by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 26, 2013 | Human Supremacy, Male Supremacy, White Supremacy
By Kourtney Mitchell / Deep Green Resistance
Over the almost seven years I have been involved in social justice activism of various kinds, my level of understanding concerning our social and planetary predicament has grown quite a bit. I began my process towards a radical perspective as a student activist in the university anti-violence against women movement. It was there I developed what I like to call a clear “scope of the problem.
Allow me to back up a bit. I did not know it at the time, but while I was in high school my family survived a rough experience fighting the local police department that helped prime me for radical activism. My mother, while an officer, filed a civil suit against the department for racial discrimination. The ordeal was traumatizing – the media was relentless in their assaults on her character, the department engaged in continuous harassment of my family (including forcibly evicting us from our home on my 16th birthday), all of this culminating in several relocations in- and out-of-state. If it were not for the consistent support of family, friends, legal counsel and a compassionate and talented journalist who had our back, the city and its armed thugs would have certainly continued its oppression against us. Instead, my mother’s case was a primary reason the city organized a citizen’s review board to oversee law enforcement activities. My mother and I went on to write and publish a creative nonfiction book of her experience.
To this day, I am consistently amazed at my mother’s strength and courage. I witnessed her defy all odds, determined to stand up to the city’s bullying and set a lasting precedent for future generations.
As a teen I was not inclined towards activism, but that all changed when I attended college and somehow found myself sitting in the social justice center talking pro-feminist theory with fellow campus community members. I completed feminist and anti-violence training and that is when the real change began.
The information I learned was harrowing. I had no idea just how prevalent male violence against women was. Shaken to the core, I spent several nights in tears, struggling to understand just how the world became this way and how it could possibly continue. From the first night of training, I knew pro-feminism would be my life’s work. It became my passion.
Further social justice training on issues of race and class began to complete the circle for me. My own life experiences started to make much more sense, and I became sensitive to issues of justice and equality.
Then it was time for another wake-up call. I do not remember exactly how I discovered radical politics, but eventually I came upon Marxist theory, which then lead me to anarchism and eventually anti-civilization. I began reading Derrick Jensen’s Endgame in the fall of 2008, and all of the emotions I felt when completing activist training came rushing back to the fore.
It was all even worse than I had thought – the levels of violence against women, people of color, indigenous communities, children and now the planet. We are, in the words of Lierre Keith, “turning the planet to dust” with agricultural and extractive industrial processes. Quite literally, the planet is being killed, and that murder is increasing over time.
And that is when it all finally clicked, once and for all. It took me nearly three years to finally complete Endgame. Jensen does not hold back – his writing makes the violence of this culture so palpable. In addition to pro-feminism, I decided to somehow find a way to assist in the fight against industrial civilization, just in time for the publication of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.
A good definition of “scope” is “extent or range of view.” It is how far or wide one is able to see, how much of a given subject, problem or circumstance one has considered. A narrow scope yields superficial or inadequate results in addressing a given situation. A wide scope allows one to consider more possibilities, and be more honest about what needs to be done.
My life experiences have given me no choice but to keep a wide scope of our planet’s peril. I have been fortunate – and unfortunate – enough to have, directly or indirectly, experienced many of this culture’s truly wicked crimes against humanity.
An aspect of widening your scope that is important to consider is that when you do, it is likely you will never be the same. Society will transform before your eyes – what was once a world seemingly full of pleasure and privilege becomes one in which oppression, repression and psychopathic behavior are the norm, the way the system works.
But when you do widen your scope, and finally become honest about what is happening, you have a responsibility to act. And you must allow the reality of the situation to inform your actions.
Jensen, Ward Churchill, Peter Gelderloos, Arundhati Roy, Stephanie McMillan, and so many others have all articulated it in various ways – the dominant culture will not voluntarily transition to a more sustainable way of life unless we force them. Even if it were possible, it is unlikely to occur within a timeframe adequate enough to save the planet from destruction.
Consider this: there is a chance that this planet is the only source of life of its kind in the entire universe. Whatever your belief, this is a possibility, and industrial civilization is destroying potentially the only source of life.
One would be hard-pressed to find a greater evil than that. If you ever wanted to determine a set of objective moral truths to follow and carve them onto a couple stone tablets, this is a good start: destroying all life on earth is evil and immoral and it must be prevented by whatever means necessary.
