shows us that no matter how oppressive the system is, people want to return to “normalcy”
  • his involvement in the Bernie 2020 campaign and the need for a revolution beyond that
  • human supremacism in the mainstream environmental movement
  • the imminence of collapse of the natural world and what we can do in this situation

24:25 Magnificent bribe of the authoritarian system

  • how there’s less left of the world for every generation
  • the need for accountability in activism and political organizing
  • need for humility
  • love for all life on Earth
  • distractions from society
  • inevitability of collapse

47:00 How to organize better

  • build  and prepare locally
  • need for a revolutionary aboveground organizing
  • talking about the necessity of radical and militant actions

Browse all of Derrick Jensen’s Resistance Radio interviews at https://deepgreenresistance.blogspot.com/p/derrick-jensen-resistance-radio-archives.html

A New Declaration

A New Declaration

by | Dec 5, 2018 | The Solution: Resistance

Featured image: Occupy Wall Street. Wikipedia

     by Derrick Jensen

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That the real world is the source of our own lives, and the lives of others. A weakened planet is less capable of supporting life, human or otherwise. Thus the health of the real world is primary, more important than any social or economic system, because all social or economic systems are dependent upon a living planet: without a living planet you don’t have any social or economic systems whatsoever. It is self-evident that to value a social system that harms the planet’s capacity to support life over life itself is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality.

That any way of life based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition not sustainable.

That any way of life based on the hyperexploitation of renewable resources is by definition not sustainable: if, for example, there are fewer salmon return every year, eventually there will be none. This means that for a way of life to be sustainable, it must not harm native communities: native prairies, native forests, native fisheries, and so on.

That the real world is interdependent, such that harm done to rivers harms those humans and nonhumans whose lives depend on these rivers, harms forests and prairies and wetlands surrounding these rivers, harms the oceans into which these rivers flow. Harm done to mountains harms rivers flowing through them. Harm done to oceans harms everyone directly or indirectly connected to them.

That you cannot argue with physics. If you burn carbon-based fuels, this carbon will go into the air, and have effects in the real world.

That creating and releasing poisons into the world will poison humans and nonhumans.

That no one, no matter now rich or powerful, should be allowed to create poisons for which there is no antidote.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to create messes that cannot be cleaned up.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to destroy places humans or nonhumans need to survive.

That no one, no matter how rich or powerful, should be allowed to drive human cultures or nonhuman species extinct.

That reality trumps all belief systems: what you believe is not nearly so important as what is real.

That on a finite planet you cannot have an economy based on or requiring growth. At least you cannot have one and expect to either have a planet or a future.

That the current way of life is not sustainable, and will collapse. The only real questions are what will be left of the world after that collapse, and how bad things will be for the humans and nonhumans who come after. We hold it as self-evident that we should do all that we can to make sure that as much of the real, physical world remains intact until the collapse of the current system, and that humans and nonhumans should be as prepared as possible for this collapse.

That the health of local economies are more important than the health of a global economy.

That a global economy should not be allowed to harm local economies or landbases.

That corporations are not living beings. They are certainly not human beings.

That corporations do not in any real sense exist. They are legal fictions. Limited liability corporations are institutions created explicitly to separate humans from the effects of their actions—making them, by definition, inhuman and inhumane. To the degree that we desire to live in a human and humane world—and, really, to the degree that we wish to survive—limited liability corporations need to be eliminated.

That the health of human and nonhuman communities are more important than the profits of corporations.

We hold it as self-evident, as the Declaration of Independence states, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it. . . .” Further, we hold it as self-evident that it would be more precise to say that it is not the Right of the People, nor even their responsibility, but instead something more like breathing—something that if we fail to do we die. If we as a People fail to rid our communities of destructive institutions, those institutions will destroy our communities. And if we in our communities cannot provide meaningful and nondestructive ways for people to gain food, clothing, and shelter then we must recognize it’s not just specific destructive institutions but the entire economic system that is pushing the natural world past breaking points. Capitalism is killing the planet. Industrial civilization is killing the planet. Once we’ve recognized the destructiveness of capitalism and industrial civilization—both of which are based on systematically converting a living planet into dead commodities—we’ve no choice, unless we wish to sign our own and our children’s death warrants, but to fight for all we’re worth and in every way we can to overturn it.

