The Moral Argument for Ecological Revolution

The Moral Argument for Ecological Revolution

Written and photographed by Max Wilbert

In 1941, as World War II thundered across half the planet, my grandfather was drafted into the United States military.

Faced with the prospect of being sent overseas to kill other young men in World War II, his morality rebelled. He refused to join the military and applied for conscientious objector status, which he was eventually granted.

This was not a popular stand to take. Among 10 million draftees, about 43,000, or less than half of one percent, became COs. He and other COs were widely criticized, attacked, and ostracized. Their beliefs were tested by draft boards, families, and communities who rejected their moral convictions and labeled them cowards, deserters, and traitors.

Nearly fifty years later, I was born into a family that looked up to my grandfather’s example. He was a warm, kind grandfather to me. When I was a child, discussions of war, imperialism, racism, exploitation of women, oppression, and the destruction of the planet were not unusual among my family. I was taught that these things must be ended. Social change was a necessity, and non-violent resistance was the method.

Faced with the prospect of World War II, what choices would I have made in my grandfather’s place? On the one hand, the Nazi regime was one of unspeakable evil, and imperial Japan’s actions were equally horrific. On the other hand, the actions of US empire—before, during, and after the war—were not exactly benevolent. As Howard Zinn writes, before the war broke out the United States:

“had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.”

And of course, this is just a partial list. In 1942, the U.S. was still a rigorously segregated society (which it remains today) committed to extracting value from people of color using any means necessary. Slavery built the wealth of the United States, and literally built the White House. And of course, the entire country was built on a settler-colonial genocide—a genocide that Hitler took as inspiration for his “final solution.”

Many prominent Americans, like Henry Ford, were supporters of the Nazi regime. The U.S. government not only failed to speak out against persecution of German Jews before the war, despite clear evidence, but actively rejected those seeking refuge and thereby condemned them to death.

The United States did not fight because of fascism, although individual soldiers may have. Critical history tells us that the U.S. fought Germany, Italy, and Japan primarily for geopolitical reasons: to control a competitor in Germany, to contain communist Russia, and to expand control of the Pacific.

For example, historian Gabriel Kolko says “the American economic war aim was to save capitalism at home and abroad.” This was achieved by consolidating American control over oil in the Middle East, gaining access to new markets formerly dominated by the British, and by a concentrated injection of public funds into private corporations: Boeing, Lockheed, and the other war profiteers.

And at the conclusion of the war, the United States killed 150,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the militarily unnecessary atomic bombing that P.M.S. Blackett calls “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.” In other words, 150,000 people were murdered not out of military necessity, but for the sake of geopolitical posturing.

The fascists needed to be stopped, yes. But the United States’ war was not a particularly just one.

I respect my grandfather’s choice. Most especially, I am impressed by the ethical toughness required to endure serious personal and professional consequences while maintaining his principled stance. There are not many people with that dignity and conviction.

Eighty years after the rise of Nazi Party, we’re faced with rising fascism around the world.

Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdogan, Putin. Countless fascist political parties and grassroots movements are on the march. Their main systemic opposition comes from neoliberal capitalism, a soft fascism of it’s own and the primary force which has decimated the planet over the past 40 years. By dismantling public institutions, embracing corporate power and unbridled militarism, corrupting the language of justice, and doubling down on exploitation of the poor and the third world, neoliberals like Barack Obama and the Clintons have helped pave the way for the rise of outright fascism today.

Capitalism itself is a war against the planet and the poor. The global economy is built on exploited farmworkers, sweatshop labor, and a toxic electronics industry that drives workers to mass suicide. All this takes place on top of stolen indigenous lands and a legacy of ongoing genocide.

The material goods that drive economic growth are made from the dead bodies of the land. Mountains are mined and blown to pieces. Rivers are dammed and enslaved. Prairies are plowed under. Forests are scalped. The oceans are strained of all life. Biodiversity is collapsing, the oceans are collapsing, and global warming is advancing faster than the worst-case scenarios. Greenhouse gas emissions are higher year after year, despite slick marketing campaigns about green industry.

The mindset of exploitation and greed is mirrored in the dominant culture. Sexual assault is endemic. Black and brown people are disenfranchised and exploited for slave labor in the prison system, then regularly executed on the streets in a form of modern public lynching. The poor, the homeless, addicts and countless other people are treated as disposable in this society, and they die by the millions as people like Jeff Bezos enjoys a cruise in his latest $100 million yacht.

Now we must grapple with the same question our grandparents did.

What is the moral course of action in this world?

Before we can know the right course of action, we have to understand the root of the problems we face. This step of diagnosis is essential to proper cure. And in fact, the origin of the term radical comes from the Latin word meaning “root.”

Too many people in society today look only at surface-level causes. We must go deeper.

First, we must understand that the problems we face are not an accident or the result of a glitch in the system. This is the normal functioning of industrial civilization. This is business as usual. The economy is booming, and the wealthy are doing very well. Things are working perfectly.

For those in power, times are good

I’ve heard it said that capitalism is a war against the planet and the poor. This is not a metaphor. The dominant economic system is killing, maiming, and destroying the lives of countless billions of humans and trillions of non-humans.

As the world’s third-richest man, Warren Buffett, once said, “there’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

This is a war, and it is a one-sided one.

Working people, the poor, and especially environmentalists often don’t see this system as a form of warfare against us. Relentless propaganda, fed to us through mass media and education, teaches us that we live in a beautiful, just society. All the problems we face—migration, climate disasters, terrorism, sexual abuse—are externalized. Instead of being factors integral to the American experience, these are regarded as someone else’s problem, or ignored completely.

Propaganda, besides inculcating American exceptionalism and the capitalist ethic, also enforces a rigid box of acceptable ways to change the world. Social struggles, we’re told, should take place via policy changes, at the ballot box, and in non-profit offices.

But these models aren’t working

Legislative change, for example, is rarely permanent. Long-standing policies like the Voting Rights Act can easily be struck down or undermined. This is happening right now. The Voting Rights Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act—all of these laws, which are very limited in the first place, are being gutted.

The business of running empire is firmly bipartisan. The Democratic and Republican parties in the United States play out a society-wide “good cop/bad cop” routine. They deceive us into believing that we live in a democracy. They allow robust debate within an extremely narrow range of acceptable politics, and therefore keep people distracted from the theft and violence of the ruling class.

The truth is we have little to no say in how our own communities operate, let alone in how the country is governed.

Constrained by felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, the electoral college, constant propaganda, and a representative system with zero accountability, our votes are largely meaningless.

We are so alienated from the concept of self-governance that we have a hard time even imagining it. When was the last time you made a meaningful decision about the political, economic, and social future of the neighborhood, the city, the state, or the country you live in?

For most of us, the answer is “never.”

To call the United States a democracy is laughable. Scholars have proven that our society is an oligarchy. Professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page concluded, in their 2014 research paper, that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

This is reflected in the nation’s capital. It has been decades since Congress passed a major bill that didn’t benefit the ultra-rich and corporations. Every major national policy decision is designed to steal more from the poor, to destroy the planet even faster, and in the process to make the owning class even more decadently wealthy.

The Non-profit Industrial Complex (NPIC)

Faced with a bankrupt political system, where do people go? Many turn to non-profits, expecting to find a world of small, fiery, organized groups fighting for social change. Instead, they find a new nightmare of bureaucracy, 60-hour work weeks, and starvation wages.

The non-profit system emerges from a liberal ideology that sees American-style capitalism as righteous. In this worldview, small gradual reforms are all that is needed to keep the system humming along happily.

Many of today’s largest foundations we’re created by tax-dodging ultra-wealthy elites in the early 20th century. These have been lucrative investments. Liberal foundations have long served to pacify social movements and prevent radical change.

One of the biggest examples of this is the professionalization of black resistance in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In the wake of revolutionary social upheavals of the 1960’s, foundations invested billions of dollars to create countless new non-profits and social service organizations. Vietnam War hawk McGeorge Bundy, head of the Ford Foundation, led a nationwide push to address racism. But behind the rhetoric was a desire not to address the roots of racism, but to pacify and assimilate oppositional black power movements into the dominant power structure.

Today’s non-profit movement politics reflect the same values: elitist liberalism, individual empowerment, and the optics of diversity. And they produce the same results: endless campaigning for progressive candidates, countless fundraising campaigns, and burnout.

What is absent is a revolutionary agenda for collective liberation from systems of oppression.

The Indian dissident Arundhati Roy, one of the most brilliant writers of our time, has a blistering critique of the non-profit system. She writes:

“Corporate-endowed foundations administer, trade and channelize their power and place their chessmen on the chessboard, through a system of elite clubs and think-tanks, whose members overlap and move in and out through the revolving doors.

Contrary to the various conspiracy theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is nothing secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this arrangement. It is not very different from the way corporations use shell companies and offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the currency is power, not money.

There are now millions of non-profit organizations, many of them connected through a byzantine financial maze to the larger foundations… The Privatization of Everything has also meant the NGO-isation of Everything. As jobs and livelihoods disappeared, NGOs have become an important source of employment, even for those who see them for what they are. And they are certainly not all bad. Of the millions of NGOs, some do remarkable, radical work and it would be a travesty to tar all NGOs with the same brush.

However, the corporate or Foundation-endowed NGOs are global finance’s way of buying into resistance movements, literally like shareholders buy shares in companies, and then try to control them from within. They sit like nodes on the central nervous system, the pathways along which global finance flows. They work like transmitters, receivers, shock absorbers, alert to every impulse, careful never to annoy the governments of their host countries.”

Greenwashing the environmental movement

One of the most damning examples of the bankruptcy of the non-profit system comes from the large environmental organizations. From The Sierra Club taking $25 million from the fracking industry to Greenpeace cooperating with the Canadian Lumber Industry to the Nature Conservancy’s collaboration with the world’s most polluting corporations, environmental non-profits have a track record of atrocities, compromises, and failures.

On their watch, everything is getting worse. And their solutions? Vote for a democrat, change your lightbulbs, and ride your bike. It’s pathetic.

Today, the global non-profit industrial complex serves as a “pressure relief valve” for budding revolutionary sentiments. By redirecting the energy that should demand fundamental change into piecemeal reformism, organizations like this are worse than distractions. They are in some ways complicit in the system that is killing the planet. Instead of radical change, these groups campaign for relatively minor reforms, such as a shift away from fossil fuels and towards green energy. These efforts are applauded by international conglomerates like General Electric, which stand to make billions in guaranteed government contracts in this so-called “green transition.”

Meanwhile, the forests continue to fall, mountains continue to be mined, and greenhouse gas emissions trend upwards.

Even in places like Germany, home to the supposed “green miracle” of wind and solar energy, emissions continue to rise and corporations grow ever more bloated on government handouts and electricity rebates, while the poor pay for big business to expand the electric grid. To be clear: big business is exempted from the taxes to pay for grid expansions and wind energy projects, then turns around and profits from the contracts to build these industrial megaprojects. Meanwhile, working people foot the bill.

This is a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich.

From one capitalist agenda to another, major environmental non-profits are shaped by what can get funded, and what gets funded is a de facto pro-corporate, pro-capitalist agenda of industrial energy production and “green products.” Driven by a results-oriented framework designed to please large donors, this system inherently deprioritizes radical critiques and revolutionary ideas in favor of what makes money and political sense in the short term.

In short, large non-profits are the social wing of the capitalist system.

Individuals within these non-profits may mean well, but intentions are not as important as outcomes when the fate of our world is at stake.

Cory Morningstar calls liberal climate activism “the hope industry,” writing that “350.org and friends serve a vital purpose . . . [by making] the public feel good about themselves. Simultaneously, they ensure obedience and passiveness to the state in order to secure current system/power structures and keep them intact… We have now reached the critical juncture where corporations will begin the slow process of ridding themselves of their toxic holdings while preparing for a new wave of unprecedented, unsurpassed ‘climate wealth.’ We are about to witness the global transition to profitable false solutions under the guise of ‘green economy’ . . . all while they simultaneously greenwash themselves as noble stewards of the Earth.”

This is how the ruling class rules

In his book Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote that an effective totalitarianism doesn’t look like pointing a gun at every person, all the time. “A really efficient totalitarian state,” he writes, “would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

Today’s elites have worked hard to create such a world. They ride the dynamic tension between reform and reaction. When political and economic conditions make it possible to do so, they mercilessly expand their exploitation of the planet and the poor. When groundswells of social discontent force concessions, they offer limited reforms. With the illusion of democracy provided by elections, legislative changes, and the non-profit industrial complex, the ruling class manipulate global society. In this way, they defuse revolutionary potential, expand their power, and consolidate their gains.

These elites, the owning class in global society, are waging an offensive struggle. Meanwhile, progressives and radicals are stuck in a reactionary position, defending ourselves against the latest assault and falling ever further behind. Our work is almost entirely defensive.

But as any experienced warrior knows, wars are not won defensively. These defensive measures can only end one way: in steady erosion of victories, slow slides into fascism, and eventual defeat. This is what we are experiencing right now.