We are facing a global temperature increase between five and eleven degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Keep in mind that just a few degrees increase is more than enough to wipe out the vast majority of diverse species on the planet.
Last year, 313 black men were killed by police or other vigilantes, an average of one every 28 hours.
Men battering women is the most common crime in the world; a man beats a woman once every fifteen seconds. And at least one-third of all women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.
We must begin to see the world through the lens of justice, and our scope must extend to all of life. There are some very serious yet important questions that need to be answered, and very soon: What do we value – life or luxury? If the dominant culture is incapable of changing on its own, are we prepared to force it to change? And what will it take to do so?
There is no use in hiding behind our privileges, comforts and perceived inadequacies any longer. Oppressed communities have been on the front lines fighting back against genocide of mind and body since the onset of this culture, but now everyone and everything is at risk. Even the privileged elite – sadistic in their callous disregard for the welfare of others, stopping at nothing to extract every ounce of resources from whoever they can – will have to pay for their actions. And that payment will be made in blood.
So what scope are you using? Are you waiting for a mass shift in collective consciousness, ascension into a higher spiritual plane of existence? If so, please tell me: who all is included in this ascension? Will the psychopaths destroying the planet be going as well? Seriously, you can have them. Take them with you. I love this beautiful planet and I’m staying here to fight for it.
Get serious about the situation we are in. Take a step back, look at the world for what it really is, swallow that lump in your throat, and join us. Let the emotions wash over you – allow yourself to fully feel them. Get acquainted with that despair and heartbreak, and then do what is necessary to make sure future generations do not also have to feel it.
Everything we do needs to be done mindful of its effect on several generations ahead. This culture is so short-sighted; in less than one percent of our existence on this planet, we’ve decimated land, animal, water and air. There is a hole in the ozone layer, and acid in the rain, and the very soil upon which we depend is either blowing away in the wind or running off into the seas and oceans.
Such is the result of limiting our scope to the next quarter, or the next fiscal year. It is a suicidal tendency. Let’s rediscover our sanity. Communion with each other, with Earth, and with its entire community of life – this reconnection will help us reverse this murderous trajectory. We don’t have much choice, anyway. So widen your scope and fight.
We have a planet to save.
Let’s Get Free! is a monthly column by Kourtney Mitchell, a writer and activist from Georgia, primarily focusing on anti-oppression and building genuine alliance with oppressed communities. Contact him at kourtney.mitchell@gmail.com.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 10, 2013 | Climate Change, Mining & Drilling
By Joshua Headley / Deep Green Resistance New York
If you’ve been a sentient being for the last few months, you’ve probably been watching some of the most curious weather events happening throughout the world.
Of particular concern for many scientists has been the Arctic sea ices melt, which dropped to its lowest level on record last summer. In the first few months of this year, large cracks were witnessed in the sea ice, indicating a great possibility that it has entered a death spiral and will disappear completely in the summer months within the next two years.
The rapid melt (and eventual disappearance) of the ice is having drastic affects on the jet stream in the northern hemisphere, creating powerful storms and extreme weather events, largely outside the comprehension of many scientists.
Jeff Masters, meteorology director at the private service Weather Underground states: “I’ve been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three yeas has done stuff I’ve never seen. […] The fact that the jet stream is unusual could be an indicator of something. I’m not saying we know what it is.”
For example, in May there were wildfires caused by excessive heat in California while at the same time there was more than a foot of snow in Minnesota. Spring in Colorado started with early wildfires and was subsequently followed by massive flooding. Massive floods have been devastating much of the northern hemisphere this spring, including Canada, the United States, Europe, India, and Russia.
Last week, Alaska saw its hottest days on record where the town of McGrath, Alaska hit 94 F degrees while just a few weeks earlier the local temperature was 15 F degrees. There have also been extreme heat waves throughout the southwest United States, some temperatures above 130 F degrees, also resulting in wildfires that spread to more than 6,000 acres in two days and killed 19 firefighters in Arizona.
Today, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at 400 ppm – a level not seen on this planet since the Pliocene epoch, nearly 3 to 5 million years ago when the average global temperature of the planet was 2-3 C degrees warmer than today. The International Energy Agency has recently warned that the planet is on track for 3.6 to 5.3 C degrees warming.
