In November 2019, DGR UK hosted an event in London titled By Any Means Necessary? Diversity of Tactics in the Fight for Life on Earth. The event featured a panel discussion between four long-time environmental and social activists: Lierre Keith, radical feminist activist and writer, co-author of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet; Simon Be, activist and co-founder of Extinction Rebellionl; Shahidah Janjua, feminist activist, writer and campaigner; and Nikki Clarke, anti-nuclear and anti-fracking activist, co-founder of South West Against Nuclear.
A video of the event is embedded here. Below the video, you can read the written text of the presentation by Shahidah Janjua:
by Shahidah Janjua
I see patriarchy as the overarching system of oppression over all sentient and non-sentient existence on the planet. In every instance any word you can come up with to describe the violence done to women, you can also apply to what is done to the environment, to the planet. The planet is a ‘she’, so you can do what you like to her. ‘Civilisation’ is the name given to a patriarchal, hierarchical and violent system of oppression. It rests on the idea of superiority. It also implies an opposite, ‘uncivilised’. Civilisation divides us on the basis of gender, sexuality, colour, ability, class. The most civilised are male, white, heterosexual, able bodied, and usually rich. The greatest challenge for us all is to become uncivilised. To become idigenised. To become one with our environment and with each other. By which I mean that our knowing, our being, our doing and relating is brought into every aspect of the communities we build. It means building harmonious, respectful, equal and just communities. It involves helping each other to undo the lies Patriarchy has told us. Our languages are filled with falsehoods and reversals.
I learned a great deal from Andrea Dworkin, radical Feminist activist and writer. She saved my life. She named the violence and oppression, male supremacy. She named my constant fear, my hyper vigilance. She broke down the barriers between women. She broke down barriers between women and men. Male violence is not genetic, inherent or inevitable, it is a product of a woman hating society. Misogyny is a blueprint for how power works.
We need a movement which honours everyone, every living entity, a movement which honours women, which acts upon violence done to all humans, to everything. We need a movement which doesn’t tell women to wait our turn, because there are other more pressing concerns. In that waiting too many of us are raped, murdered, disappeared, made slaves, prostituted and dehumanised. This is why women have not made alliances with men, because men have habitually put us last. For there to be a movement of all peoples, men need to look at what ‘civilisation’ has done to you. It has denied you your humanity in every conceivable way, got you to prop up its system of control, violence and oppression. It has terrorised women and made us complicit. We need to dig deep to unlearn these ideas and behaviours.
Mental health is a huge issue for people today. Here we are trying our best to live what are essentially a lot of lies. Is it any wonder we are driven to distraction. Relationships are atomised by patriarchy. The capitalist, patriarchal plan, promotes individualism, keeps us separate from each other, does away with community. Patriarchy makes it very hard for us to name our experiences and make connections with others. It fragments us down to a cellular level. Science, beaks us down, takes each piece of us and creates a specialism out of it. I take a drug to kill lung infection and it destroys my liver. One area of research is severed from another. Big pharma make money out of our illnesses, many of which are caused by them and by other corporations, who pollute and poison us, our environments, our planet.
There is nothing left untouched by patriarchal misnaming and patriarchal violence. Cruelty is manufactured and released into the unsuspecting minds of boys, the men of tomorrow, who have sensitivity, and curiosity. Boys go into porn sites for information on human bodies and sex. They are confronted with images of their future selves as torturers and murderers of women. The women in the pictures, in the videos are real women. Lately boys are shown that choking and strangling are the manly things to do to women, orgasm is their reward. Callous and careless about a being that closely resembles himself, how will a boy respond to any living creature that does not resemble him; the animals, the earth, the forests, the rivers? How will he care about the planet.
Robin Morgan says, and I paraphrase, ‘If I had to name one genius of patriarchy it would be compartmentalisation’. ‘Intellect severed from emotion…. The earth itself divided.