Counter-revolutionary propaganda

Systems for social change have been co-opted by the corporate elite. But agents of oppression are never satisfied with dismantling organizations and institutions alone. They must murder revolutionary leaders, too.

When Che Guevara was on the firing line, his last words were: “Shoot, coward. You’re only going to kill a man.” Fred Hampton, murdered by the police as he lay drugged in his bed at the age of 21 years, once said “You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution.” Thomas Sankara, the Burkinabé revolutionary sometimes called “Africa’s Che,” had the same message before he was killed: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you can’t kill an idea.”

This hasn’t stopped those in power from murdering dangerous individuals and trying to smash dangerous ideas. Psychological and information warfare is constant in modern society. Popular music, television, movies, and other media, as well as institutions like the school system and non-profits, all promote vicious counter-revolutionary propaganda.

According to the psychologist John F. Schumaker we “are by far the most propagandized people in history.” Corporations are expected to spend $2.1 trillion on media in 2019.

Developing an effective offense requires that we discard the mythologies and misconceptions taught by these systems. In other words: as long as our minds are still colonized, we will not be able to fight and win.

One of the most pervasive misconceptions we must dismantle is the mythology of pacifism. This mythology is carefully constructed. School lessons around social movements—if the topic is covered at all—paint a picture of civil non-violent struggle. This is no accident. A whitewashed version of Martin Luther King, Jr. is emphasized, while the Black Panthers are never discussed. The bourgeois American Revolution is celebrated, while the Haitian Revolution is ignored. Women’s suffrage is mentioned, but the radical direct action of suffragists around the world is bypassed. In this way, the imaginations of entire societies are shaped and molded.

The reality, of course, is that social change is won through struggle. The history of our society is the history of class warfare. And revolution is the solution to the problems we face. But revolutionaries are ignored in our education system, slandered in the mass media, and actively opposed in US policy. We must reject these toxic lessons to have a chance.

Beyond non-violence

Non-violence is a profoundly moral way of changing society. In the right conditions, it can be highly effective. But deepening inequality, global ecological collapse, and the utter failure of established institutions to address these crises have led me to question non-violence—not as a moral guiding light, but as a practical strategy.

This morning, I am following the latest news from the Unist’ot’en Camp. In western Canada, the Unist’ot’en have stopped proposed tar sands and fracked gas pipelines for nearly a decade.

They have never ceded their land to the Canadian Government or signed a treaty. Under Canadian law, their land has been recognized as sovereign. But in December, the pipeline company applied for an injunction from Canadian courts. This injunction gives the police (the RCMP) authority to removing any blockades from the roads.

Now, as a result of the injunction, armed men are in Wet’suwet’en Territory to remove the land defenders and facilitate the fracking, logging, water poisoning, road building, and other destruction the pipeline will bring.

The late Secwepemc organizer and international leader on indigenous rights Arthur Manuel called injunctions the “ace in the sleeve of the Canadian government.” He said, “every time there is a dispute between indigenous people’s territories and industry, the court pulls out their court injunctions and sides with industry.”

This fight is still in progress. We don’t know how it will end. It might end in a victory, as did anti-fracking fights on Mi’kmaq territory in 2013. Or it might end in a defeat like at Standing Rock.

But we do know that, as this fight continues, industry is going about their business unimpeded elsewhere. We are not able to fight them everywhere at once. Around the world, coal oil and gas extraction is booming. Tar sands in South America, offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, fracking in the Marcellus Shale, coal mining in Mongolia. Major industrial projects are booming worldwide, and greenhouse gas emissions are rising to unprecedented levels as forests, wetlands, grasslands, and oceanic preserves are destroyed for industry. Carbon emissions in 2018 surged by 3.4 percent over the previous year—the largest increase in eight years. Time is short.

To have a chance of stopping the forces that are squeezing the life from the planet, defensive stands like Unist’ot’en Camp are crucial. But defense alone is not enough, and governments continue to side with industry. If we want to survive, we need legitimate offensive strategies.

What does offensive struggle look like?

Legislative change, voting, and the non-profit industrial complex are all controlled by the ruling class. Offensive struggle is, by design, essentially impossible in these arenas.

Real offensive struggle is inherently revolutionary. A revolution is “a forcible overthrow of a government, class, or social order, in favor of a new system.” While that force does not necessarily mean open violence, violence is a part of every revolutionary struggle.

Most people who want social and environmental justice have been taught that violent revolution is morally indefensible. Through fear and lies, elites have shamed us out of organizing and carrying out a revolution. Thus, they limit us to defensive action.

Breaking our allegiance to the dominant system is the first step to effective resistance. This requires we decolonize our minds and remember the true source of life. We all need to choose sides: life or the machine.

Which side do you choose?

Even the preeminent strategist on non-violence, Gene Sharp, talks about non-violent resistance as a form of war. Perceiving our struggle in this way is important. Defensive struggles are possible to undertake while denying that you are engaged in a war. But once you acknowledge that we are in a war, offensive struggle becomes a legitimate possibility.

Once our imaginations have expanded, we can attempt to answer the question: what does offensive struggle look like?

In military strategy, the purpose of offensive action is to destroy your opponents ability to wage war. After effective offensive action, they cannot continue to fight you, no matter how badly they want to.

In my analysis, the primary weapon of war being used against the planet and the poor is the global industrial economy. Therefore, offensive struggle today means breaking the supply lines of industrial capitalism by targeting and destroying key bottlenecks in the the global economic system, and dismantling the institutions of the dominant culture.

If this were carried out, it would change the balance of power globally. Those in power would no longer be physically able to destroy the world, and the way would be clear for alternative cultures, land restoration, and the Earth itself to begin the process of healing.

Ending the war

The war against the planet and the poor is raging right now. To end this war as quickly as possible and with the smallest possible loss of life, our only feasible path is to stop the aggressor’s ability to harm the poor and destroy the planet.

Capitalism has made this a life-or-death struggle. Voting isn’t working. Signing petitions isn’t working. Liberal institutions are in shambles. Those of us who reject this system cannot survive by trying to coexist with the system. At the current rate, it appears that either industrial civilization will survive, or the biosphere will.

War is terrible, and business as usual is a war. The faster the global industrial economy is ended, the less suffering there will be. Ending this war must be our overriding objective. This means destroying capitalism’s ability to wage war. Anything less is merely whistling on the way to our collective grave.

Fighting a war is dangerous, difficult, and demanding. Sometimes I imagine sitting this war out, becoming a modern conscientious objector, and living simply. But that path isn’t a moral one. Given our current political situation, we must make adult choices. The crisis we face is calling all of us to become revolutionaries.

I wish that my grandfather was still alive so I could sit down with him to discuss all of this. Alzheimer’s disease claimed him before I was fully grown. But I still know that, unlike so many, he would not flinch away from these realities. He would face the truth, think, and decide on the right course of action.

My political stances are extremely unpopular at every level. I have received death threats from racist far-right ideologues. I have been shouted down by the left and the environmental community. And I have been harassed by federal agents. When she heard about the FBI harassment, one of my aunties told me that my grandfather would have been proud of me. She told me that he would have said, “you must be doing something right.”

That is what we must do: what is right.


Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance. Max is the author of two books: the forthcoming Bright Green Lies, and We Choose to Speak, a collection of essays released in 2018.

Just say no to fake action

Just say no to fake action

by Elisabeth Robson

Beginning tomorrow, Friday September 20, and going through September 27, there are a whole host of climate-related actions happening nationally (USA) and globally, including climate strikes and marches. These climate strikes are being heavily promoted by big green organizations on down to local communities, and the media plays along by making sure to note in coverage about the upcoming strikes that they are “youth-led”. Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth. The youth themselves, of course, believe they are doing the right thing, and certainly their message that we need to do something about the climate catastrophe is true. But these youth are being supported and, one might even say, manipulated by a tangle of pro-businesspro-capitalismpro-growthanti-nature organizations, corporations, and governments.

Bill McKibben writes about the climate strikes in The Guardian (“Why you should join the global climate strike” Wednesday, September 18, 2019). As in other recent articles he’s written, McKibben gives himself away as a front-man for big green organizations, including the one he started himself, 350.org, which have been co-opted by the solar, wind, and carbon capture industry.

He asks us to strike because…

“… sun and wind are now the cheapest way to generate power around the world”—if you ignore the impacts of land-grabbing, mining, manufacturing, transportation, maintenance, and disposal…

“… this could be the great opportunity…Green New Deals have been proposed around the world; they are a way forward”—the “great opportunity” he is speaking of is a way to keep our capital-demanding growth economy going so that the rich can continue to get richer at the expense of the natural world and the poor… Green New Deals are all growth plans, they all involve extracting more, building more, destroying more of the natural world…

“… batteries are ever cheaper – we can now store sunshine at night, and wind for a calm day”—again he is acting as front man for the solar and wind industries which are, as I write this, destroying forests, rivers, deserts, wildlife, habitat, and poor communities around the world, while the materials required for batteries and battery storage (lithium, iridium, copper, zinc, etc) are incredibly destructive to mine and manufacture…

“… indigenous people around the world are trying to protect their rightful land from the coal and oil companies”—and they are also trying to protect their rightful land from mines and dams and solar and wind factories and installations, because all those are harmful to land and communities just like oil is…

“… young people have asked us to. In a well-ordered society, when kids make a reasonable request their elders should say yes”—in fact it is the “elders” who are running the show, the elders who are running organizations like We Mean Business and GCCA who are working feverishly behind the scenes of the so-called youth-led movements to make sure that governments and corporations will make plenty of money on the fourth industrial revolution “demanded” by the people.

McKibben mixes his pro-business, pro-growth reasons for striking with just enough nice nature-sounding reasons to mask, for most people, that what he’s really doing is helping the corporations behind the fourth industrial revolution, by tricking “the people” into “demanding” action, believing they are part of a grass roots movement, when in fact those demands are being manufactured by the very organizations who will “respond” to those demands with more growth, more capitalism, and more extraction.

Don’t fall for it. True grass roots movements don’t have billionaires backing them. True grass roots movements don’t make vague demands of the very governments and organizations that have failed for 40 years to do anything at all. True grassroots activists take concrete actions that actually help: they sue the government and corporations when they break the law; they stand in front of bulldozers building pipelines and cutting down trees; they help inner city people learn how to build gardens in once empty parking lots to supply fresh vegetables; they change the zoning and planning laws in their own communities. Difficult and sometimes dangerous work that actually makes a difference.

Don’t waste your time on fake movements with vague asks that don’t actually take on the systems of power. The people behind these fake movements don’t give a damn about the planet, and they don’t give a damn about any of us. They care about money and power. That is it.

Do something real instead.

Image by Lunae Parracho for Reuters: Ka’apor Indian warriors tie up illegal loggers in the Amazon rainforest. Tired of the lack of government assistance in keeping loggers off their lands, they and four other tribes monitor their territory themselves.

“Before releasing them, one of the warriors told the loggers on the ground: “We’re doing this because you are stubborn. We told you not to come back, but you didn’t listen.”

They then set fire to five trucks and three tractors equipped to pull down trees and transport them from the jungle. They confiscated chainsaws and shotguns that they carried back to the village saying: “Jande pairata” or “We are strong.””

Now that is taking action.


Image credit: Max Wilbert

Native Youth Movement Statement on Social Media

Native Youth Movement Statement on Social Media

Editor’s Note: this piece comes from the Native Youth Movement, a cross-nation warrior society for indigenous youth on Turtle Island. We do not agree with every detail of this piece, but consider it a good primer on this topic and a look at how traditionally-minded indigenous people are approaching the internet, social media, pornography, and more. Featured image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Facebook (Fed-book): the ultimate tool for intelligence and distraction.