This is catastrophic – most scientists have recognized any significant rise above 1 C will usher in irreversible changes that will threaten nearly all biological life on this planet.
Carbon dioxide has an approximate thirty-year time lag between its release into the atmosphere and its corresponding affect on average global temperature. Even if we stop all emissions today – keeping it at 400 ppm – we still have nearly thirty years of warming and climatic changes to undergo.
And right now, nothing that we are currently observing matches up with any of the models that we have – a stark acknowledgment that this historical moment we find ourselves in exists largely beyond our ability to comprehend it let alone predict its movement.
We are in uncharted territory – we are facing challenges never before experienced in the history of the human species. This presents a grave problem: if the best science we have today cannot accurately offer any model predictions for the path that we are currently on, how can we effectively plan for the future?
The honest truth: we can’t. We cannot effectively plan for a future that is beyond all known human experience.
The best that we can do now is stop exacerbating the problem – stop contributing to the rapidly accelerating decline and destruction of the Earth’s biosphere and ecosystems.
Quite literally: we have to completely dismantle the industrial economy, we have to do it soon, and really, we should have done it yesterday.
But even still, grinding industrial civilization to a complete halt today is only guaranteed to mitigate the pace at which we’re running – it is not yet clear that it will ultimately alter our direction. We have, at minimum, thirty more years of incomprehensible climate disruptions and changes to undergo no matter what happens today or tomorrow. Our only chance to still have a thriving and living planet following the coming decades is by making a complete, radical and rapid shift from the industrial economy.
The logic of industrial civilization and capitalism is immediacy – grow as quickly as possible, generate maximum profits in the shortest time, and deal with consequences and crises later (if at all). Long-term planning and strategizing is antithetical to, and bears no consequence on, the drive for capital accumulation, expansion, and domination.
This process, within the last 30-40 years alone, has resulted in such an expansive project of urbanization around the world that capitalism has triumphed over (read: conquered, murdered, and erased) all other ways of existing on this planet, human and non-human. We now live in a truly global industrial civilization – a monoculture of unprecedented scope; a totality of being and of tyranny.
To oppose this project of endless growth and centralization of control, we need to enter into the logic of a truly oppositional culture – a fundamental and radical break from of our entire material reality. This entails a complete negation of our current standard of living and entire way of being in the world. Anything short of this negation will only exacerbate the problem.
Acknowledging this does not mean that the task at hand is easy or that a majority of people will accept it as truth. In fact, even amidst collapse, most people will not resist the status quo and are likely to fight to the death to protect it.
As Derrick Jensen has stated:
If your experience is that your water comes from the tap and that your food comes from the grocery store then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on that; if your experience is that your water comes from a river and that your food comes from a land base then you will defend those to the death because your life depends on them. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it’s very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.
But this also does not mean that the task at hand is any less true. It does mean, however, that if we wish to build our struggle for a truly just and sustainable future we must first do away with our delusions, re-focus our strategies to the most effective, and be radically uncompromising in our vision.
On June 25th, Barack Obama – a president whom, despite his rhetoric of care, spent all of the last five years of his presidency completely ignoring climate change – finally addressed the nation in a speech that was supposed to signal a “serious plan forward.”
Many “environmental” groups along with the mainstream media heralded the speech as being progressive and a great commitment to the crisis at hand. In reality, much of the speech was full of nothing more than the doublespeak typical of his presidential legacy.
In a move that many considered to be a “big victory,” the president merely stated that he will ask the State Department not to approve the final construction of the Keystone XL pipeline unless it can first determine that it “will not lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions.”
This is certainly a sly trick designed to pacify a building resistance, an attempt to re-frame the debate and make it appear as if our best interests are dutifully being considered. However, to even pretend that it is at all possible that this pipeline would not lead to a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions is delusional.
While the fight against the KXL has been a fight against a pipeline, it is predominantly being waged as a fight against tar sands oil production entirely. It is incredibly easy to argue that one specific pipeline will not result in significant GHG emissions if we isolate it from the very process that demands its existence in the first place.
It is the extraction process itself that is the net greenhouse gas emitter destroying the planet – not merely the nodes at which its product is transported and consumed. Although this infrastructure should be equally opposed and dismantled, stopping one pipeline being built will only mean that others will replace it or other means will be developed to export its goods.