How did we get to this point? We have had little or no history of our own to refer to. We’ve dug out what we can, but we haven’t heard or read it in any systematic, ongoing way. The oppressor writes history. The message patriarchy gives us is that this system, of cruelty, violence, greed, war, money, has always existed, it is natural, it is unchangeable. This is precisely why it disappears or destroys our histories. They would expose the patriarchal lies
I thought democracy meant I had a say in the way society was run, that it was about people making decisions about how we live, that the people we vote for have our interests at heart, our need for shelter, warmth, food, medicine, education. Where everyone is a valued member of the community, cared for and respected. This too is a deeply ingrained patriarchal lie. Democracy was conceived in Greece by people who owned women and slaves. Historically numbers of people have been denied voting rights, because they were the wrong sex, the wrong colour, in prison, without property. Today there are millions of people who are disenfranchised. Voting is a way of co-opting us into an unjust, exploitative, oppressive system. It has harmed us, made us poor, jobless, homeless, cold, hungry and ill. Who has ever voted for that? The liars are powerful and the lie persists.
There had been many waves of women’s activism prior to the so-called first wave. There remain some egalitarian societies in existence today. We are not told about them. There was no mention of the Syrian Kurdish Rojava region, where women and men are striving together to create a just and equal society. This is the community that is being bombed out of existence. The so-called first wave women’s movement started when women protested sexual abuse, violence, rape, prostitution. Men divided that movement, some women were brought into the patriarchal fold and promised the vote, the ability to change laws, to bring women into equal power. Today we have no equal pay, rapists go unpunished, prostitution with all its violence, is seen as a job, women in the UK are murdered at the rate of 3 per week. I see no point in counting the numbers of women in governments, in corporations, in work-places, when these structures are patriarchal. That is not equality, it is co-option.
Some feminists have spent decades trying to change laws, work alongside governments, work in state institutions to bring about change from the inside. We have worked hard and tirelessly. None of it has worked. We have been doing the master’s work. Breaking our backs and our hearts to illustrate how we are hurt in these systems of oppression. We have done the research, named the violence. Created platforms for vulnerable and hurt women to speak out. We have begged and pleaded. We have given the master the language we use, and he has turned it against us. More recently we have witnessed how quickly the laws, the rights, the concessions we have fought so hard for, can be swept away at the stroke of a pen. At the same time there are movements across the world which are using laws to claim what is rightfully theirs. Some are winning. The lessons we have learnt would point to the transitory nature of these gains.
I believe it is absolutely necessary to draw lessons from our past struggles against patriarchy. It is necessary to develop new strategies; to unravel the influence patriarchy has had on our thinking. I believe we need to make connections. Pornography, prostitution, violence against women, rape, are part and parcel of the patriarchal means of control of not only women, but also everything else. Colonialism, capitalism, industrial civilisation are on the same continuum. The subjugation of women is the blueprint for oppression. We cannot continue to fudge this reality, if we are serious about the business of our survival as a species, and if we truly hold to the principles of valuing all life equally.
I believe we need to understand that we cannot ask for justice from a system which is deeply invested in injustice. Our strategies, including civil disobedience, have in time wrought the same long-term realities; that we have been assimilated into the power structures, or had the substance of our challenges subverted in some other way. To quote Audre Lorde, black lesbian, activist, writer, ‘We cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.’
I believe that we would need to have a multi-pronged strategy of resistance, one arm being the one that informs, educates, promotes understanding, that encourages involvement and activism; that is on the streets, consistently visible. Another arm engaged in developing alternative ways of living, according to local environments and local knowledge. This would mean existing villages, parts of towns, blocks of flats, housing estates, becoming self- managed, with non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal arrangements; working towards taking themselves off the grid. There is one example in the heart of New York. This will be how we build community.
In the process of indigenising, there is everything to be learned from indigenous peoples. From those who have hung on to their histories, language, knowledge, lived in deep connection with their local environments, honouring how it nourishes them and how they can nourish it in return. We need to learn how to live in harmony with our immediate environment, and with the planet.