Indigenous People
Who are We?
We are the original people of our Lands. Some of us were born into our culture, some of us were not, some of us got taught a little, some of us got none, some of us were born in our homelands to Indian hands and greeted by the Sun, some of us where born in far away industrial war zones, slapped on the ass by a white man & put under neon lights.
So who are we now?
Although we come from different realities & have been taught different world views, deep inside we share common pre-invasion bloodlines, pre-invasion realities and pre-invasion minds.  At one time we all had the same world-view as humans–we are simply another animal species no more important than other Life forms. Life is a beautiful gift which we must not take for granted. Instead, we are to respect, care for and protect it. We are born with a basic task, the same as all Life: to continue it.
Today, we are those who have united and chosen Life over death, Land, Water and Air, over industrial waste. We have a Sacred Duty, to be Earths Army.
Our Vision?
Is to raise babies who are Independent of other humans and machines, knowing the land & water, how to sustain themselves with real skills, working with the Natural Law, Food Harvesting, Building, Healing, Protecting, Clothing, Making Fire, with good Leadership Qualities, Virtues and all the skills for living on the Land in various seasons and terrains.
Our Job. What do we want?
To Provide Life. Healthy Life! No More. No Less. We demand Healthy Life, not from other people, but from ourselves. It is our Duty as Indian Men and Women to look after ourselves and continue Life forever according to our Original Instructions.
How will we get what we want?
Building our skills, and living the Natural Law. Leaving the cities and reservations and building more villages in our Lands or join existing ones.
How did we arrive where we are?
Since the beginning, humans have had to fight off other humans attempting to invade lands and utilize the resources for their own human group.
Over 500 years ago a new kind of invasion took place in our Lands, one that had been existing over the seas for thousands of years–One that attempted to exterminate our people and way of life. These attempts continued to get advanced in their quest for resources and control. It was a War against Indigenous People. The War against the human proved unsuccessful. Many were exterminated, but many survived.
The industrial revolution changed the face of battle, from primary attacks on humans, to attacks focused on the earth that humans and all Life depend on for existence. War against humanity had expanded. Industry waged war against all Life forms.
To compliment industry, psychoanalysts used their study of human thinking to go deep into the thoughts and feelings of the survivors of Tribal people to empty the original thinking and replace it with a foreign way. Missions, Boarding & Residential schools would become the way for the white man to kill the thoughts, feeling and responsibilities of the Indigenous children by taking them away from their Lands and teachers and replacing their way of being with a white mind, and body that could now be used to contribute to the destruction of the earth. After generations, that form of forced brainwashing and fear through violence and sexual abuse was so successful they now use the public schools to continue to raise robots whose only purpose in life is to get a job contributing to the industrial machine and their own destruction in the process.
Resistance to pre-mature death is nothing new; it is a Natural Law of self-preservation. When something attacks you, you do all you can to make sure the attack is unsuccessful. Today is no different. World-wide attacks on humans and the Earth are resisted, so they must advance their methods of attack.
In comes the teck-no-logic ‘revolution’. Welcome the world of ‘social’ media, known better as advanced social monitoring.
This statement will focus on facebook, which we prefer to call by what it really is: fed-book– the world’s largest database of humans and their activities. For those who are completely part of the system the service provides insight even deeper into the colonized consumer human mind and how they can sell more products in order to expand control over them.
For those who know something is wrong and must change, fed-book serves to monitor their location, activities, friends, and psychology. From those reformist views of wanting a piece of the pie (money for our lands being exploited), and those revolutionaries who don’t want the money, but want to stop the exploitation and destruction of the land, fed-book is an intelligence tool. The greatest to date, with over 1.5 billion people (and growing) making their own profile to be monitored.
This writing will focus on why it is so great for intelligence and why we are so quick to fall for it. We will start by  looking at why we might be susceptible to social media, then the problems created by it–Physical Health, Social, Mental & Body aspects–then Movement Health. Finally, we will discuss what we are going to do from here on out to improve our current state.
Teck-No-Logic World & the Internet: The quest for more control
The Internet was created by the military, for military purposes, and it continues to be used for such. Business, military and governments, which are all intertwined, have always sought more efficient ways to monitor people & control them. Psychoanalysts are the leadership in this constant improvement of how to control people better so we can live & die in their vision and not in our true way of life. They are highly skilled, with the majority of our people uploading photos of themselves, shooing off smiling, stoic, innocent, noble savage, hard or duck lips faces Billions are contributing to self-made intelligence profiles.
Let’s look at why humans are so eager to show themselves to anybody and everybody who cares to look, even after proven detrimental consequences.
How to get us to be distracted
Sex, Food and Violence
Internal Trickster, Tricking Our-selves
Needs are: Air, Water, Food, Protection, Fire and depending on your region the ability to stay warm or cool. This is what we need to complete our job while living on Earth.
We are born from a seed like all other life, then die, and our body goes back into the earth and essence back into the universe. Extremely simple. So if humans are so smart why do we complicate things so much?
The trickster. The trickster exists in all facets of our life, not really to trick us, but to test us, & like all tests, once completed & passed you have a stronger understanding and knowledge of the subject you were tested on making you a better human being. Within all of us are internal tricksters, and they exist within our mind. Our job is to not let ourselves, trick ourselves.
Reward System and Energy Balance
Our Real Elders have taught us that our Brain is truly a Seed. All Life comes from a Seed. We literally are the same as all Life, full of Water, Vitamins, Minerals & Energy, compiled into another shape.
In our Brain we have a part called the Reward System. The job of the Reward System is to identify things that are pleasurable and good for us. When identified, dopamine’s are released in this portion of the brain, giving a temporary feeling of satisfaction & euphoria.
We also have another part of the brain which combines many structures and makes the Energy Balance System.  In a time before industrial production, refrigeration and internet  systems worked hand in hand & they complimented each other. When we encountered fresh sweet berries, fatty meat, or salty food, our reward system was triggered because we knew that we needed it for proper energy balance in our bodies.
The Earth provides naturally, the perfect amount of energy, through a process of growth and death, giving and taking, to keep the planet in balance and therefore helping us to continue orbiting in the universe how we are supposed to. On a smaller scale the Earth always provided all its animals, including humans the proper amount of energy, through food and water to keep us alive and strong.  No doubt if we looked into the minds of our ancestors they would not have found competing systems but one working unit. Some humans began to go through great efforts to change this naturally perfect system of internal cohesion and recognition between the Energy Balance and Reward System, and slowly began to only feed the Reward System.
Today we are still born hardwired to be healthy and strong life forms, but that is quickly disturbed and our brain separated by only getting offered physical and emotional things that benefit the Reward System and put us completely out of touch with Energy Balance.  At the root of the Reward System is the thought that it needs certain things to continue healthy Energy Balance.
Now, when we see sweet, salty and fatty foods our Reward System finds them hard to resist because they used to benefit our Energy Balance system & when used in moderation were what we really needed to live. For example, when people see someone of the opposite sex they are attracted, not because they crave the feeling of orgasm, but because the feeling of orgasm signals to the reward system something good is happening for energy balance; a new life is being made, which is essentially why we are all here–to help Life continue.
Today, everything is superficial and instead of having just the right amount to live in energy balance, we are forced to have too much. Excess things trick our Reward System into thinking we are doing what is right, but really we are nowhere near proper Energy Balance. Realizing we are out of balance can explain why there is more obesity, drug addicts, sex addicts, technology addicts, gambling addicts, gaming addicts, chemicals, pollution, pre-mature deaths, physical & sexual abuse, overall sickness, and more war and destruction than any time before us on the planet. It can also help explain why, today, humans are the weakest in the story of humanity. Never before have we been so physically, mentally & spiritually weak.
How can we improve that? As Hidatsa-Arirkara Michael Yellowbird says, “In order to successfully de-colonize our harmful & obstructive emotions, thoughts & behaviors we must understand this imbalance & have the courage to confront it.”
So let’s confront it.
Mental & Physical Health
Social Health
The want for social attention and recognition
White man wants us to think there is a need for social recognition, not on the same level as basic needs, but a need none the less. However, we did not think like that, and shouldn’t today. There was not a need for social recognition. A need is necessary for existence. Some may have wanted it, but social recognition is not necessary to live.
If we are equal to all creation then to call it a need is as silly as a plant needing recognition to do its job. A plant that grows from a sprout into a beautiful flower, whose petals fall off, then withers and dries, drops its babies (new seeds) into the ground to continue life, then falls and feeds the earth, eventually becoming another layer of the dirt, does not need other plants to tell it what a good job it is doing to continue and complete its job. Some plants may want it (doubt it though), but a need? I don’t think so.
The want for social recognition can only happen if a person has their basic needs met. Today, although extremely poorly, the majority of Native people think they get their needs met through government programs put in place to maintain control. Although all Native communities have a shorter life expectancy than non-native communities, some as low as 42 years old, basic day-to-day needs appear to be met, but aren’t sufficient. If they were we wouldn’t die so young. But the appearance exists, giving our people the time to begin and worry about social recognition & status in a false reality, & today, a virtual one.
A long time ago your social status had to do with your deeds, your actions and how beneficial they were to the larger group. The society you lived in would determine what actions would help you achieve social recognition.
For the white-man, the deeds of george washington won him great social recognition. His society wanted all Indians dead, he was good at massacring them, therefore granting him the highest social status in white amerikkka.
For Native People fighting to continue our way of life, the actions of Crazy Horse to defend Indigenous people against destruction and defend the Land made him a person of high social standing. So much so that many Indigenous people, even outside of the Lakota Nation, know this name. To be high status in our society was different than the white-man, it did not mean you were better than others, it meant you did great deeds, knew the story of your people since creation and had a vision of what needed to be done for the future.
Skills & Self-esteem
Today our people seek social status and recognition not because they are deserving of it, but because they have an empty void they are trying to fill; a void caused by the invasion of our lands, the murder of our people, the destruction of our resources, the systematic erasing of our knowledge of how to provide for ourselves, the rape of our woman & men, the molestation of our children, machismo and feminism, & the continued poisoning of our bodies and minds with substances & colonial mentality.
In order to escape these realities, people turn the want for recognition into false need, just like the drug addict who now thinks they ‘need’ a substance. It develops an addiction that can enter for numerous reasons all having to do with voids caused by oppression. This void cannot be filled with lots of compliments and fed-book friends, although it may feel like it. To add to the dysfunction is the fact that social recognition in a virtual reality that isn’t real. Social media is not a real life community; it is a virtual one– fake.
People have developed a low self-esteem because of inter-generational trauma. Thinking attention and social recognition can help boost our self-esteem, is a false feeling. Only skills can improve self-esteem.
Compliments and attention are a quick release of dopamine in the reward system, just like substances (drugs), it is like a hot air balloon, a false heat that will come down when hot air is gone and needs more to get you feeling good again. This leads humans to become extremely narcissistic, in other words, have extremely inflated ego’s & think they are so beautiful & great & the whole world should know this. Greatness based on what deeds? Beauty, according to whose standard? Those who are truly beautiful & great, do not think so themselves, cause as soon as they do, their beauty and greatness are gone.
Narcissism is the medical term that can explain why humans love fed-book so much. We can recognize that this is just another form & layer of colonization. Let’s look at it so we may confront and improve it.
Narcissism
Narcissist was a greek youth who fell in love with his own image and spent hours of the day staring at himself, developing a huge ego & becoming extremely selfish. He eventually died from not taking care of daily needs & just staring at himself, but to make the story sound good, they say he turned into a flower which today bears his name.
Since 2000, psychological tests designed to detect narcissism have been done across the country, and the scores of residents of the united states have continually increased. Psychologists have linked the increase to social media. This is one of the reasons for creating social media: to get people consumed with themselves so they cannot function as normal human beings, let alone be a threat in an organized resistance to the industrial world.
Signs of narcissism are:
  • Problems in sustaining satisfying relationships
  • Lack of empathy: The capacity to recognize emotions that are being experienced by another.
  • Problems distinguishing them self from others: others either exist to meet their needs or may as well not exist at all.
  • Hyper-sensitivity to any insults or imagined insults.
  • Feeling Shameful instead of remorseful or guilty.
  • Haughty Body Language: a physical posture which implies & puts out an air of superiority, seniority, hidden powers, mysteriousness, amused indifference, etc. The narcissist usually maintains sustained and piercing eye contact, also keeping space & posturing up.
  • Flattery towards people who admire and affirm them.
  • Detesting those who do not admire them.
  • Using other people without considering the cost of doing so. Usually the other is in a subservient position where resistance would be difficult or even impossible.
  • Pretending to be more important than they really are.
  • Bragging (Subtly but persistently) and exaggerating their achievements.
  • Claiming to be an “expert” at many things.
  • Inability to view the world from the perspective of other people.
  • Pathological lying, making false promises.
  • Lacks values; easily bored; often changes course.
  • Entitlement: Narcissists hold unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves special. Failure to comply is considered an attack on their superiority, and the perpetrator is considered a “controlling” or “difficult” person. Defiance of their will can trigger Narcissistic Rage.
  • Inability to engage emotionally with their children’s needs, often choosing their own wants over time with children.
  • Failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Narcissistic Abuse
“At the core of a narcissist is a combination of entitlement and low self-esteem. Feelings of inadequacy are projected onto the victim. If the narcissistic person is feeling unattractive they will belittle their romantic partner’s appearance. If the narcissist makes an error, this error becomes their partners. Narcissists also engage in insidious, manipulative abuse by giving subtle hints and comments that result in the victim questioning their own behavior and thoughts. Any slight criticism of the narcissistic, whether actual or perceived, often triggers narcissistic rage and full blown annihilation from the narcissistic person.
The discard phase can be swift and occurs once the narcissistic supply is obtained elsewhere.
In romantic relationships, the narcissistic supply can be acquired by having affairs. The new partner is in the idealization phase and only witnesses the ideal self; thus once again the cycle of narcissistic abuse begins. Narcissists do not take responsibility for relationship difficulties and exhibit no feeling of remorse. Instead they believe themselves to be the victim in the relationship.” Wikipedia
Fed-book & all social media is helping to increase this selfish and egotistical behavior in our people, hitting us in the deepest root of who we are…the inner self. Bringing two dysfunctional people together will contribute to dysfunctional Nations. To be Strong again, we must confront these dysfunctions & stop feeding into them. We must change them.
Trying to find yourself through Social media
Personal realization is crucial in the development of a human. But is Fed-book really helping with it, or creating an illusion about it?