We should settle for nothing less than a complete end to all extraction processes. It is not even close to a victory until that happens.
Despite his attempt to appease environmentalists with this speech, there were some activist groups that were rightfully confused and enraged with his hypocritical stance. In a speech meant to signal commitment to slow climate change, President Obama continued to praise and support the fossil fuel industry and hydraulic fracturing for natural gas.
Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism, examines the rhetoric and reality of this latest speech, providing a great reminder of whose interests this president actually serves – those of the ruling class. He also outlines some new ideas for Obama’s consideration:
- If you’re serious about stopping global warming, you need to veto KXL.
- If you’re serious about moving away from dirty energy, then there needs to be a strict timeline established for the complete phasing-out of all coal and nuclear plants by 2030 and their replacement, not with natural gas or nuclear, but with wind and solar power.
- If you’re really serious about carbon pollution, you can’t with any honesty discuss solutions without making massive cuts in military spending. The Department of Defense is responsible for 80 percent of the U.S. government’s energy consumption, and the U.S. military is by far the biggest polluter on the planet. Radical reductions in spending on the Pentagon are essential for human survival.
- You made no mention of the need for enormous investment in and expansion of public transit. If you’re serious about addressing climate change and making our cities more livable and the air more breathable, you will take the money you just saved by cutting military expenditures and apply it to the construction of new rail, light rail, tram and bus service, between and within cities, obviating the need for cars.
These ideas are some of the more prevalent solutions that are often tossed around in environmental and social justice circles. While the intention may be sincere, simply advocating for a shift from “dirty energy” (coal, oil, nuclear) to “clean energy” (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, etc.) does a great disservice for generating informed decision-making at such a critical historical moment.
While these energies have many flaws, one of the greatest problems with their proponents is that they do not fundamentally put into question our standard of living or way of being in the world.
An often-cited study by these proponents is the work of Mark Z. Jacobson who, mere weeks after Hurricane Sandy devastated the Northeast U.S., presented the economic argument for investing in renewable energies. His plan calls for a complete shift off fossil fuels and towards a rapid investment in wind and solar power for the entire state of New York by the year 2030.
Not only was this study completed on the premise that our culture does not dramatically change its standard of living, the study fails to even acknowledge the resources required to build these new energy infrastructures.
These energy sources are not free from fossil fuels and are dependent on rare earth metals and minerals; this sort of rapid technological and social shift will require massive extractive processes – a price we simply cannot afford if we wish to stop the destruction of this planet.
If we wish to create a “sustainable” future that is also just, a question that should be immediately asked is: Where are these resources coming from? From whose land will we steal from in order to build this renewable-energy utopia? Despite the fact that New York State ranks in or near the top third of U.S. mineral production, none of the crucial metals and minerals currently used for the development of solar panels and wind turbines can be found here – we will have to steal these resources from some other land base.
Even more problematic, Jacobson’s study does not entirely take into consideration (to the extent that it is possible) the severe climatic disruptions we are unavoidably set to experience in the coming decades. The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice in the next few years will result in rising sea levels that could displace more than 400 million people globally. Is it worth the investment for an entirely new energy infrastructure that may ultimately be irrelevant by the time it can be actualized?
To continue to advocate for these “solutions,” is to continue living in the delusion that we can have our current standard of living and have a planet too. As Robert Jensen articulates in his article, “Get Apocalyptic: Why Radical is the New Normal“:
…Toughest to dislodge may be the central illusion of the industrial world’s extractive economy: that we can maintain indefinitely a large-scale human presence on the earth at something like current First-World levels of consumption. The task for those with critical sensibilities is not just to resist oppressive social norms and illegitimate authority, but to speak a simple truth that almost no one wants to acknowledge: The high-energy/high-technology life of affluent societies is a dead end. We can’t predict with precision how resource competition and ecological degradation will play out in the coming decades, but it is ecocidal to treat the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.
We cannot know for sure what time the party will end, but the party’s over.
Our primary goal and vision for the world is a living planet. Nothing else matters. The biggest challenge to that goal is the industrial economy and it’s a moving target. If we have any chance at stopping it we cannot have a strategy that is focused solely on the injustices of today. Our actions and strategies should be based on where we’re heading – and where we’re heading is nothing short of near-term extinction.