#

Here is a list of our initial demands. When these demands are met, we will have more, and then more, until we are living sustainably in a just society. In each case, if these demands are not met, we will, because we do not wish to sign our own and our children’s death warrants, put them in place ourselves.

We demand that:

  • Communities, including nonhuman communities, be immediately granted full legal and moral rights.
  • Corporations be immediately stripped of their personhood, no longer be considered as persons under the law.
  • Limited liability corporations be immediately stripped of their limited liability protection. If someone wants to perpetrate some action for which there is great risk to others, this person should be prepared to assume this risk him- or herself.
  • Those whose economic activities cause great harm—including great harm to the real, physical world—be punished commensurate with their harm. So long as prisons and the death penalty exist, Tony Hayward of BP and Don Blankenship of Massey Coal, to provide two examples among many, should face the death penalty or life in prison without parole for murder, both of human beings and of landbases. The same can be said for many others, including those associated with these specific murders and thefts, and including those associated with many other murders and thefts.
  • Environmental Crimes Tribunals be immediately put in place to try those who have significantly harmed the real, physical world. These tribunals will have force of law and will impose punishment commensurate with the harm caused to the public and to the real world.
  • The United States immediately withdraw from NAFTA, DR-CAFTA, and other so-called “free trade agreements” (if it really is “free trade,” then why do they need the military and police to enforce it?) as these cause immeasurable and irreparable harm to local economies in the United States and abroad, and to the real, physical world. They cause grievous harm to working people in the United States and elsewhere. Committees should be formed to determine whether to try those who signed on to NAFTA for subverting United States sovereignty, and for Crimes Against Humanity for the deaths caused by these so-called free trade agreements.
  • The United States remove all support for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Both of these organizations cause immeasurable and irreparable harm to local economies in the United States and abroad, and to the real, physical world. They cause grievous harm to working people in the United States and elsewhere.
  • The United States recognize that it is founded on land stolen from indigenous peoples. We demand a four stage process to rectify this ongoing atrocity. The first stage consists of immediately overturning the relevant parts of the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. M’Intosh, which includes such rationalizations for murder and theft as, “However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned.” We demand that this pretense, this principle, not only be questioned but rejected. The second is that all lands for which the United States government cannot establish legal title through treaty must immediately be returned to those peoples from whom it was stolen. Large scale landowners, those with over 640 acres, must immediately return all lands over 640 acres to their original and rightful inhabitants. Small scale landowners, those with title to 640 acres or less, who are “innocent purchasers” may retain title to their land (and this same is true for the primary 640 acres of larger landowners), but may not convey this title to others, and on their deaths it passes back to the original and rightful inhabitants. The third phase is for the United States government to pay reparations to those whose land they have taken commensurate with the harm they have caused. The fourth phase is for each and every treaty between the United States government and sovereign indigenous nations to be revisited, with an eye toward determining whether the treaties were signed under physical, emotional, economic, or military duress and whether these treaties have been violated. In either of these cases the wrongs must be redressed, once again commensurate with the harm these wrongs have caused.
  • The United States government will provide reparations to those whose families have been harmed by chattel slavery, commensurate with the harm caused.
  • Rivers be restored. There are more than 2 million dams in the United States, more than 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall and over 70,000 dams over six and a half feet tall. Dams kill rivers. If we removed one of these 70,000 dams each day, it would take 200 years to get rid of them all. Salmon don’t have that time. Sturgeon don’t have that time. We demand that no more dams be built, and we demand the removal of five of those 70,000 dams per day over the next forty years, beginning one year from today. Remember, physical reality is more important than your belief system.
  • Native prairies, wetlands, and forests be restored, at a rate of five percent per year. Please note that tree farms or “forests” managed for timber are not the same as native forests, any more than lawns or corn fields are prairies, and any more than concrete sluices are wetlands. Please note also that if all of the prairies and forests east of the Mississippi River were restored, the United States could be a net carbon sink within five years, even without reducing carbon emissions.
  • An immediate end to clearcutting, “leave tree,” “seed tree,” “shelter tree” and all other “even age management” techniques, no matter what they are called, and no matter what rationales are put forward by the timber industry and the government. All remaining native forests are immediately and completely protected.
  • An immediate end to destruction of prairies and wetlands. All remaining prairies and wetlands are immediately protected.
  • The United States government immediately begin strict enforcement of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and other acts aimed at protecting the real, physical world. All programs associated with these Acts must be fully funded. This includes the immediate designation of Critical Habitat for all species on the wait list.
  • Each year the United States must survey all endangered species to ascertain if they are increasing in number and range. If not, the United States government will do what is required to make sure they do.
  • The United States government do whatever is necessary to make sure that there are fewer toxins in every mother’s breast milk every year than the year before, and that there are fewer carcinogens in every stream every year than the year before.
  • The United States government do whatever is necessary to make sure that there are more migratory songbirds every year than the year before, that there are more native fish every year than the year before, more native reptiles and amphibians, and so on.
  • Immediate closure of all US military bases on foreign soil. All US military personnel are to be immediately brought home.
  • An immediate ban on the direct or indirect use of mercenaries (“military contractors”) by the US government and all associated entities.