Having lots of fed-book friends may help you temporarily feel good about yourself, but a study called, ‘Are Close Friends the Enemy? Online Social Networks, Self-Esteem, and Self-Control’,  (by Keith Wilcox, a professor at Columbia University & Andrew Stephen, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh) shows that fed-book also makes you fat, broke, lazy and depressed. This ego boost has an ‘unintended psychological consequence.’ Fed-bookers relax their self-control making them more likely to make purchases and over eat junk food that they know is bad for them.
“Simply browsing Facebook makes people feel better about themselves and momentarily enhances their self-esteem,” Wilcox told Today.com. “It’s that enhanced self-esteem that ultimately lowers your self-control. The loss of self-control can result in self-indulgence. When you feel good, you can rationalize ordering dessert or buying something you don’t really need. ‘I feel good today,’ you tell yourself. ‘I deserve a treat.’ “
The results of the study found that Fed-book users had a higher body-mass index (BMI) (fat), were more prone to binge eating, carried more credit card debt and had lower credit scores. Fed-book use ‘is causing people to have reduced self-control in a variety of situations.’ They believe the ‘Facebook effect’ is subtle and develops over time and only gets worse the more a person is on it.No matter how many people like your self-moulding photos, or comment on your picture or post, it will not make you a better human being. You are not a good person because you appear to be attractive by cosmopolitan standards.
Social-Media has helped contribute to sexual dysfunction and is teaching another new generation that attraction is based on appearance.
Another recent study shows that social media makes the section of the brain connected with emotions grow, but not in healthy ways. It grows uncontrollable sensitivity, overly affected by what people think about, even if they do not even know the people and had no real life interactions with them.
Effects on marriages and romantic relationships
With the ability to be turned on at every corner of the web, social media is the leading cause of break-up and divorces today.
Emotional cheating is when you allow your thoughts (usually caused by viewing images), to drift from your real life partner and family, to somebody else you may or may not know as a real human being. Emotional cheating is still cheating, and often, more times than not leads to physical cheating, even if not with the person or people the emotional cheating started with.
It open’s a Pandora’s box into the human mind & the craving to satisfy the Reward System, not to create more life, but just to feel good, without any benefit on energy balance.  The person online doesn’t contain any of the imperfections as your real life human partner. A person may feel completely attached to this idea of meeting someone perfect for them, & their real life partner is made into an evil enemy in the mind of the cheater to justify this new found ‘love’ & ‘freedom’.
When emotional cheating turns physical, most, if not all, will soon realize there is no such thing as a perfect person. They don’t exist, sorry, in case you didn’t know, you are not perfect either.
Over one third of divorce filings in 2011 contained the word “Facebook,” or “social media” according to a report from a legal services firm, Divorce Online.
Lookin’ for Love on fed-book
Divorce and break-up rates due to fed-book and other social media sites are extreme, but what about ‘meeting’ someone and creating a relationship that is based on something as shallow as appearance and not real human interaction?
When Fed-book was invented so was crush-stalking.
It’s a quiet and seemingly innocent art that everybody does, so it must be ok, right?  The silent accumulation of massive amounts of information about a person whose appearance you like, quietly plotting how you will arrange to see them again, dropping-in on the events they announced they will be at, at the same time adding more mutual Fed-book friends, eventually sending them a friend request, then start liking what they like (even if you really don’t), start commenting how great & pretty they are, then ask for their phone number & eventually set up a face-to-face meeting. Before fed-book, you met someone who may interest you, maybe talk for a couple of minutes, not long enough to ask for a number, and it’s done. There is no ability to learn about their life, interests, hobbies, favorite music, who all their friends are, where they’ve travelled, & you damn sure wouldn’t be able to view their family photos. By looking at their pictures and videos you learn their different facial expressions, moods and share in their emotion at the time and place of the photo or video.
There would be no way that a person you just briefly met or just saw in the street would give you their personal journal & give you an open door into the inner most feelings of who they are. In so many ways it would be seen as high risk, for the heart & security, if a complete stranger had all that information. Now any & all who wish, can have access to all that information, without ever having to get to know the person in real life.
In Fed-book you can be whoever you want, only exposing the positive characteristics of yourself. As your virtual personality you don’t ever look tired with bags under your eyes, you don’t shit, you don’t fart, you don’t get sick, you don’t throw up or ever have diarrhea, your perfect, & your self-esteem is skyrocketing cause everyone ‘likes’ what you have to say & everybody ‘likes’ the photos of you. You are looking at that Photoshopped version of yourself — your favorite flattering photos, your witty comments,  your epiphanies that came to you on your recent vacation — all reinforcing the version of who you want to be, having a positive but very temporary effect on your self-esteem.
You get that ego lift because you self-select the information that is included in our Fed-book profiles and posts on your wall . That skyrocketing self-esteem goes up fast and strong, but it always has to come down, and when it does the landing is never smooth. But with quick glance at the most beautiful photos of yourself, you can get that hot air balloon back up and running. But soon it will be deflated yet again, often leading to a new but real medical term, “Facebook-Depression.”
Those enormous egos may have already taken over your bodies and minds, a temporary escape from reality, & if you have access through your phone it is one you can visit all the time, even more than living in real reality.
The ability to be constantly connected means that those fragile relationship beginnings can be fast-tracked: You’ve only hung out once, but you Fed-book Chat throughout the day and like each-others uploads at a crazy pace. It’s too much, too soon, and can be addictive. Constantly chatting means that you can get to know someone seemingly faster and can quickly turn into a phase where you spend hours talking about your childhoods, families, and futures.
Then, you get stuck with a false intimacy.
Fed-book does not just confuse people about how ‘great’ they are, but looking at ‘friends’ pages, posts and updates also negatively affects the views of yourself, because like you they put only their best up & it can make people feel depressed & sad thinking others have a better life than theirs. So now to improve your feelings you gotta out do them to make yourself feel sufficient. Constantly self-modeling & announcing the newest cool things you’ve done.
In other words, the computer or cell phone it is not a healthy place to look for Love.
Sexting and Virtual Sex
Real Life Sex must happen to create more Natives. Sex is not an act for the release of dopamine’s and daily expulsion of sacred energy. When two humans, a man and woman exchange their energy it is a sacred union of these two energies: Water & Fire, Earth and Sky, Sun & Moon, pure balance that can potentially lead to a larger responsibility, a new Life.
In our pre-invasion world it was seen very different than today, very Sacred; the most Sacred of our ceremonies, the one that is universal. By exploiting sexuality, we exploit our Essence as Life forms. By colonizing & changing our sexuality they colonize our first & oldest ceremony, so sacred every man & woman had their own and it was only viewed, attended & participated in by them, an internal union of duality.
It is now controlled by the perverted minds of the colonizer. If they control what arouses people and when, through imagery, they can make a person think about sex and control the oldest part of us.
The Hind Brain is older and Stronger than any other portion of the brain. We share it with all other backboned animals. It is associated with the 5 F’s: Fighting, Feeding, Fearing, Fleeing & Fornicating; The Hind Brain Defends Territories & their husbands or wives from others who may want them. Being aggressive to protect is an important job of the Hind Brain.
“Sexual Behavior is instinctive, responses are automatic & our emotions are more stimulated, negativity & anxiety flow easily.” – Michael Yellow Bird, For Indigenous Minds Only.
When Hind brain is in charge, accessing neural networks that are responsible for compassion, self-awareness & emotional intelligence is harder. The place where our deepest Love comes from can be quickly overridden by the Hind Brain. Today most People in the industrial world function in this mental state of the five F’s. A continued state of Narcissism. Self-Modeling & sexting are perfect examples of this portion of the brain not just in charge but controlled through imagery and violent sexual trauma.
In other words, they have sexualized our world as a way to control the oldest thought process of survival.
Sexting and Pornography are eroding whole generations from birth. While sex is thought of as a curse word in public & our communities, dysfunctional sexuality is a behind closed doors addiction that is available for the whole virtual world to see. In 2012 the Internet Watch Foundation found that an “estimated 88% of self-made explicit images are stolen from their original upload location and made available on other websites, in particular porn sites collecting sexual imagery of children and young people”. When the person who originally sexted the photo finds out everyone has access to it they can go into depression & there have been many cases of suicide.
Young children are even sexting & very few adults want to talk about how wrong & against Natural Law it is because they are doing it or have done it too. We must question what is going on, not just follow the crowd because the cool kid or prettiest girl is leading the way.
Indigenous views of sexuality must be revived as a Sacred teaching to our Young ones.
We did not stare at asses, which is really the upper portion of the legs where you shit comes out of.
“Titties” are the physical tissues where food exits for the new life to eat.
Muscles are what give us form, the clay on sticks.
Sexual organs are for the exiting of turbid fluid (piss) & for exchanging seed to egg to make Life.
This shit is not funny or giggly, it is real. We all have the same bodies, with fluids, organs, tissues & energy. Smartin’ up, this is not a joke, the future of Indigenous People are at stake. Body parts were not objects, just as the human they are part of, are not objects, they are sacred Life forms that must be treated good & engaged respectfully. Physical appearance is shallow. A person’s mind must be in good health to be healthy. Looks are temporary. This did not drive the reason you are with somebody & choose to make a new Life.
Not only does the enemy control our feelings and emotions through screens they get us to attempt to satisfy them with material objects. No matter who we are, now they seek to make all consumers of our own colonization and destruction of the Land.
Study, Experiment & Execute- The creation of the Consumer
Today’s industrial world uses the old roman philosophy of bread & circus for control. Entertainment (Circus) & Welfare (food).
Now they’ve mashed them together making everything circus, flashy entertainment that tells us what to buy, whether it’s food, jewelry, shoes, clothes, toys, games, music devices, phones, computers, household items or whatever they can to get us to continue this perpetual cycle of buying things. Humans are now in a constant state of wanting something else, always getting the itch to buy something else. It is yet another product of low self-esteem, always trying to fill a void, one that can only be filled with Land and Water & living by Natural Law.
Turning humans into buyers of things is called Consumerism. It is another advanced form of colonization. Psychoanalysts have learned they can control people through the selling of stuff. They study the oldest desires in the Hind Brain of individuals then try to fulfill them with products. There are always new products to fulfill those desires in a better way.
Public relations are utilized to control Life in every aspect: the constant sight & sound of bright flashy things, then wanting them & getting them.
The core of white civilization is Individualism, so study groups were set up over generations to find what appeals to the individual human mind & how they can make people Narcissistic, so companies can appeal to that desire & control through products.
In the 1980’s business stopped dividing people by social class and started classifying them by what their inner psychological wants were.
Those who wanted Security & Belonging are Mainstreamers.                If they sought Status & Esteem of Others they are Aspires.
If it is Control they seek they are Succeeders,
or if it is self-esteem they are Reformers.
They market products to fill the wants of these people.
Now through social media they mine all the information they can get about people & market to them directly for their individual wants and desires. It is called Data Mining, and is the newest tool used to help advance control through buying & debt.
Data Mining is used by corporations, police and intelligence.
Wikipedia says: “With this data, companies create customer profiles that contain customer demographics and online behavior. A recent strategy has been the purchase and production of ‘network analysis software’. This software is able to sort out through the influx of social networking data for any specific company.It is used to help companies improve their sales and profitability. Facebook has been especially important to marketing strategists. Facebook’s controversial ‘Social Ads’ program gives companies access to the millions of profiles in order to tailor their ads to a Facebook user’s own interests and hobbies. However, rather than sell actual user information, Facebook sells tracked ‘social actions’. That is, they track the websites a user uses outside of Facebook through a program called Facebook Beacon.”
That shit is crazy! Data mining is the next advancement of colonization
We were not born to be data mined consumers!
Are We Stronger Social Beings because of Fed-book?
Controlling our inner most feelings, when we are hungry, sexually aroused & scared due to violence, are at the root of control.  At one time these feelings would come naturally, when needed. When our body needs more energy, it tells us, and we eat or drink, when we are alone with our partners we are in an intimate space we get sexually aroused, when some form of confrontation or violence occurs we make the decision to fight or get out of the situation somehow if we can. These are not feelings that should be turned on and off by movies, internet, images, billboards or games. By controlling our emotions & feelings, we are like a puppet or a toy that can be turned on & off at the will of the enemy.
“We strengthen our brains neural circuits of fear, anger and helplessness when we engage in negativity, faulty thinking, feeling and behavior…
Our brain changes depends on how we train our minds to engage the world…
A Healthy well balanced mind and brain are essential to engage in proactive, creative & successful decolonization activities” – Michael Yellow Bird
So are we stronger and better human beings because of fed-book. Are we socially advanced? Do we live the good stress free life of our ancestors?
When you log on you may feel like it, but that is all it is, a feeling, not real Life. Get real. Get a Real Life and Real friends who you know and trust and won’t be attracted to you because of physical appearances, what you type & false virtual status.
What type of future Adults are we raising today?
Raising Warriors
vs.
Raising Addicts, Zombies & Disease Riddled Children?
Raising Addicts & Zombies
When phones first entered our communities, elders started to see the break down of personal interaction. People no longer talked to each other face-to-face, just over the phone. Visits and social gatherings became less frequent due to the ease of the phone. Now Internet has taken over, so instead of talking, people are typing and texting, another deeper level of social breakdown with absolutely no human interaction, just writing and reading through a screen.
We have been told we are more social than ever, learning how to speak a language of typed acronyms. Social implies interaction, not typed interaction, but physical interaction.
Children are the primary targets of it all. If children can be taught from a young age, you can control them as adults.
The majority of kids and teens spend about 75% of their awake time attached to some sort of screen.
What type of human is this going to be as an adult? What skill sets will that child learn? Will any of them be applicable if there was no electricity? Will any of these children be functional without electricity?
Addiction is the continued use of a substance or continuation of a behavior despite extremely negative consequences.
Not being able to function without electricity is an extremely negative consequence, a suicidal one. In the world of cyber war, whole Nations electrical systems can be turned over with the switch. On average approximately 7.5 hours per day are spent using some form of entertainment/electrical media. Most people think they need constant audio or visual stimulation.
Doctors have recently set general guidelines recommending that children under the age of two should not watch TV or any form of screen entertainment at all, because television “can negatively affect early brain development” & that children of all ages should not have a television in their bedroom. If it’s bad for child humans in cannot be good for adult ones either.
Where there are humans there are screens, screens have quickly replaced missionaries to colonize those who are uncivilized (not of the city).  It is a world-wide disease, one that people slave in jobs to get and give to their children.
Bright flashy loud T.V. & games is how they get children’s attention; Using our instinctive sensitivity to movement and sudden changes in vision or sound. The human naturally orientates itself to screens, it is proven almost from birth: infants, when lying on their backs on the floor, will crane their necks around 180 degrees to watch TV.