This is not hyperbole or metaphor. 200 species went extinct today and another 200 species will go extinct tomorrow. 400,000 people die every year from climate-related deaths. A war has been declared against the living the world and we ought to start articulating which side we’re on, and we ought to seriously start fighting back.
I’m reminded of a recent quote from MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta), a militant group successful at halting more than 28% of Nigeria’s oil output between 2006 and 2009, which articulates the situation succinctly:
From today, every tanker vehicle we find distributing petroleum products including propane gas has become a legitimate target in our war against injustice, corruption, despotism and oppression.
This is the kind of vigor we need to be generating in our own movement. Never before have the lines between those who seek to destroy this planet and those who seek a radically different future, been so clearly drawn and defined. Yet, there is a degree of hesitancy within the majority of activist circles in the West that is painstakingly paralyzing our movements from reaching its goals.
If we stand in solidarity with all the human and non-human lives that have been lost, or are routinely brutalized to this way of life, we must fundamentally reject our own standards of living and ideals about how to enter into relationship with each other and with the land. Knowing that we have now entered a historical moment of incomprehensible climatic disruptions and changes for the foreseeable future, we’d be better to do away with our delusions sooner rather than later.
BREAKDOWN is a biweekly column by Joshua Headley, a writer and activist in New York City, exploring the intricacies of collapse and the inadequacy of prevalent ideologies, strategies, and solutions to the problems of industrial civilization.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 5, 2013 | ANALYSIS, Strategy & Analysis
Industrial civilization is killing the planet. It is, by its very nature, entirely dependent upon tearing & rending apart the fabric of the living world for the raw materials which sustain industrial society. As civilization fells ever more forests, blows apart ever more mountains, dams ever more rivers, vacuums ever more fisheries, drains ever more wetlands, plows ever more prairies, and replaces ever more of the natural world with concrete and fields growing food for solely human use, the bloody hands of empire must reach ever further afield to grasp for new pockets of wilderness to seize.
As industrial society becomes more and more globalized, so too does industrial destruction. Wild places that may once have been too remote to access find the crushing weight of civilization brought to bear upon them.
While the reach and presence of this way of life accelerate around the planet, the privileges and material prosperities afforded by its war against life remain the property of a small minority at the center of empire. It is to this center that the overwhelming portions of planetary plunder flow. It’s coded into the way empires—and civilizations—operate. The center of power conquers outlying lands, colonizing them and forcefully extracting resources, which flow back to feed the bloated power base.
The pattern is the same, whether we’re talking about cities extracting food via agriculture from the surrounding lands or the global economy extracting oil, steel, wood, etc. from the Global South. It is the same dynamic of empire—of colonies and conquerors. We may rationalize the pattern through complex social and economic theory, but it doesn’t change the underlying relationship of exploiter and exploited.
Central to the smooth function of this way of life are the logistics and transportation necessary to physically transport those materials from the site of extraction to the center of empire. The global economy is incredibly complex, so much so that how exactly it operates in the physical world may seem inexplicable, and only comprehensible in the abstract. But despite this, there are very specific infrastructures—foundations of support—that are fundamental to its function. The infrastructure of globalized transportation and logistics is among these; without them, the precarious balance of industrial society would collapse.
In the incessant drive towards ever-greater efficiency—the drive to expand “economic production” (read the conversion of living landbases into private wealth) beyond any limitations—the industrial economy is becoming ever more dependent upon fast-paced transportation and logistics. It’s why most grocery stores only have a 72 hour supply of food in-store. By reducing inventory capacity and relying upon “Just-in-Time” transportation systems, industrialism has accelerated its pace, but at the expense of its stability.
For those who understand the destruction and horror that is this way of life—those who understand that it must be stopped and dismantled at any cost—the centrality and fragility of the systems responsible for the transportation of resources & goods presents a strategic target for disruption and sabotage.
Fortunately, these transportation networks are large and poorly defended. A paper recently released by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, written by Douglas Bland, cited the criticality and vulnerability of Canada’s rail transport infrastructure as weaknesses which could be exploited to cripple the entire Canadian economy. The report talks specifically about the potential of an “aboriginal uprising” in Canada and how such a mobilization could impact the industrial economy of the nation:
In the event of an insurgency, the Canadian economy could be shut down in weeks. The 2012 CP Rail strike cost an estimated $540-million a week, as it hit industries including coal, grain, potash, nickel, lumber and autos. Some First Nations leaders like Terry Nelson in Manitoba have already concluded that a covert operation involving burning cars on every railway line would be impossible to stop.