I have for very many years believed in non-violent action. I have revisited the question from time to time, principally when I thought I could murder traffickers, rapists, pimps, pornographers…. the list goes on. However, I do believe that dismantling the infrastructure ‘industrial civilisation’, is another arm of a necessary strategy towards destroying it. There are many historic and current, mostly hidden, examples of this.
My fear is that unless men look with deep scrutiny at their place in the patriarchal construct of society, how it destroys their humanity, how it fragments them, how it buys them off with the promise of power and control …… these actions become what any other war instigated by the oppressors looks like, a struggle for power, not a struggle to destroy industrial civilisation and to restore balance to the planet.
We are here to find solutions together. There may be many different solutions, depending on where we live, how we live, who we are learning from, who we work with. I do believe that we cannot have a single centre, or centralised power, which tells us what to do and when to do it. At the same time we do all need a shared moral and ethical base, which upholds everything we are fighting for, a genuine deep respect for each other, for the environment, for the planet, a just and fair place, a place of safety.
In this episode of The Green Flame podcast, we focus on radical feminism. We speak with Saba Malik and Lierre Keith, with Aimee and Kara in the UK, and with Renee Gerlich in Aotearoa (New Zealand). This episode features music from Beth Quist and poetry by Dominique Christina. Special thanks to Beth Quist and Elizabeth R. for help with this episode.
Radical feminism is a branch of feminism that emphasizes the historical and contemporary importance of patriarchy as a system of oppression, and works to dismantle it by advocating for reproductive rights, fighting pornography and prostitution, opposing male violence, fighting back against the oppressive system of gender, and more. Radical feminism also ties together analysis of economic class, race, and other hierarchies within society.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Bios
Lierre Keith is an American writer, radical feminist, food activist, and environmentalist. Lierre is the author of the novels Conditions of War and Skyler Gabriel. Her non-fiction works include the highly acclaimed The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. She is coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet (Seven Stories Press, 2011) and she’s the editor of The Derrick Jensen Reader: Writings on Environmental Revolution (Seven Stories Press, 2012). She’s also been arrested six times. She lives in northern California.
Saba Malik is a longtime radical feminist, environmentalist, and anti-racist organizer. She studies herbal medicine and loves to spend time in the forest with her children.
Renee Gerlich is a feminist writer and activist based in the Wellington region, in New Zealand.
Dominique Christina is an award-winning writer, performer, educator, and activist. She holds five national poetry slam titles in the three years she competed, including the 2014 & 2012 Women of the World Slam Champion and 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion. She is presently the only person to have won two Women of the World Poetry Championships. She is the author of 5 books.
Aimee and Kara are organizers and radical feminists based in the UK.
At this pivotal moment in history, is nonviolent direct action the most effective tactic for bringing about urgent change? Should we continue to expect governments and corporations to listen and act, or has the time for that already passed? What does radical system change actually mean, in the context of the sixth mass extinction? And how can we work together to the same goals even when our tactics differ?
As the climate crisis worsens daily and governments worldwide fail to take meaningful action, it has never been more imperative to discuss all tactics available for resistance. Time is running out and those in power are not listening to mounting calls for radical change.
This panel discussion followed by audience Q&A aims to address the ways in which the environmental movement can rise to the unprecedented challenge facing humanity and all life on earth.
The panelists
Lierre Keith
Lierre is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of six books, including The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She is coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. She’s also been arrested six times. You can read more about Lierre at www.lierrekeith.com.
Simon Be
Simon describes himself as a gravedigger, celebrant, pagan and a holy troublemaker. He’s committed to breaking the spells that civilisation has built around the myth of human superiority and exploring what it means to do what love requires in the context of dismantling a toxic system that’s devouring our living systems. He co-founded both Rising Up! and Extinction Rebellion and has been active with Earth First and other organisations.