  • A reduction in the US military budget by 20 per year, until it reaches 20 percent of its current size. Then it will be maintained at no larger than that except in case of a war that is declared only by a direct vote of more than 50 percent of US citizens (and to last only as long as 50 percent of US citizens back it). This will provide the “peace dividend” politicians lyingly promised us back when the Soviet Union collapsed, and will balance the US budget and more than pay for all necessary domestic programs.
  • The United States officially recognize that capitalism is based on subsidies, or as Dwayne Andreas, former CEO of ADM said, “There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” He’s right. For example, commercial fishing fleets worldwide receive more in subsidies than the entire value of their catch. Timber corporations, oil corporations, banks, would all collapse immediately without massive government subsidies and bailouts. Therefore, we demand that the United States government stop subsidizing environmentally and socially destructive activities, and shift those same subsidies into activities that restore the real, physical, world and that promote local self-sufficiency and vibrant local economies. Instead of subsidizing deforestation, subsidize reforestation. Instead of subsidizing the oil industry, subsidize relocalization. Instead of subsidizing fisheries depletion, subsidize fisheries restoration. Instead of subsidizing plastics production, subsidize cleaning plastics from the ocean. Instead of subsidizing the production of toxics by the chemical industries, subsidize the cleaning up of these toxics, both from our bodies and from the rest of the real, physical world.
  • Scientific consensus is that to prevent even more catastrophic climate change than we and the rest of the world already face, net carbon emissions must be reduced by 80 percent. Because we wish to continue to live on a habitable planet, we demand a carbon reduction of 20 percent of current emissions per year over the next four years.
  • The enshrinement in law of the right for workers to collectively bargain. In case of strikes, if police are brought in at all, it must be to protect the right of workers to strike. If police force anyone to come to terms, they must force the capitalists.
  • That laws against rape be enforced, even against those who are rich, even those who are famous athletes, even those who are politicians, even those who are entertainers.
  • The enshrinement in law of the precautionary principle, which states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or the real, physical world, then the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking the action. In the absence of conclusive proof, no action may be taken. For example, no chemicals would be allowed to be released into the environment without conclusive proof that they will not harm the public or the environment.
  • No new chemicals be released into the real, physical world until all currently used chemicals have been thoroughly tested for toxicity, and if found to have any significant chance of harming the public or the environment, these chemicals must be immediately and without exception withdrawn from use.
  • The immediate, explicit, and legally binding recognition that perpetual growth is incompatible with life on a finite planet. We demand that economic growth stop, and that economies begin to contract. We demand immediate acknowledgement that if we do not begin this contraction voluntarily, that this contraction will take place against our will, and will cause untold misery.
  • That overconsumption and overpopulation must be addressed in methods that are not racist, colonialist, or misogynist. We must recognize that humans, and especially industrial humans, have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity. We must recognize further that while overconsumption is more harmful than overpopulation, both are harmful. We must further recognize that right now, more than fifty percent of the children who are born are not wanted. We demand that all children be wanted. We recognize that the single most effective strategy for making certain that all children are wanted is the liberation of women. Therefore we demand that women be given absolute reproductive freedom, and that all forms of reproductive control be freely available to women. We demand that those who attempt to deny women this freedom be punished by law.
  • The United States government put an immediate end to absentee land ownership. No one shall be allowed to own land more than one-quarter of a mile from his or her home.
  • Land ownership patterns change. Land ownership is more concentrated in the United States than in many countries the United States derides as antidemocratic: five percent of farmers in Honduras own 67 percent of the arable land, while in the United States five percent of landowners (not citizens) own 75 percent of the land (California is in many ways worse: twenty-five landowners own 58 percent of the farmland). To rectify this, no one shall be allowed to own more than 640 acres. All title to individual or corporate land holdings over 640 acres are to be immediately forfeited. These lands will be first in line for restoration to native forest, prairie, wetland, and so on. Lands not suitable for these purposes will be used to provide housing for those who cannot afford it.
  • An immediate end to factory farming and to monocrop agriculture, two of the most destructive activities humans have ever perpetrated. We demand a return to perennial polycultures.
  • An immediate end to soil drawdown. Because soil is the basis of terrestrial life, no activities will be allowed which destroy topsoil. All properties over sixty acres must have soil surveys every ten years (on every sixty acre parcel), and if they have suffered any decrease of health or depth of topsoil the lands will be confiscated and given to those who will build up soil.
  • An immediate end to aquifer drawdown. No activities will be allowed which draw down aquifers.
  • Provision of free food, shelter, and medical necessities to all residents.
  • Immediate increase in the tax rate to 95 percent for all gross earnings over one million dollars per year by persons or entities.
  • An immediate and permanent halt to all fracking, mountaintop removal, tar sands extraction, nuclear power, and offshore drilling.
  • An immediate and permanent halt to all energy production that is harmful to the real, physical world. This includes the manufacture of solar photovoltaics, windmills, hybrid cars, and so on.
  • Removal of plastic from the ocean. Each year the ocean must have 5 percent less plastic in it than the year before.
  • Each year the oceans must have 5 percent more large fish than the year before.
  • The United States Constitution be rewritten to destroy the primacy it gives to the privatization of profits and the externalization of costs by the wealthy, and to make its primary purpose not the preservation of the wealth and power of the already wealthy and powerful, but rather to protect human and nonhuman communities—to protect the real, physical world—and enforcably to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet.