This vulnerability in the structure of modern civilization is present outside of Canada; indeed, it is characteristic of the global economy. These transportation and logistical networks—those that connect and maintain the flow between the different nodes of industrial production—are fragile, sprawling, and poorly guarded. And they’re very vulnerable to sabotage.
As just one recent example, some anonymous folks sabotaged rail lines in Central Oregon in celebration of May Day a month ago. In their own words,
Late at night on May Day we sabotaged a rail line in Central Oregon to interrupt the flow of commodities. Capital depends more than ever on the metropolis, the constant flow of commodities, services, capital, information, and any interruption of that flow is a small victory… This action was quick and easy. Using copper wire with the ends stripped, we wrapped both ends of wire around the rail and buried the middle section. This sends a false signal that there is a train on the tracks, delaying any other movement until the blockage is cleared.
Like many forms of sabotage, it doesn’t take much, as the communique issued by those behind this particular action so kindly describes.
Of course, while we understand that disrupting a single rail line on a single night will have little to no measurable impact on the masticating gears of industrialism, such sustained actions—as described by Bland’s paper—could translate into effective systems disruption. With the whole of the globalized economy so dependent upon such a precarious & precisely balanced transportation infrastructure, the impacts of such a campaign of sabotage could have massive and far reaching effects.
This way of life cannot last. It remains steady and standing only through actively destroying and consuming the fabric of the living world. The movement of materials—the blood soaked corpses of its victims—through the industrial system is central to this. To stop that movement is to stop the machine. While it may not be the first course of action many would turn to, and while it may make some uncomfortable, sustained and coordinated sabotage against the industrial transport infrastructure presents a strategic way to disrupt and halt the monstrous activity of industrial civilization.
Civilization is not static; it is a holocaust in motion. As we all know, an object in motion stays in motion, unless acted upon by an outside force. It’s long past time to apply that force.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
Photo by American Public Power Association on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 15, 2013 | People of Color & Anti-racism, Repression at Home
It’s often said that where there is oppression and brutalization, there is resistance; that resistance is fertile, and that it inevitably takes root in the cracks between the building blocks of exploitation and injustice. Even as industrial civilization drives indigenous peoples from their homelands and destroys what little remains of the living world, there is resistance. Even as men abuse and violate women, there is resistance. Even as whites oppress and exploit people of color, there is resistance. We continue to find determined resistance in the places we would think it least likely to survive in.
But there is another truth, a corollary to the undeniable will of resistance; where there is resistance, there is repression. Whenever and wherever people fight back, those in power—those higher on the social hierarchy—go to whatever lengths they deem necessary to protect their power and privilege. If resistance is inevitable, so is repression. Those of us determined to see justice need to be prepared for it, and use it to our advantage as much as possible.
This is becoming all the more immediately relevant as resistance against industrial extraction begins to enter a new phase of confrontation and action against those who would dismember the planet for profit. Across North America (and around the world), activists are increasingly turning to nonviolent direction action, having tired of the failures of legislative & administrative strategies. While this certainly represents a step in the right direction—that of physically confronting and stopping atrocity—it is also beginning to shed light on the way that power operates, and the means it will use to prevent dissent and resistance.
You may have heard about the anti-forest defense bills which are currently on the table in the Oregon State legislature. House Bill 2595 makes it a mandatory misdemeanor for the first charge of disrupting government forest practices, and a mandatory felony and minimum 13 months imprisonment for a second offense. House Bill 2596 essentially makes it easier for private entities to file suit against forest defenders. The laws come in response to direct action protests—including sit-ins, tree-sits, and blockades—by forest defense groups, including Cascadia Forest Defenders and Cascadia Earth First!, which stymied attempts to log the Elliot State Forest. Both bills have already been passed in the House and are now moving onto the senate.
Obviously, these bills are a blatant attempt to intimidate those who would act to defend the forests they love. It’s telling as well that the phrase “eco-terrorism” has been central in dialogue around the bill; labeling peaceful protesters using nonviolent tactics as “terrorists” is clearly an attempt to justify their political repression.