Through stylistic techniques, they activate this orienting response by increasing the rate of cuts, edits, zooms, criticism, sudden noises & camera changes in the same visual scene to increase the persons physiological excitement along with attention to the screen. The content of the program is irrelevant. Screen based entertainment is the flavor enhancer of the audio-visual world, providing unnatural levels of sensory stimulation.
Research from China and Mexico identified television exposure as an independent factor in obesity. Mexico’s health ministry has reported that obesity has risen by 170 per cent in a single decade, 12 per cent higher for each hour of television watched per day. Eating when watching TV is a main factor, humans continue to salivate unnaturally in response to more and more food when normally they would not. 75 per cent of meals are eaten in front of the television.
Other studies have shown that for every hour of television watched there were an increase in attention problems. The younger and more TV watched the more serious the attention disorders become.
The latest research on communication disorders suggests that early childhood television viewing may be an important trigger for autism (communication disorder), which is steadily increasing.
Children get less sleep than previous generations had & have a harder time getting into a deep sleep.  Passive exposure to TV creates sleeping difficulties in all age groups, from infants to adults.
A 25-year study, tracking children from birth has recently concluded that television viewing in childhood and adolescence is associated with poor educational achievement by 30 years of age. Early exposure to television has long-lasting bad consequences for educational achievement and later, the socio-economic status and well-being.
Not that we are promoting the white worlds view of educational and socio-economic status, but it goes to show that screens produce a dumbing effect on the population no matter what their goals are in Life.
Watching screens together, whether TV, Computers or cell phones, is a main pastime of families in the industrial world taking up more time than any other activity but sleep and even that is getting over powered by screen time.
Toys & Games
As Indigenous children we used to play with toys designed to help us learn coordination & the skill sets necessary in our world to Provide & Protect as adults. For example, little bows & arrows, hand-woven dolls to care for as if they were babies & many others that began to teach, from a young age, the jobs we would need to learn to be a beneficial member of our Community & Nation.
After colonization, we began playing with plastic & rubber toys which had very little significance to our way of Life & the Natural world. Now, kids are playing video games, learning how to be electrical killers & consumers, undoubtedly preparing them for a robotic world, whether in War or Purchase.
Recent estimates put the number of people playing video games worldwide at around 1.2 billion. This is mostly children & teens, not including the millions of adults sitting in front of slot machine screens, also known as adult gaming. These addictions are causing children & adults to ignore their own basic necessities of Life, such as Hygiene, Health & Humanity.
Dr. David Greenfield Director of the Center for internet and technology Addiction in Connecticut says people have died or killed others because their games were taken away.
“There are people who have died of deep vein thrombosis, starvation, repetitive motion injuries, heart attacks, malnourishment, and bowel restrictions because they refuse to go to the bathroom,” he said. At a Computer Addiction Services center in Richmond, bc, excessive gaming accounts for 80% of youth counsellor’s caseloads. Overuse of social networking and gaming also makes children more susceptible to depression and anxiety.
Globally, there have been deaths caused directly by exhaustion from playing games for excessive periods of time. Again it is the release of dopamine’s in the Reward System driving these cravings & addictions in Youth. Teck-no-logic addiction through screens is the most addictive thing on Earth and the materials used to make them are causing more diseases than any plague or pandemic know to Life.
Where do screen and computers come from & what are they made of?
Each screen and computer comes from somewhere. It is a compilation of materials that come from the Earth. These materials are acquired through mining.
Mining is when they blow holes into the Earth to access rocks below the surface that contain various metals they use for products. Mining has gone on for thousands of years. The industrial revolution enabled mining to reach a whole new level. Most products around the world are derived from mining, whether for metal or oil. In the process of separating the metal from rock they use toxic and hazardous chemicals, which leak into the ground & ground water.  The metals that are mined are hazardous themselves, they are in the ground for a reason & when exposed to the surface have terrible effects on all Life.
There are over 40 individual materials that make up most electrical products, and are all toxic chemicals ranging from hazardous flame retardants such as PVC &  brominated flame retardants (BFRs), including PBDEs (tri- to deca- brominated congeners), PBBs (tetra- to deca-brominated congeners), HBCD (hexabromocyclododecane) and TBBPA (tetrabromobisphenol A) to heavy metals like lead, tin, chromium, mercury, cadmium, tantalum, tin, tungsten, niobium, gold, copper, bauxite, steel, glass, crystalline silica, phosphorous & many more.
These chemicals are linked to birth defects, impaired learning and numerous other serious health problems.
After they stop working, and they all stop working at some point, they are discarded & become electronic waste, continuing poisoning & leeching poison into Life. Literally billions of electronic products are thrown away each year & billions more are produced to continue the never ending supply & demand. But the Earth only has a limited amount of these materials, leading to very serious discussions around mining other planets and even the Moon.
What do these hazardous & toxic materials do to our Bodies?
Physically, electricity is the greatest cause of sickness around the world and in the story of humanity. It is the greatest weapon for not only monitoring humans, it is the greatest weapon of sickness & disease ever known to the Earth. It is causing millions of pre-mature deaths and making whole generations dependent on a white medical system that has no concern with healing.
The use of electrical products by children is killing whole generations earlier than ever before, starting at the core of Life, the cellular structure.
“The body conducts electricity that enters it. When this happens, the body’s electrical processes are disturbed, & cell functioning is disrupted. The electricity in electrical wiring and appliances changes the atomic structure of the cell and breaks the bonds that exist in and between cells. This triggers changes in blood chemistry, induces free radicals, disrupts the cells ability to control  PH levels, enzyme activity, cell reproduction, synthesis, functioning and energy transfer. A healthy and permeable cell membrane wall is needed for effective communication and coordination of activity between cells, tissues, organs and nerves. When exposed, to EMFS, the protein in the cell membrane wall is weakened and the cells react as though threatened by an invader and elicits a state of emergency (fight or flight response) in the body. In this state of emergency, non-vital processes are delayed, and blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar levels increase.  The cell enters into a state of emergency. Besides impaired communication and coordination, the reduced membrane permeability also makes it difficult for nutrients to enter and for toxins to exit. As a consequence, the body does not benefit from nutrients and healing therapies as it should, When the cell is in a state of emergency, instead of producing water and carbon dioxide, the cell produces hydrogen peroxide and carbon monoxide. In short, the cell begins to ferment. The state of emergency behavior is passed on to each subsequent generation of cells.”- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
VLF (Very Low Frequency) & ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) & EMF (Electric Magnetic Frequency) are emitted from all electronics. They cause what scientist call PEMR (Pulsed Electro Magnetic Radiation) which disturbs the balance of living cells. PEMR exist around all screens & continue shooting out of them even when turned off and unplugged. Magnetic Radiation travels through absolutely everything, walls, metals, flesh, screen filters…everything.
Magnetic Radiation creates electric smog which is everywhere, affecting all Life & doing irreversible harm to all, especially those who are around it all the time. Those who keep cellphones in their pockets, talk or text on them, watch TV or spend time on computers are the most affected.
Magnetic Radiation affects the whole body. The Pineal Gland is the organ most impaired by EMF exposure. This organ produces hormones and neurotransmitters that tune and regulate the hypothalamus, central nervous system, and immune system. EMF exposure suppresses the pineal gland activity leading to the reduction of two important chemical messengers: Melatonin and Serotonin. Both are involved in regulating numerous processes and functions in the body. Serotonin has enormous influence over many brain functions. Melatonin is a powerful antioxidant needed to keep the body healthy and strong.
Melatonin Deficiency can cause: insomnia; sleep disorders; endometriosis; fibroids; fibrocystic breasts; menstrual disturbances; prostate cancer; PMS; immune disturbances; cancer; high cholesterol; blood pressure abnormalities; depression; bipolar disorder; Alzheimer’s; autism; epilepsy; sudden infant death; diabetes; anxiety; heart arrhythmia; cataracts; and scoliosis.
Serotonin Deficiency can cause: insomnia; memory and learning disorders; mood disorders; eating disorders; depression; obesity; panic attacks; alcoholism; headaches; ADD; aggression; fibromyalgia; PMS; deficits schizophrenia and deficits in executive, fibromyalgia, schizophrenia, anxiety, memory and learning disorders, and impairments in functions that are collectively known as executive functions.
Our body has sixty trillion cells. Each cell is a tiny organism and can easily be damaged by the action of electromagnetic wave lengths which interfere with your body & reproductive abilities, menstrual cycles. For example, sperm & egg count are greatly affected by electrical products.
Obviously electrical products are not a good for health, but putting laptops, i-pads cellphones or any screen product on your lap is even worse. Some people do it daily, all day.
Watch out Narcissists, it’s not just what is inside that is affected, computers also cause wrinkles in the skin and premature aging. What about close to your head? It’s no coincidence cell phone are called cell phones, they affect the cells & when put close to the head all the time cause Cellular Death.
Cellular Death
Your cell phone emits and receives signals. There is an electromagnetic field around each cell phone, damaging memory, endocrine secretions, sexual abilities; gout & can cause dementia, depression, Parkinson’s disease & severe neurological diseases & tumors. Scientists admit there is a direct relationship between brain cancer and cell phone use. Brain cancer tumor risk has been steadily increasing over the last 10 years- particularly among the 20 -29 year olds.
What will it be like in the next 10 years with more & more children having i-pods & cell phones? Some scientists believe whole generation to come will be crazy in the head & brain tumors will be common in teenagers. Before you decide to allow your kids to have or even touch cell phones, look at the dangers involved.
Radiation in general & radiation from cell phones in particular penetrate much deeper into the tender skulls of kids than into adults. Tissues in their brains and limbs are still growing and their cells are rapidly dividing. Without a doubt it will decrease their life span. Once it penetrates your kids’ heads, it enters their brain and eyes at an absorption rate far greater than it does in adults. Up to 9 times higher. What does it mean for your kids? It means that their risks for cancer & mental sickness are far greater.
Cell phones for kids are death traps, ensuring them an unhealthy Life. They may seem normal only because we live in this time of worldwide radiation & really do not know what normal health is. Damage to the genetic material in kids’ growing cells can result in disruption of cellular functions, cell death, development of tumors, and damage to the immune functions and the nervous systems.
Many nations around the world have banned cell phone use to children. For Indigenous People, our children are everything & we should do the same. Also beware of all electronics near babies & children. Most baby monitors use digital wireless technology that produce more powerful EMF’s than living near a cell phone tower.
When EMF exposure is reduced, healing energies flow freely & the body begins to heal itself & get stronger. The nervous system & acupuncture meridians are unblocked. Our Natural flow begins again, the pineal gland increases production of hormones & chemicals that control & effect mental, emotional & physical functioning. Clarity, concentration, understanding and calmness set in. There is control of impulses & increased Energy.
Social Media: A scary place of Strangers, Predators & Perverts
Besides the effects on the body itself, children are at the greatest risk from social networking. Social Media is the perfect place for predators to hide.
Would you send your young children into the middle of a populated prison yard unattended? Or a busy city full of every kind of weirdo known to man-kind? Knowing full well that perverts & predators are lurking all around just waiting to find prey to abuse? Hell No. So why would you allow them to have any social media accounts? This is essentially what parents are allowing by allowing their children to make accounts online. Just because “everybody is doing it,” it has become normalized, much like the gas chambers & smallpox blankets humans are blindly following with no thought of what it is they are doing. It is absolutely crazy! Protect your babies by keeping them off social media & away from sickos.
Building a Society of Cyborgs
Many walk around constantly looking at a screen like zombies, having no situational awareness & knowledge of what is happening around them. Go anywhere with large human populations, whether on the street, a city bus or shopping mall & you will observe the majority of everyone constantly looking down at their cell phones, or as we prefer to call them, little poisonous electrical boxes. But why look down all the time? Why not just have it as a part of your body? That makes more sense, right?
Cyborgs may sound sci-fi, but they are actually real & gaining in popularity.
Cyborg, short for “cybernetic organism” is a being with both organic and artificial parts. They are currently making cyborgs for all sectors of industrial society, humans that are not full humans, full of electrical chips with the ability to stay constantly connected to the internet.  Some cyborgs have their eyeglasses implanted into their head with screens on in their glasses so they can always see their social media sites. Even better, some have fake eyes with cameras & screens built into them.
Cyborgs are a part of the movement to replace humans with robots. Militaries are at the most advanced stages of robotics, some planning to have up to 1/3 of military vehicles unmanned within the next few years.
Constant cell phone & social media updating may seem innocent enough but it is normalizing the constant presence of technology which is leading to the normalcy of cyborgs & all robotics, or TI (Teck-No-Logic Intelligence).
Movement Health
“The most important thing was security. What you knew you held in your heart.” – Companaero Raul, EZLN Warrior
“Everything was for security.”
“Above all we had to be discreet about things.”-  Commandante Abraham, EZLN Warrior
“In the first place, we learned Security measures without Security you can’t do anything”…
“As the work grew, we had even more security”
“…We always put security first” – Companero Gerardo, EZLN Warrior
“He was also very strict about security…” – Capitan Lucio, EZLN Warrior, speaking about subcommandante Pedro
“They were told how to be careful because everything was underground” – Major Moises, EZLN Warrior
Security Effects of fed-book
Making Gathering Intelligence Easy & More Efficient
Social media is an intelligence operation, which has completely changed the jobs of intelligence groups. Before social media, spies had to put much more effort into gathering information about those they want information from, and it would take an extensive amount of time to put complete profiles together on targets.
Today, everybody gives them all the personal and group information they need on their own, and all the intelligence community has to do is monitor and organize the information. Social Media use, combined with cell-phone conversations and text are enabling oppressive regimes around the world to monitor people more than ever, maintaining & gaining more control in every way.
Everything you do on social media stays on social media, regardless of your security settings, or if you can still see it or not. Whatever you post is somewhere, forever. There is no such thing as deleting your account– all info can be recovered at any time.
With over 2 billion people (and growing daily) on some sort of social media site it is the best known surveillance technology that has ever existed. For an intelligence organization, the most difficult & time consuming job is the collection and organization of data. With social media people make their own intelligence profile and update it constantly, sometimes multiple times a day.
Social media makes us think that record keeping and documentation of our lives & locations is normal. We have begun to normalize surveillance and even make excuses why it is ok.
People give government and business access to information that they would never have the time or resources to get on their own. There is no controversy about surveillance because the targets of it are not only the ones producing the information they are also distributing it.
Fed-books privacy policy states: “We may share your info in response to a legal request if we have a good faith belief that the law requires us to do so…we may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to: detect, prevent and address fraud and other illegal activity…” What the hell is a “good faith belief”?
Fed-book gives a trail of information on people from physiological wants and valuable information about the reading, listening, viewing & buying habits & attractions of its users.