#

We hold these further truths also to be self-evident:

That demands without means to enforce them are nothing more than begging. We are not begging. We are demanding.

Power is not a mistake, and those in power will not suddenly have attacks of conscience. Social change has never occurred through waiting for the rich or powerful to develop consciences, and it never will.

Those in power will not act different than they have acted all along, and they will not act against the power of capital. We hold it as self-evident that the rich and powerful have no reason to stop the rich from stealing from the poor nor the powerful from destroying more of the real, physical world than they already have. That is, they have no reason except us. Our lives and the life of the planet that is our only home is on the line. We no longer have the luxury of allowing those in power to continue. If those in power won’t accede to these demands, then they need to not be in power, and we need to remove them from power, using any means necessary.

We hold it as self-evident, as the Declaration of Independence states, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it. . . .”

It is long past time we asserted our rights.

 

 

Interview with DAPL Eco-Saboteurs Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek

Interview with DAPL Eco-Saboteurs Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek

by | Aug 2, 2017 | Property & Material Destruction

Jennifer Murnan and Max Wilbert of Deep Green Resistance interviewed Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek following their press release claiming responsibility for multiple incidents of sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline and construction equipment. Listen to the audio, or read the transcript:

Download mp3

Jennifer: First, thank you so much, Jessica and Ruby, for having this conversation today. Could you talk a little bit about who you are?

Ruby: My name’s Ruby. I’m 27 years old. I found out about DAPL when I was a pre-school teacher in Boulder, Colorado, and that motivated me to quit my job and go to Standing Rock. I was following the issue very closely. When I arrived at Standing Rock, I was really relieved and comforted to see so many people there willing to do whatever kind of work was needed.

I saw that Standing Rock was really taken care of, and I noticed that there were 1200 other miles of pipeline that had to be stopped. I saw a news article in a local Iowa paper about Jessica Reznicek starting an encampment by herself down at the Mississippi River, the largest waterway here in the United States in the northern continent. I went down there, to Mississippi Stand. I plugged in immediately, willing to do whatever.

I worked on media and participated in boycotts and marches and the whole traditional model of civil disobedience, and here I am today talking today to you.