This sort of rhetoric and political repression extends far beyond the battle for forests in the Pacific Northwest. In Oklahoma and Texas, TransCanada—the corporation behind the Keystone XL pipeline—has filed lawsuits against individuals and organizations to stop them protesting and using nonviolent direct action to stop construction of the pipeline. It’s a blatant attempt to stamp out any interference or meaningful opposition to the pipeline.
In Canada, state security forces—including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service—have begun viewing and approaching nonviolent protests, especially against the oil and gas industries, as “forms of attack” and “national security threats”.
Of course, this isn’t by any means a new or recent phenomenon, nor are these repressive measures outstandingly horrific. Take for example, the Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) conducted by the FBI against indigenous, Black, Chicano, and other radical movements in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, which aimed to discredit, disrupt and destroy those social movements and political organizations. COINTELPRO used infiltration, psychological warfare, legal harassment, and illegal state violence (among other tactics) to tear apart movements and render them ineffective.
While it certainly succeeded in its diabolical mission in many regards, COINTELPRO and other forms of intense repression were a key factor and motivation in driving many revolutionaries into underground and militant action and organizations. As Akinyele Omowale Umoja argues in his study Repression Breeds Resistance, when aboveground factions of the Black liberation movement came under increasingly heavy political repression, they turned to underground militancy to more effectively carry on the struggle. In his words, “Due to the intense repression against the BPP [Black Panther Party] and the Black liberation movement, it was necessary to go underground and resist from clandestinity.”
The potential of repression to fuel the formation and growth of underground resistance is also a trend to which Robert Taber speaks, in his 1965 study of guerrilla warfare, War of the Flea. In his survey of different guerrilla movements, Taber identified several prerequisite conditions that must be met for militant guerrilla struggle to be effective, among them the presence of “an oppressive government, with which no political compromise is possible.”
Political repression is a terrible thing; it has destroyed countless lives, families, communities, and movements, and continues to do so today. It is of course undeniable that repression hurts movements—and usually aims to destroy them, but it is also true that it can push them into new and much needed directions. One unintended effect of measures such as the Oregon House bills or TransCanada’s lawsuits may be to bolster support for and acceptance of militant & underground resistance. Certainly, we should not be surprised if this is the case, and rather than lament the means to which people resort in defense of the land, we should celebrate such action.
It should be clear that when nonviolent and aboveground means of fighting for justice & sustainability are criminalized, those who would otherwise limit themselves to legal means are motivated to take up more militant forms of action. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that political repression is going to get worse, the reins on acceptable political action continuously tightened, and the list of legally allowed responses to atrocity to be constantly shrinking. But this may very well (and very likely, if history is anything to go by) encourage and facilitate more serious and determined militant and underground action.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 1, 2013 | Lobbying, Mining & Drilling, Property & Material Destruction, Strategy & Analysis
Mining is one of the most viscerally destructive and horrific ways in which the dominant culture—industrial civilization—enacts its violence on the living world. As entirely and unequivocally destructive as this society is, few other industrial activities are as horrifically confronting as mining. Whole landscapes are cleared of life as communities—most often indigenous or poor—are forced from their homes. Mountains level to piles of barren rubble which leach countless poisons, scouring life from whole watersheds. Pits of unimaginable size are carved from the bones of the earth, leaving moonscapes in their wake.
Besides the immediate damage to the land at the site of operations, the destruction extends through the uses its products are put to. In this way, mining is crucial to the continued function of industrial civilization, supplying many of the raw materials that form the material fabric of industrial society. Steel, aluminum, copper, coal, tar sands bitumen, cement; the materials extracted through mining are central components of industrial civilization in an immediate and physical way. They are the building blocks of this society.
Fortunately, as is the way of things, where there is atrocity and brutalization, there is resistance. There has been a lot of militant anti-mining action happening recently; in the last few months alone there have been several inspiring incidents of people taking direct militant action against mining projects and infrastructure.
In February, several dozen masked militants raided the Hellas gold mine in Halkidiki, Greece. They firebombed machinery, vehicles, and offices at the site. The attack followed several years of legal challenges and public demonstrations—none of which succeeded in stopping the mine, which will destroy forests, poison groundwater, and release air pollutants including lead, mercury and arsenic.