In 2006, Newsweek reported that myspace had nearly 800 agencies and a 24-7 law enforcement team helping surf the site and monitor its users, their activities, and locations. In 2 years of launching the site it was contributing to 150 investigations a month. “Under Justice Department guidelines anything posted is fair game,” according to myspace vice president Jason Feffer. And that was years ago. myspace was shut down and made way for dozens of social media sites, and ever improving law enforcement monitoring and investigations.
The US Department of Justice uses social media to, “Reveal personal communications, establish motives & personal relationships, provide location information, prove & disprove alibis, and establish crime or criminal enterprises.” In the same Justice Department, documents say their purpose is to go undercover on fed-book and other social media sites to “communicate with suspects/targets, gain access to non-public info & map social relationships/networks.”
A department of Homeland Security memo states, “Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of friends link to their page and many of these people accept ‘cyber friends’ that they do not even know… Once a user posts online they create a public record & timeline of their activities.”
Every year (since 2009) law enforcement has a gathering called SMILE-Social Media Internet & Law Enforcement. The gathering is held to “emphasize the relationship between Law enforcement, social activist and traditional media.” They also teach & share techniques regarding “maintaining public order & mass surveillance in an open source world”.
Infiltration into movements depends on believability of the informant. With social media you just have to type the right words your targets want to hear, post pics & videos they will like. They can just simply like the posts of their targets & gain enough trust to start engaging targets in typed conversations and if they really want to get close, soon enough they can get a phone number from target and start to have phone conversations, which can lead to face to face meetings. Profiles & posts offer law enforcement all the information they would ever need to pose a recruit or real member of the targeted organization.
The number of social media sites & users give the impression that there are too many people to keep track of. In reality, law enforcement is becoming better than ever at dealing with massive amounts of information. The NYPD (New York Pig Department) said they plan to “mine social media sites like facebook, twitter, myspace, linked in, in order to find criminals bragging about a crime they’ve committed or planning to commit.” Data mining is not just limited to policing. The CIA follows up to 5 million tweets a day. Analysts then cross-reference the data with other available intelligence and create reports for the white house.
Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal says, “The illusion of privacy is simply self-delusion on the part of young people.” Fed-book uses facial recognition software that automatically identifies people in photos. Opting out does not keep them from gathering data and recognizing your face- it just keeps people from tagging you. A person does not even need to be a Fed-book user to be identified.
There are over 90 billion (and counting) photos that fed-book hosts have access to, which they can then give to anybody they have “a good faith belief” should have it.
The US Army states that one of the ‘key tasks of counterinsurgency are to understand how members of a targeted population interact with each other’. The FBI can now instantly compile thorough dossiers/profiles (a collection of documents about a particular person, event, or subject.) on u.s. citizens tying together surveillance outside a drug store, credit card transactions, cell-phone call records, texts, emails, airplane travel info  & web-search information.
Communications, along with public data like Facebook profiles, GPS location information, tax data, and other commercial data, were used to create “sophisticated graphs of some american’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions, and other personal information,” said The New York Times. 
In addition to phone records and email logs, the National Security Agency (NSA) uses Facebook and other social media profiles to create maps of social connections. A policy change in November 2010 gave the NSA the ‘legal’ right to chain together info on targets, and discover & track connections from all other intelligence services. Julian Asange, founder of whistleblower wiki-leaks says, “Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies, and building this database for them,”
Find ‘Em, Fix ‘Em, Flank ’em, Fuck ’em is a common military term used when engaging an enemy.
With social media we lead to our own demise.
We get found every time we log in, and you’re always found if you stay logged in. Your location is always picked up.
We are fixed, because they know our attention is on a screen in specific location.
We can get flanked at any time we are in a virtual world because we never see them coming.
We get fucked whenever they want, or better yet they let us fuck ourselves by giving us an open line to incriminate ourselves by thinking we have some form of freedom.
Building your house on the sand.
Organizing through fed-book-the illusion of being organized.
“People in the movement are falling for that shit?”
-Wolverine, Secwepemc Warrior, response when told about Fed-book.
Being involved in any Movement or Organization you must have strong ties. Connections & trust is of the utmost importance. Fed-book & social media in general promotes weak ties, the weakest possible, so weak that people accept support from anybody who types the right words; they could be cops, intelligence analysts, rapists, molesters, crazies or just everyday pieces of shit.
Some people promote that the social movement is more organized than ever before, but this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
There has never been a time in our story that we have been so un-organized.
Making connections around the world at the click of a friend confirmation is so fake it’s a bad joke. You do not know them, they are not your friend, ally or supporter, you cannot confirm or deny anything substantial about the people you connect with on social media, only thing that you know for sure is that you don’t really know them, or even really know if it is the person whose pictures you are looking at. Some think they can learn about the supposed person they are friending by checking out their photos, friends & posts, but learning about anybody through a screen is impossible.
Virtual reality is just that, it is virtually real, but it isn’t really real. Our Movement for the Liberation of our Lands and People is Real, not virtual, so we cannot claim to be part of this Movement through a virtual reality, it’s fake, a figment of imagination. Let’s get real.
Are you Fed-book Down or Really Down? The rise of the Internet Warrior
“There is no excuse for weakness.” – Sakej, Mik’Mak Warrior
Narcissism not only plagues the average fed-book user but it is what contributes to the continuing exposing & monitoring of so-called ‘movement’ members & organizers. Many think they are so beautiful, but the only real beauty is for Intelligence & police, through social media they make themselves a beautifully easy target for monitoring & surveillance.
Being a celebrity & well-known is promoted by society, even in Indigenous Movements that are supposed to be fighting for Land & Water. There are constantly people who are seeking to be fed-book famous, using the fight for the Land as a way to get attention to try to boost that low self-esteem. There is now an enormous amount of people, who are ‘down’ with the cause online, but they’re real Life actions & lifestyle is everything but down; just another unhealthy consumer contributing daily to the destruction of the Earth.
Celebrities are not Leaders. Leaders lead humans through example & influence. We must revive our real teachings & do away with pre-madonna celebrities craving attention who have no real life skills. Posting & posing are not skills, sorry.
A Lakota War Leader constantly reminds his Warriors that “the most important time to be a Warrior is when nobody is looking.” Fed-book is the opposite. People just play Warrior when they think people are looking. That’s all they are doing, playing. But this game is real Life & real Struggle involving real Life consequences too.
Educating people about current situations is great, but there are far better, more secure & less self-incriminating ways than social media to do it. In the current teck-no-logic world many may have forgotten how to really organize with humans, or for the younger ones they were most likely never taught.
Internet defenders often bring up the Zapatistas as a ‘great’ example of how effective the internet can be. To a certain extent, they are right. But, the Zapatistas spent 10 years organizing secretly, meeting with real humans, building a Movement from the ground up, and never informing intelligence services or the world about their organizing or their plans. They did not exist in the virtual world until they chose to & they did not choose to until they had a strong enough force to take over 7 cities & 650 ranches all while maintaining their home bases & villages. They did not organize their Movement through internet & damn sure not through social media (monitoring) if they did we would have never heard of them cause they wouldn’t exist anymore– they would have never even been able to get started.
“…The fact that people see social media as a tool for social change is more a triumph of marketing than the result of some digital revolution. Social media is a powerful tool for the very institutions that we are at war with, the people that seek to exploit & oppress us. Embracing it has resulted in our willing participation in a process of surveillance that we should be actively resisting”
-Evan Tucker, ‘Who needs the NSA when we have facebook’ Life During Wartime: Resisting Counter Insurgency
Reactionary Mentality vs. Pro-Active Thinking
We have been strategically raised to only address symptoms and not causes. To look at the pain & not the source of the pain. When we have a skin rash, we get a topical cream to put over it, never stopping to ask, what caused the rash, if we have a cough, we get something to sooth the cough, not addressing what caused the cough. When have no more food we go to a store. Before industrialization we were pro-active, we would go & harvest more food while we still had food, so we would never risk having none. They need our mind to react to situations & conditions they’ve created & not proactively work on fixing them.
Campaigning & protesting are reactionary actions. This is a mind-state promoted by the system, being a reactionary. We must get out of the campaign mentality. Protesting & freedom of speech are legal for a reason, because they produce no genuine change to the destruction of Mother Earth. While some campaigns may be successful in stalling some projects or achieving some legal legislation in colonial governments, no campaign has ever stopped this beast from swallowing the Earth, Water, Air & Universe. Even if they stop for a while, you can guarantee they will be back at some point to get the resources.
Social Media campaigns are a perfect way to keep those who could be potential in the building of a real Movement distracted with Narcissistic Celebrity views of getting known by ‘fighting’ the corporate world. They are in fact not really fighting but becoming another hindrance to real substantial Movement that led the Zapatistas to have a Land Base with clean Water to operate & Live from.
This industrial world does not limit their mind to single projects–industrial projects are a small part of how they keep this society functioning. The systems thinking & vision are very large; ours must be as well. The more we get caught into a campaign to campaign, or event to event mentality, the less we are thinking about the big picture, which may include stopping these projects, but cannot be limited to it. Projects and campaigns to stop them are the symptoms that arises out of industrialization. It’s not the cause. In an organized movement if we want real change we must address the root cause of the problem, a false man-made way of life based on mining, oil, electricity & greed.
Now people are virtually protesting, letting off steam through comments & posts, having even less effect than previous generations, thinking the Movement is in the latest image and movie. Instead of being on the Land protecting the Earth, many are concerned with getting the newest camera & computer to help get their word out. Everybody is a producer & photographer in the digital age. Technology has become a great excuse for in-action & building a real Movement with actual humans.
In order to fight industry, first we must not need industry, or else it’s called suicide. To fight mining we cannot live mining. To fight oil, we must not live oil. To fight industry, we must not need industry. How can we not need industry? By replacing it with Indigenous ways of living. They replaced our ways with white ones & they do not work. Now we will replace white ones with ours again.
Time & Energy is all we have while on Earth, we must spend it wisely, every breath that we spend on fedbook, twitter or linked-In, is one we cannot get back. It is wasted time. We must use our time being productive for the real world we live in & the one we want to create. Use your time to learn how to provide for yourself in every part of living, this is the biggest fight of all, this is the Movement, being a Real Indigenous Person.
Whatever english term you prefer, Indigenous, Indian, Native or Original these are just english words to describe those who still live on the Land without Industry. If you do not live this way, you are not really Indigenous. Right?  All humans were people of the Land at one time, even in europe. Can europeans claim Indigenous Identity because they’re ancestors used to live with the Land? Is Indigenous just having ancestors that lived with the land? That would mean the world was Indigenous, right?
But the world is not. To use the term Indigenous you must recognize your Responsibilities to continue Life with Natural Law & Live by them. Does that mean a white hippy in north amerikkka can say they are Indigenous? We’re not saying that. But what we are saying is that we cannot just continue to be consumers & slave to the white-man’s possessions. We must recognize our Duties & work hard to fulfill them. Fed-book makes Life seem easier, less work. But is less work good? Does it make you Stronger? Does it make you a better Human?
As Bruce Lee says, “Do not pray for an easy Life, pray for the Strength to endure a difficult one”
Where do we go from here without Social Media?
“…if we’re going to be revolutionaries we have to be revolutionary to the last, because if one doesn’t accept the full consequences or abandons the people, it’s no good…
If you say you have to Struggle, you have to go through till the end.” –Major Moises, Zapatista Warrior
So what can we learn from all of this? Well for one thing, social media is not advancing us in our daily lives to be better humans, it is not helping our families become better families, it is not helping our bodies become stronger & it is not helping our Movements for Land & Water. So what should we do about it? We can start by unplugging.
Deactivate your social media accounts. Take it as a loss while you still can.
Malcolm X says it best: “Once you change your philosophy you change your thought pattern, once you change your thought pattern you change your attitude, once you change your attitude it changes your behavior pattern & then you go into some action.”
Before neuroscience recognized the brains ability to change according to thoughts & experiences we have, Malcolm knew it through his own experience. Today they call it Neuro-plasticity. Knowing our brain has the ability to change its destructive thoughts, feelings, memories & narcissistic behaviors is the first step to getting strong real Life people. Only real Indigenous Men & Woman will make real change for the future. No change or strength lies in the virtual world, just confusion, weakness & disease.
We must not hold other humans up as the standard we strive to be like. Things are not ok because ‘respected’ people do them. We must think critically, examine what is going on around you, question it & if need be, change it. As long has we’re breathing it’s never too late.
Remember Tecumseh was just a Man & Lozen was just a Woman, with the same Organs & Bodily Fluids, Tissues & Energy as all of us. What made them different? First it was their Mind, how they thought & then their training. Because they thought different, they acted different, they trained hard to survive and Live in a Strong way. We too have the same potential to be like them, not just the same potential, but we have a Sacred Duty to be like them, they must be our standard, we must all be like Crazy Horse & Geronimo.
Next time you feel that temptation of weakness creeping in just ask yourself what would Tecumseh & Geronimo do? What would they think of social media & making our own intelligence profile for the enemies of the Earth?
A Movement is comprised of many individuals who in order to be successful must have a common vision and a plan on how to make that vision come to fruition. If our vision is re-building our Indigenous Nations, then we must have strong families to do this. When a man and a women make babies they have now knowingly or unknowingly engaged in a Sacred responsibility to care for these new lives, to guide them & protect them to the best of their ability regardless of the consequence. No matter what prior dreams and thoughts a person had as an individual with no children, the primary job now is to feed, cloth, protect and keep those new lives warm in cold and cool in hot. The child needs teaching & knowledge of the Land & Universe to be Strong, not screen time. We must Raise Warriors not addicts.
Get your mind out of screens. Come back to reality. If you were never in it, come & join us.
Real Warriors don’t sext, text, message, post, like, friend, comment, poke or any of the other slave talk in social media, they don’t were skinny jeans or self-model, they live and die according to Natural Law and walk the Lands in every part of the World.
Take Courage, be humble, this fight did not start with us & will not end with us, it is a Generational Struggle, our Duty is to continue Natural Law by Any Means Necessary. Love Life. It is Beautiful.
Remember our Warrior Virtues:
Honor-Streangth-Courage-Duty-Dicipline-Loyalty-Integrity-Willpower-Wisdom-Self-Sacrifice.
We will Continue Forever! Raise Warriors! Don’t Talk About it, Be About it!
Earths Army Unite!
From the Mountains of the Northwest Western Hemisphere
Native Youth Movement-Society of Warriors
The Horrific Human Supremacy of Jeff Bezos