Jessica: My name’s Jessica Reznicek, 36 years old. I really started delving into activism about six years ago during the Occupy Wall Street movement. I joined the Zuccotti movement in New York. When I learned that back in my home city of Des Moines, Iowa, there was a local Occupy movement occurring, I returned home and plugged in there. I began working tirelessly on the Occupy campaigns on a local level in Iowa, in the Iowa state capital, and around the caucuses.

Through that movement, I met Catholic Workers who were at the forefront here in the local struggle. For about six years I’ve been plugging in and working on resistance via the Des Moines Catholic Worker house, and have been engaged non-stop in various campaigns, everything from anti-war to saving the planet and trying to save the human race!

I met Ruby here in Iowa last summer. It’s been an incredible journey with the two of us together, and I’m eager to share that journey at this point.

Jennifer: When you met each other, did you find common ground in motivation and inspiration?

Jessica: I think that’s how Ruby and I ended up pairing off. The bottom line for both Ruby and me was to stop this pipeline and to do it peacefully and nonviolently, and to explore and exhaust what you might call traditional avenues. Hundreds of thousands of people resisted this pipeline, so by no means did only Ruby and I care so deeply about these issues—but we really hit it off. Our personalities hit it off.

We did a hunger strike at the Iowa Utilities Board over the winter, boycotts, marches, lockdowns. Mississippi Stand was notorious for lockdowns, and they were effective. I think that’s where we got a taste of it.

One of the lockdowns I did with another close friend of mine was on a construction site, the boring site under the Mississippi River on the Iowa side. We locked onto a backhoe, and stopped the construction at the boring site for about four hours.

Ruby and I had some great conversations after that ― it was great to shut down a construction site for four hours, but ultimately we need more. We need to delay construction not just for days, but for weeks and months for the ultimate purpose of shutting this pipeline down and having investors pull out. Ruby and I were in that vein together.

Jennifer: You’ve been very courageous. Where do you pull that well of courage?

Ruby: Directly from my heart. I’ve tried to stop caring about this, honestly, and I can’t. I’ve been involved with other campaigns since DAPL, and those are also courageous, but I just can’t let this go. All of this destruction needs to be stopped, absolutely. But I saw with Standing Rock that DAPL in particular was a turning point for a lot of things, and we have yet to win a victory.

For me and for a lot of people, the bottom line was to stop the pipeline. That is what motivated me to act the way I have, having exhausted every other tactic.

I was a preschool teacher and I love kids. [chokes up with grief] We’re not leaving them anything. It’s scary, it’s scary what everyone is going through, and I see a lot of fear preventing people from acting. I was afraid as well, but it had to be done. That’s why I’m here talking to you now, because these are the conversations that we need to be having, as a collective, as a whole. How do we effectively stop this desecration that continues day in and day out?

Jennifer: Those are the questions that we all have to ask ourselves, and I’m really glad that you’re raising those questions. Thank you.

Max: The question of how we actually stop them is critical. So is recognizing that when what we’re doing isn’t working, we have to do something else. What was your psychology as you moved toward taking the actions that you did, and what did you actually end up doing?

Ruby: Our lockdowns gave us a teaser for stopping construction. One day, after another pullback had occurred at the Skunk River, Jessica and I got together and had this idea to mess with the engines of these heavy machines.

We brainstormed back and forth all day . . . you know, what if we take the oil out of the thing . . . we really don’t know how to do that. So why don’t we just burn it? Okay, I know how to light a fire. You strike a match. Going and doing that action was really liberating and empowering and at the same time scary. Oh my gosh, I just committed arson. But it had to be done. That was the first night that I really felt empowered as an individual. I did actually make a difference and a concrete contribution by my standards as a person.

So the psychology of it is you’re battling with fear, because we’re all living in this oppressive system. That’s something we have to overcome. Otherwise we continue to allow this to go on, and we continue to be oppressed. We have to liberate ourselves through our own actions.

Jennifer: I appreciate that your statement distinguishes living beings from objects when discussing violence. You point out that destroying infrastructure isn’t violence.

Jessica: I’ve been trying to get this message out to the activist community here in Iowa and elsewhere. Our culture and our society and we as people put so much emphasis on property, but we have to start understanding that these machines are desecrating the earth and the people and all of the earth’s inhabitants. We need to get out of that paradigm where we place property on such a high pedestal, especially when that property is destroying every natural resource available to us and not leaving a future for the generations to come.