When local residents tried to stop the mine through the courts the government ruled against them, claiming that the mine would create jobs. As the Deputy Minister of Energy and Environment Asimakis Papageorgiou said, “We can no longer accept this [area] being left unexploited or barely exploited.”
Statements like these on the part of those in power, while not necessarily surprising, help to make clear the reality we face; the dominant culture requires the rending of the living world into dead commodities. It can’t be persuaded to change, no matter how compassionate and compelling the appeals we make. It can only be forced to change.
More recently, the Powharnal coal mine in Scotland was attacked at the beginning of April. An anonymous communique was released via Indymedia Scotland:
At some point over the past weekend multiple items of plant machinery at an extension to the Powharnal open cast coal site in East Ayrshire were put beyond working use. High value targets including a prime mover and bulldozer were also targeted to cause maximum disruption to workings at the mine.
Scottish Coal is falling and not only do we intend to make sure that they go down – but that they stay down too.
This action presents yet another hopeful example of militant action targeting extractive projects. This was not a symbolic act of property destruction, but rather one aimed at materially disrupting and stopping destructive activity. More so, the actionist(s) specifically targeted key equipment and infrastructure at the site to maximize the impact of their actions, making good use of effective systems disruption.
A third example comes from Peru, where in mid-April several hundred protestors stormed the Minas Conga gold & copper mine, occupying the site for a short while and burning equipment. Besides the immediate damage done by the arson, the action forced the operating company, Minera Yanacocha, to evacuate personnel and equipment, further disrupting their operations.
This latest protest in April is the latest in a continuous and diverse tapestry of resistance to the Minas Conga mine. Such direct and militant protests and actions last year forced Yanacocha to put most of the mining project on hold, and the strong unyielding opposition has Newmont Mining Corporation (which owns Yanacocha) considering pulling out of the project altogether. This is yet another example of how effective militant action can be in stopping mining and other extractive projects.
Of course there are plenty of aboveground and nonviolent efforts being made to oppose mining projects happening as well, and this isn’t meant to detract from or dismiss their efforts. But the dominant culture needs access to the raw materials that feed the global economy, and in the end it will secure those resources by force, refusing to hear “no!”
Again, this isn’t to say that nonviolent efforts are by any means doomed to failure each and every time we employ them. It is to acknowledge that the entire existence and operation of industrial civilization requires continued access to “raw materials” (otherwise known as natural living communities), and that the courts, regulatory systems, and laws have all been designed to preserve that arrangement. We may win occasional victories here and there, but like a casino, they—the House, the capitalists, the miners, the extractors, etc.— will always come out ahead in the end.
When aboveground & legal efforts to stop mining and other extraction projects fail, as they so often and reliably do, those determined to protect the lands and communities that are their homes turn to other means.
Attacking and destroying the mining infrastructures themselves—the physical machines that are the immediate and direct weapons used to tear up biomes—forces a halt to extraction with an unmatched directness and immediacy. Beyond mining itself, the strategic efficacy of targeting infrastructure—as the foundational supports of any system—has been proven time and again by militaries and resistance movements around the world.
Of course, attacks targeting mines alone will likely never be enough to stop such harmful and destructive processes altogether. That can only happen by dismantling industrial civilization itself. And like anti-mining resistance, bringing down civilization will require underground action— the targeting of key nodes of critical industrial systems through coordinated sabotage.
That will require building a serious and capable resistance movement, one that is unafraid to name the situation before us—the stakes, the urgency, and the strategic reality—and to confront power. It means building a movement that can navigate around the traps and misdirection historically used to disrupt and disable movements. It means building a movement that is willing and able to defend the living Earth by any means necessary. Toward this end, members of DGR will be traveling the Northeast U.S. & Southeast Canada this summer for the Resistance Rewritten Tour, to talk about what that movement will mean and look like.
As civilization continues its incessant death march around the world— tearing apart and destroying ever more of the living world, ever more human and extra-human communities— resistance against it must of necessity become more militant. With so much at stake, those resisters in Greece, Scotland, Peru and elsewhere using militant attacks on industrial infrastructure to defend their lands and communities deserve our undying support. Those of us who value life and justice should not condemn them, but celebrate them— for theirs is precisely the type of action that will be required to stop the murder of the living world.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