The Horrific Human Supremacy of Jeff Bezos

By Elisabeth Robson / Art for Culture Change

On May 9, 2019 Blue Origin — Jeff Bezos’ space exploration company — posted this video of Jeff Bezos speaking at the Going to Space to Benefit Earth event. One of the visions of Blue Origin, as outlined on the web site, and the focus of Mr. Bezos’ presentation is that millions of people must live and work in space in order to “preserve Earth” and that we will “go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy.”

He begins his presentation by making some true statements — that the Earth is not infinite (who knew!) and will eventually run out of energy for our use (again, who knew!). Mr. Bezos then quickly veers into human supremacy in the extreme, with a couple of innocuous sounding but telling remarks: that our lives are better than our parent’s lives, which were better than our grandparent’s lives (really better? Or just more energy intensive?) — completely ignoring all the non-humans we share this planet with — and that we could power our culture’s current energy needs if only we covered Nevada in solar cells. “It is mostly desert, anyway,” he says, ignoring the fact that deserts are in fact teeming with amazing life of all kinds from beautiful desert flowers to lizards, birds, tortoises, and so many more; ignoring the fact that solar farms in Nevada and other areas are bulldozed of all life before the toxic and deadly shining solar cells are installed.

As Mr. Bezos correctly points out, if we continue growing (GDP, energy use, etc.) at 3% a year, our historical trend in the modern era, we’d have to cover the entire surface of the Earth with solar panels to supply our energy needs in 200 years. Unintentionally, he’s hit upon a big problem with renewables: the land use requirements are unsustainable, and aside from the fact that along with running out of fossil fuel energy, we will eventually run out of the raw materials to make solar cells, wind turbines, batteries, smart grids, and so on long before 200 years passes. Of course, as he says, it is ridiculous to cover the Earth with solar panels, so we need something else.

Something else will include efficiency: our technology will continue to become more efficient, but Mr. Bezos acknowledges that growth in energy use will far outstrip energy efficiency. This relationship between greater efficiency and greater resource use is known as Jevons’ Paradox, discovered by William Stanley Jevons in 1865. Energy efficiency never reduces the amount of energy we use, because the more efficient our devices and cars and lighting and heating become, the cheaper they get, and the more we use. One example Mr. Bezos uses is air transportation: 50 years ago it took 109 gallons of fuel to fly one person from LA to NYC; today it takes only 24 gallons. And indeed, air travel is growing faster than any other transportation sector and is expected to double in the next 20 years, far outstripping the gains in efficiency made by airline companies. Efficiency gains just lead to more growth.

So, yet again, we need something else. Mr. Bezos never questions that growth is bad. He never suggests that maybe we should de-grow our population, our economy, our consumption, anything. He never contemplates that growth might not always be a good thing if it leads to the suffering of multitudes. No, he charges on assuming that growth is what’s best for everyone. Of course he does. As the CEO of amazon.com he is the embodiment of growth at all costs, including the lives of his own employees.

Does he even for a second think about the lives of non-humans at all? I don’t think so.

Unlimited demand + limited resources = rationing. This is the equation Mr. Bezos shows the audience, and he is correct. But rather than suggest we limit our demand, he focuses on how awful the rationing will be. According to him, that rationing means our children’s lives will be worse than our parent’s lives, and our grandparent’s lives. Again, I am blown away by the human supremacy of this thinking. It assumes that our lives have indeed, until now, been getting better. Which assumes that “our” means humans, because it surely cannot mean non-humans, whose lives have been getting demonstrably worse. Much worse. And which humans is he talking about? Clearly only the humans in the so-called Western developed world, because most humans on this planet have more recently been stripped of their land and livelihoods by colonization and “sustainable development”, and forced into menial, poverty-level jobs in factories, mines, and oil fields where their lives are demonstrably worse than they were before. For proof of this, simply imagine (or better yet, read the stories about) the life of a Native American Indigenous person who lived free on the land before white colonization and genocide and compare that with the life of a Native American relegated to living in poverty on a reservation with no access to land for traditional use, clean water, clean air, or cultural sites and activities. Mr. Bezos is arguing, as all techno-utopians do, that progress is always good. Only for people like you, Mr. Bezos.

And what is wrong with rationing? Well, god-forbid, it means we’d have to use less of everything we’re accustomed to using now. (Rich) Americans — 5% of the global population — would have to stop using the 25% of the resources on this planet that we use now. The horror! Cutting back and using less is fundamentally anathema to the American Dream(TM) — the idea that if we just work hard enough we can all achieve that fantasy of progress: having more money, owning more stuff, and of course, the unarticulated implication of using more energy that goes with that. “More” is the stuff American Dreams are made of.

The choice Mr. Bezos presents us with is between “stasis and rationing” and “dynamism and growth”. For Mr. Bezos, the choice is easy: we want dynamism and growth.

And here’s the good news: if we move out into space, we’ll have access to more! To unlimited resources!

Mr. Bezos’ solution to continued dynamism and growth is O’Neill colonies: giant tubes in space filled with a million people each. Here’s what he envisions this would look like:

[see photo here]

These will be easy to get to from Earth, easy to move amongst so we can visit our friends and neighbors. We can have the atmosphere of the best day on Hawai’i, the best cities, the best recreational spaces (complete with a deer and a bird flying over!). We can have it all, if we are willing to leave the planet behind, willing to forgo our “planetary chauvinism” as he (and a clip from Isaac Asimov) says.

Earth will, according to Bezos, be zoned for “residential”, “light industry” and people going to college. That’s weird. Why would people want to go to college on the planet, but not on the colony? He never says why. He also doesn’t mention “other species” in his zoning plans for Earth… at all. Or forests, rivers, mountains, glaciers, prairies, or wild places of any kind. Or how we’ll go about cleaning up the pollution and what will be no longer needed nuclear power plants, roads, buildings, and so much more we’ve left in our wake. He just says Earth “will be a beautiful place that people will visit.”

A trillion humans in space means a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts, according to Bezos. He doesn’t mention a thousand white rhinos, or a thousand passenger pigeons, or a thousand great auks. Of course not, because — oops! — we already killed off those species with our insatiable greed and inability to set limits on ourselves. As if a beautiful sunset isn’t as valuable as a Mozart concerto, and a thousand physics geniuses is somehow better than an entire species. Mr. Bezos claims this would be a great civilization. Only for people who care only about people, Mr. Bezos. Yes, there are a still a few of us who care about more than that.

Mr. Bezos says it won’t be up to him to build this future; it will be up to the (presumably younger) people he points to in the front row. It will be those people and their children and grandchildren, those people who will need to create the companies and the infrastructure to move to space… well they’d better hurry because we have only a couple of decades to get our CO2 emissions down to zero to avoid catastrophic climate change, and I’m not sure you can build a million colonies in space each big enough to hold a million people in two decades. Perhaps Mr. Bezos envisions that all of Earth’s remaining resources will be used up in this process? In which case it is unlikely that Earth will be a “beautiful place to visit” once we’re done building these big metal tubes in space.

The rest of the presentation is an advertisement for Blue Origin and how the company is putting all the basic infrastructure — the road to space — into place so that future generations can take it from there, with gratuitous phallic images of rockets launching into space accompanied by rousing movie music. Jeff Bezos’ childhood fantasy come true.

At no time in this entire presentation does Mr. Bezos mention non-human species, except implicitly when he mentions (and shows fantastical pictures of) “recreational opportunities” and “agriculture” in the colonies. It is as if, for Bezos, “nature” doesn’t exist except for recreation and food. Who, I want to ask him, is going to be responsible for building the web of life on these colonies so his deer and his bird and the pollinators (not shown) in the colonies will actually exist for more than a few weeks, days, or hours? Unfortunately, knowing what we know about Jeff Bezos, it is entirely possible that the graphical rendering of the colonies shows a robotic deer and a robotic bird, and that pollination occurs entirely via miniature drones. And what about the soil in which the plants in the “agriculture” areas and the trees shown in the “recreational” spaces grow? It is likely that the soil, too, is artificial, and artificially fertilized… oops! Synthetic fertilizer is made from petroleum products, which implies that either we find fossil fuels out in space somewhere (where we’ll be putting all the “heavy industry” of the future, according to Bezos), or that we continue mining the Earth for fossil fuels so we can grow food in space. Or maybe once established, we’ll all be pooping out the fertilizer in these closed-circuit biospheres in space. Because that’s been so successful in the past.