It’s really difficult for people to understand that Ruby and I were actually preventing destruction. I like to focus on the property improvement that we’ve made versus property destruction. At every turn, we were acting from our hearts and from our spirits and with all life on this planet in mind. Absolutely no life was in jeopardy while we were acting, and in fact our goal was to save lives.

Max: The methods that we’re taught are acceptable for changing the world usually aren’t very threatening to those in power. I don’t think it’s a mistake, for example, that we get taught the history of Martin Luther King in school but we don’t get taught about the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. We learn about the struggle against apartheid, but we don’t get taught that Nelson Mandela organized and committed sabotage and engaged in actions that caused him to be labeled as a terrorist by the U. S. and South African governments.

You have a history and a background as activists trying to do the right thing and make the world a better place. What’s your understanding of how your actions fit into the history of social movements and people who are called to do what’s right even though it may be illegal?

Ruby: I know a little bit about the Black Panthers. I know that narrative that the government hijacked everything, but I didn’t know that Nelson Mandela organized sabotage. That’s awesome.

It was a very personal thing for me. It’s the right thing to do. I live here, in the United States, in a country that perpetuates violence everywhere, including here. I saw that I had the opportunity to act in this way, and that’s what motivated me.

Jessica: We’re not taught these things, so Ruby and I feel isolated or alienated from the wider movement when we decide to take these actions. That’s really unfortunate, not to feel in solidarity with a historical narrative. A lot of our energy is expended, unfortunately, on defending ourselves to the movement, and you just wonder . . . it’s disheartening when I don’t know whether I’m going to be supported by anti-pipeline activists.

We do go back over these stories. Fortunately, I’ve been intimately engaged for six years in the Catholic Worker Movement, which has a rich history and tradition of property destruction via a Biblical narrative. I’ve embraced this tradition and found my little niche.

I live in a small intentional community here in Des Moines, and when when we released our press statement a few days ago, we were immediately supported by our close friends and family. Thank goodness. That’s basically due to an ongoing historical struggle created in the 1930s with Dorothy Day. It gives us something to which we can attach ourselves and find legitimacy, which we’re having a really hard time finding in other circles. That’s due to lack of information and lack of being taught these histories as children.

Jennifer: I’m part of the Political Prisoner Support Group in Deep Green Resistance. What do you need right now? What do you need into the future, and how can we be part of that?

Ruby and Jessica: First of all, thank you.

Jessica: Thank you so much. We love you. Thank you for asking. It’s been kind of a blur for the last couple of days. Ruby and I got out of jail yesterday morning on pre-trial release. We’re scrambling now to do a couple of things before . . . who knows? The feds could come knocking at our door at any moment.

One thing is to get a website set up where we can have postings such as joint statements that Ruby and I release, and also future hearings, court dates, solidarity actions, and support network information.

We’re representing ourselves, but do have a fantastic federal attorney, Bill Quigley, out of Loyola Law School down in New Orleans, as a stand-by counsel. He’s a great guy and available, but we’d really like to find someone here in the Midwest who would be more accessible and willing to at least assist us in filing motions or communicating with a prosecutor, and serve as a stand-by counsel here locally in the case that Ruby and I are incarcerated and facing serious charges. It’s really difficult to work from inside the oppressive prison system, so it’d be valuable to have a legal advocate here locally that we can work with.

Ruby: Yeah, just the offer of support is amazing. Thank you for doing what you’re doing. I’m sure I’ll have a request or two once I’m inside. As Jessica said, if you know anyone for defense in Iowa, that would be really helpful. We’re having a hard time trying to find a lawyer in Iowa, I think because this stuff doesn’t go on in Iowa.

Max: I don’t know anyone off the top of my head, but we do have some friends in the legal community, activist lawyers, who we can talk to. We’ll definitely be in touch with you two.

Oftentimes speaking out can be dangerous. They try to discourage people from building solidarity and speaking about what they did. They want to keep people isolated in the legal system and afraid. Why did you feel called to speak out about what you did, even to the point of saying that you hope other people consider these kinds of similar actions as a way to effectively defend the planet?

Ruby: Because really we’ve tried everything, hot dog under the sun, man. I’ve exhausted my creative possibilities. The No DAPL campaign fragmented pretty quickly, and we lost focus on stopping the pipeline. We were called by The Intercept about two weeks ago for interviews, so I had hope that the No DAPL issues could stay alive in the media. But The Intercept focused instead on the illegal surveillance of activists.