Who knows what is in Bezos’ addled mind. I do know one thing that isn’t there: a fundamental respect for nature, for billions of years of evolution, for the intricacy of the web of life that supports us here on planet Earth, a web of life we know virtually nothing about in comparison to what there is to know. He very obviously sees humans as separate from nature; anyone who imagines we can live in space must believe that to some degree. What Mr. Bezos fails to understand is that we are completely, utterly, inextricably part of nature; that we are human animals, and that our attempts to pretend otherwise will last only as long as the planetary ecosystem here on Earth, the ecosystem that continues to function at some diminished capacity, despite the damages we keep inflicting on the one and only planet we know of that supports life.

To fantasize that it is somehow better to try to recreate in space what we once had on Earth, than it is to contemplate limiting our demand just a bit so we can continue to live on this beautiful blue planet is human supremacy in the extreme. This won’t be a popular position, I know. Humans, especially Americans, love a new frontier to explore, and almost everyone I know gets excited about new technology and launching things into space.

But launching ourselves into space with the idea that we can somehow live without the planet to whom we are tethered with blood, guts, bacteria, cells, water, phytoplankton, oxygen, breath, fish, birds, trees, … every living thing on Earth… is the insane hallucination of someone who’s been “successful” as measured by little bits of green paper and numbers on a computer screen, but who has absolutely no idea that his fantasy, like the paper and the numbers, is a delusion.

To Save The Planet, Apply Poison

To Save The Planet, Apply Poison

True change can only be driven by revolutionary action and long-term radical organizing — not chemical collusion and compromise.

Last year, I volunteered to plant native species at the Spencer Creek-Coyote Creek wetlands southwest of Eugene, Oregon. This site, owned by the McKenzie River Trust (MRT), is an important riparian area at the confluence of two streams and is habitat for a wide range of plants, mammals, amphibians, birds, and other forms of life.

After arriving at the site, we learned during the orientation that herbicides had been applied in the area we were to be working to remove undesired plants. This did not sit well with me. I contacted McKenzie River Trust several months later and met with their conservation director to discuss chemical use. He explained that organizations like MRT are tasked with conserving large areas of land and don’t have the volunteer resources or staff to conduct non-chemical restoration. I suggested that MRT engage the community in dialogue around these issues in order to attempt an alternative.

The McKenzie River Trust disclosed that it has used pesticides including Glyphosate (aquatic formulation), triclooyr 3A, clethodim, aminipyralid, clopyralid, and flumioxazin over the past two years. MRT also uses chemicals at the Green Island site at the confluence of the Willamette and McKenzie rivers. The organization even has job descriptions that include specific reference to “Chemical control of invasive species… apply herbicides” in the activities list. It maintains a certified herbicide expert on staff. A representative of McKenzie River Trust told me that the organization has changed its volunteer policy to prevent the sort of herbicide exposure volunteers had earlier this year at the Spencer-Coyote Wetlands — but this doesn’t address the ecological impacts, or impacts on local residents.

I sympathize with relatively small organizations like McKenzie River Trust. They are operating in a bind whereby they are forced to either concede important habitat to aggressive invasive species, use poison, or attempt to mobilize the community to maintain land by hand. As they write in a fact sheet, “When working on large acreages, [herbicides] are the most efficient and cost-effective tool at our disposal.”

However, there is no excuse for manufacturing these substances, let alone deliberately releasing them into the environment.

We all assume that restoration and conversation groups have the best interests of the natural world at heart. But many of these groups regularly use chemical pesticides for land management, including chemicals that have been shown to cause cancer, birth defects, hormonal issues, and other health problems in humans and other species. This includes not just small local groups like The McKenzie River Trust and The Center for Applied Ecology, which are based in my region of western Oregon, but also large NGOs like The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

I have spoken with representatives of each of these organizations, and have confirmed that they actively use chemical herbicides.

The Nature Conservancy, for instance, uses organophosphate herbicides (the class that includes Glyphosate, the active ingredient of the popular weed-killer RoundUp) and a range of other chemicals on non-native species in the Willow Creek Preserve in southwest Eugene as well as thousands of other locations globally. The organization notes on its website that “herbicide use to control invasive species is an important land management strategy.”

The intentional release of toxic chemicals into the environment is an ironic policy for environmental groups, given that the modern environmental movement was founded on opposition to the use of pesticides (a category which includes herbicides). The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring is taken by many as the beginning of the modern environmental movement.

Pesticides are a persistent, serious threat to all forms of wildlife and to the integrity of ecology on this planet.

Amphibians, due to their permeable skin, are especially sensitive to the effects of pesticides. These creatures often spend their entire lives on the ground or underground, where pesticides may seep. Even at concentrations of 1/10th the recommended level, many pesticides cause harm or are fatal to amphibians.

Bees exposed to herbicides may be unable to fly, have trouble navigating, experience difficulty foraging and nest building. Exposure may lead to the death of bees and larva. One study showed that Glyphosate effects bees’ ability to think and retain memory “significantly.”

While herbicides are less toxic to birds and large mammals than other pesticides that are used to kill bugs and small animals like mice, several studies have shown interference with reproduction. Not all poisoning results in immediate death. Impacts might include reduced body mass, reproductive failure, smaller broods, weakening, or other effects.

Pesticides, in general, are implicated in dramatic collapses in bat populations, threaten invertebrates, and kill or harm fish. Additionally, they bioaccumulate in flesh — that is, their levels concentrate in the bodies of predators (including humans) and scavengers that eat poisoned rats or other animals that we deem as pests.

Pesticides are applied much more widely than most people realize. They are used along roads, in parks, in front of businesses, and along power lines. In forestry and agriculture, thousands of tons of chemicals are applied in Oregon every year. The Oregon Department of Transportation uses herbicides to spray roadsides across the state. A recent “off-label” use of a herbicide has caused the death of hundreds of Ponderosa pines along a 12-mile stretch near Sisters, OR. Across much of the United States, insecticides are sprayed widely in cities and water bodies to kill mosquitoes. And private organizations and individuals use pesticides widely as well. A southern California study that took place between 1993 and 2016 found a 500 percent increase in the number of people with glyphosate in their bloodstream during that period, and a 1208 percent increase in the average levels of glyphosate they had in their blood.

The effects of these chemicals on humans can be disastrous. Pesticides are linked to neurological, liver, lymphatic, endocrine, cardiovascular, respiratory, mental health, immune, and reproductive damage, as well as cancer risk. As far back as 1999, pesticide use was believed to kill 1 million humans per year. Yet these toxic chemicals continue to be used today.

***

According to permaculture expert Tao Orion, author of Beyond the War on Invasive Species, more volunteer work, or active harvesting, perhaps through collaboration with Indigenous groups, can eliminate the need for chemicals entirely. “If you’re considering that one or two people are going to manage 500 acres,” she said, “you’re setting yourself up for herbicide use. It’s a cop-out… Tending these areas may cause rare plants to increase. There is a lot of evidence now that this is indeed the case. But that goes against the [commonly accepted] American wilderness ideology.”

Orion says the use of toxic herbicide mixes is common as well. “I did an interview with the founder of the Center for Applied Ecology, and he said ‘we often just mix up RoundUp and 2, 4-D, that’s a surefire mix we’ve found,’” Orion said. As some may remember, 2, 4-D is one-half of the Agent Orange defoliant that was widely used in the ecocidal Vietnam War and has been linked to extremely serious human and non-human health issues.

In her book Beyond the War on Endangered Species, Orion details Agribusiness giant Monsanto and other pesticide industry corporations making a deliberate shift to market and sell chemicals to ecological restoration organizations. This is often done with the help of incomplete or poorly executed science claiming that pesticides are harmless. Jonathan Lundgren disagrees. This Presidential Early Career award winner for Science and Engineering was forced out of his USDA research scientist position after exposing damage caused by pesticides. Lundgren says that the science of pesticide safety “is for sale to the highest bidder.”

TNC and other restoration organizations are heavily influenced by research produced by land-grant colleges. Land-grant schools were set up in the late 1800’s to provide education on agriculture, engineering, and warfare. These schools maintain a fundamentally extractive, colonial mindset. “The pesticide manufacturers fund research and professorships at universities like Oregon State and other land-grant colleges,” Orion said. She also explained that these groups regularly receive grants from the federal government and sometimes from corporations directly. Land grant schools were a major factor in the industrialization of agriculture over the past 130 years.

One result of this corporatization of science is a revolving door between big organizations like The Nature Conversancy and industry. For instance, TNC’s managing director for Agriculture and Food Systems, Michael Doane, worked at Monsanto for 16 years prior to joining the organization.

The Nature Conservancy’s collaboration with big business goes well beyond Monsanto. Its “Business Council” is made up of a select group of 14 corporations including BNSF, Bank of America, Boeing, BP, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Monsanto, and PepsiCo. Previous partners include mining giant Rio Tinto, ExxonMobil, and Phillips. The Nature Conservancy has received 10’s of millions in funding from these corporate partners, who are collectively responsible for a substantial portion of global ecocide and who have profited to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

I spoke with a local beekeeper who called TNC to inquire about pesticide use at Willow Creek. The TNC representative confirmed the use of multiple different herbicides. Though the beekeeper explained his fear for his bees, and described health concerns related to an elderly family member with Parkinson’s disease (a malady they believe is connected to past RoundUp exposure), the TNC representative refused to entertain any neighborly idea of notifying adjacent landowners about chemical use.

“He told me ‘this is private land, and we can do whatever the hell we want,’” the beekeeper told me.

This response is not a surprise: The Nature Conservancy’s entire approach is based on privatization. At the Willow Creek site, and most Nature Conservancy properties, land is not accessible by the public. Fences block access and signs warn against trespassing.

This privatization model mirrors the Royal “hunting preserve” and “King’s forest” commonly found in historic monarchies. It’s an approach that is regularly critiqued by other conservation groups, who see responsible interaction with the land as essential for creating a land ethic. Groups like Survival International regularly report on the negative impacts this approach has on Indigenous people throughout the world, especially in Africa, where TNC and other large groups such as the World Wildlife Fund regularly purchase and privatize lands once held in common. According to Survival International, this approach is often counterproductive. The group notes that Indigenous people’s presence on ancestral lands is actually the number one predictor of biological diversity and ecosystem health.

***

Given the decades-long effort by chemical companies to market their products as safe and the clear evidence this is not the case, it’s important to grow a mass movement that questions the use of chemicals.

Locals, including Orion, members of the Stop Aerial Spraying Coalition, and the beekeeper I spoke with want TNC and other conservation groups to change their approach to eliminate chemical use, and appreciate TNC’s experimentation with prescribed fire, which may reduce or eliminate the need for chemicals. Prescribed burning is a traditional practice among many Indigenous communities. Other chemical-free practices that can reduce undesirable species and increase biodiversity include targeted grazing, reintroduction of extirpated species, hand removal, and beneficial harvesting.

These approaches aren’t as fast as poison, but they can be sustainable.

The Nature Conservancy does some good work. So do many nonprofits, especially the smaller, grassroots organizations. However, cases like this illustrate why lasting environmental victories aren’t likely to emerge from large environmental NGOs or from corporate collaboration. TNC’s refusal to engage in political struggle over pressing issues such as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, let alone global climate change and major threats to the planet, show the limitations of these groups. Their defensive work to protect a given species or area is important, but this “whack-a-mole” method cannot proactively address the global issues we face.

The perils of collaboration with corporations can be seen throughout the environmental movement, not just in this case. Corporations and wealthy individuals have long recognized the existential threat posed by a radical environmental movement. When you question the destruction of one mountain or meadow or forest, it isn’t long until you question capitalism and industrialism too. Thus, they direct their funding to mainstream environmental groups, which present technological and policy change as the solution. I’ve called this a “pressure relief valve” for popular discontent. Others have labeled it one half of the “twin tactics of control: reform and repression.

We must be wary of foundation funded and large NGOs. Nonprofits that are reliant on outside funding always must speak to the lowest common denominator: the funders. They must avoid offending these individuals and groups, and must supply deliverables to meet grant requirements. This focus on short term bullet-points relegates broader visioning to the fringes, and results in institutions and organizations with a systemic inability to think big or lead revolutionary change.

Despite the massive nonprofit industrial complex, every indicator of ecological health is heading in the wrong direction. I have always advocated both reform and revolution. But in today’s world, there is no shortage of tepid, chemical-soaked reform. To turn this around, we will need fundamental changes in the economic system and the structure of society, changes that can only be driven by revolutionary action and long-term radical organizing — not chemical collusion and compromise.