So after we got off the phone, we talked together, and it was like, “Fuck it, man, let’s claim it.” Because we didn’t stop the pipeline. We both feel personally responsible for that, and this is the last thing we can do. And you know what? People need to talk about it.

I remember trying to talk about it with people that I trusted. I’m pretty fresh on the activist scene and security culture, but it felt like I was encountering a fear-based immediate shut-down, do not talk. That sucks because we need to be doing these things. Apparently this is the only way they’re going to actually listen.

We anticipated the repercussions of every action that we took. Although I view these repercussions as unjust, we were fully prepared going into it, in that mental mind game of “I’m driving myself to jail right now.” So we’ve been prepared for jail for several months, and we still feel passionate about this — I still can’t let this go because this is still really flipping important — and we both have the mental fortitude to step forward. Well, let’s step forward then.

People need to have these conversations. It’s important for our own evolution as a people, as a whole, to take a step back, look at what’s going on, look at what we’re doing and whether it’s effective. We want to stop the pipeline, or we want to save the old-growth forests. We have so many battles. So let’s do it. If the methods that we’re using aren’t working, let’s change the methods. Let’s not get stuck in some ego, celebrity, whatever.

Max: Reading your press release, I was struck with, frankly, how easy it seemed to be to pull off some of the actions. I went to an event recently with the Valve Turners, the people who shut down the tar sands pipelines. They talked about how they actually had pretty bad security culture in planning of their action. They didn’t know how to use the encryption technology well. They didn’t do a super-secretive job, and they expected that maybe the cops would be there waiting for them when they showed up to carry out their action.

But the cops weren’t. The action was a total surprise to the authorities. Could you speak to how easy some of this stuff is and how maybe most of the barriers we actually face toward shutting this earth destruction down is more in our minds and our hearts than in actual danger?

Jessica: Absolutely. I could not agree with you more. I think we created this whole narrative in our minds that this oppressive state and industry were listening to everything we were doing, following us everywhere we went, and that we would inevitably be caught.

Ruby and I did a sloppy job so much of the time at many points. I mean you hate admitting it, but it’s just the truth. We went to these places with knowledge self-garnered within a matter of weeks and were effectively halting construction for weeks on end just via one fire or one valve piercing.

We built our confidence up each time. Like wow, this is really doable. It’s insulting on some level, but it needs to be cleared up. Ruby and I acted solely alone. Nobody else was involved in any of these actions. I think it’s hard for people to believe ― “How could these two women pull this off so easily?”

It’s a matter of determination. It’s a matter of breaking through your own fears and doubts and perceptions of this undefeatable empire. Really this is doable for lots of people. That’s one of the main reasons we wanted to come out and tell people ― because this is easy stuff to do. If Ruby and I had had a crew that had doubled or tripled or quadrupled our numbers, we really could have stopped this thing, I truly believe at the bottom of my heart, just via actions like we did.

Ruby: I think that narrative that’s in our head that they’re always watching us and blah blah blah, it’s oppression, dude. They come out with the NSA and blah blah blah and their television shows with forensic evidence and this is how they catch a criminal. It’s all crap. It’s all crap. They are incompetent.

Have you ever talked to a cop? They are instructed to just follow orders. They do not know how to think critically. And that continues to worsen.

If you’re acting with integrity and utilizing your own critical intelligence, you can do a lot of good. Recognize that fear as oppression. Liberate yourself!

Max: Inspiring words. Thank you so much.

Jennifer: Yeah, thank you so much. It has been really great to be here with you today.

Ruby: We really appreciate talking to you. It seems that you all have a strong network of solidarity. That is super-hopeful; we need that kind of communal infrastructure. So thank you all.

To Contact Jessica & Ruby’s Legal Support Team:
Attorney Bill Quigley: 1-504-710-3074 AND quigley77@gmail.com

 

Editor’s note: Deep Green Resistance advocates a militant strategy for saving the planet: Decisive Ecological Warfare.  We invite you to read this strategy, and to undertake a long and sober assessment of the situation we face. Time is short.

Note: Though the resistance movement will have different phases and parts, the Deep Green Resistance organization is, will always be, and is committed to only being an aboveground group.

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.