Shahidah Janjua
Shahidah has been a feminist activist, writer and campaigner for 35 years, campaigning against pornography, prostitution, violence against women and trafficking in women and children. She has been active with feminist organisations including Justice For Women and the Rape Crisis Federation, and she is a founding member of the Women Into Politics project in the North of Ireland and a Refuge for Asian Women (Ashiana) in Sheffield. A writer and poet, her latest book of poetry, ‘Dimensions’, was published in Ireland in 2015. You can find out more about Shahida at www.sjanjua.net.
Nikki Clarke
Nikki has been an active anti-nuclear activist for nearly 20 years, and she is the co-founder of South West Against Nuclear, a direct-action based campaign that has had a specific focus on Hinkley over the last ten years. She has been arrested for non-violent protests on numerous occasions and has had several court cases for her actions against nuclear weapons, nuclear power and fracking in the UK. She gives talks and workshops across the UK about the impacts of radiation on health, and the health of women in particular, as well as nuclear policy.
After short presentations by all speakers on the panel, the floor will be open to audience questions to generate debate and discuss action-focused outcomes. We hope you can join us and be part of the conversation.
Ticket sales are to cover costs. Prices are set on a sliding scale: Concession, General and Solidarity – use the Eventbrite ticket link below to purchase. A limited number of free tickets are available for those unable to pay. Please message the organiser if you need to request a free ticket.
Editors note: Gerda Lerner (1920-2013) was a historian, author and teacher. She was a professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a visiting scholar at Duke University. Lerner was one of the founders of the field of women’s history, and was a former president of the Organization of American Historians. She taught what is considered to be the first women’s history course in the world at the New School for Social Research in 1963.
This excerpt comes from the final chapter of the book The Creation of Patriarchy (1983), and summarizes portions of the preceding chapters. While some of Lerner’s claims may in retrospect be overly optimistic (for example, she could not have predicted the explosion in internet pornography as a primary sex-education tool of patriarchy), the book as a whole is a excellent introduction to the topic of patriarchy and its origins.
By Gerda Lerner
Patriarchy is a historic creation formed by men and women in a process which took nearly 2500 years to its completion. In its earliest form patriarchy appeared as the archaic state. The basic unit of its organization was the patriarchal family, which both expressed and constantly generated its rules and values. We have seen how integrally definitions of gender affected the formation of the state. Let us briefly review the way in which gender became created, defined, and established.
The roles and behavior deemed appropriate to the sexes were expressed in values, customs, laws, and social roles. They also, and very importantly, were expressed in leading metaphors, which became part of the cultural construct and explanatory system.
The sexuality of women, consisting of their sexual and their reproductive capacities and services, was commodified even prior to the creation of Western civilization. The development of agricutlure in the Neolithic period fostered the inter-tribal “exchange of women,” not only as a means of avoiding incessant warfare by the cementing of marriage alliances but also because societies with more women could produce more children. In contrast to the economic needs of hunting/gathering societies, agriculturists could use the labor of children to increase production and accumulate surpluses. Men-as-a-group had rights in women which women-as-a-group did not have in men. Women themselves became a resource, acquired by men much as the land was acquired by men. Women were exchanged or bought in marriages for the benefit of their families; later, they were conquered or bought in slavery, where their sexual services were part of their labor and where their children were the property of their masters. In every known society it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved, whereas men were killed. It was only after men had learned how to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as strangers, that they then learned how to enslave men of those groups and, later, subordinates from within their own societies.
Thus, the enslavement of women, combining both racism and sexism, preceded the formation of classes and class oppression. Class differences were, at their very beginnings, expressed and constituted in terms of patriarchal relations. Class is not a separate construct from gender; rather, class is expressed in genderic terms.
By the second millennium B.C. in Mesopotamian societies, the daughters of the poor were sold into marriage of prostitution in order to advance the economic interests of their families. The daughters of men of property could command a bride price, paid by the family of the groom to the family of the bridge, which frequently enabled the bride’s family to secure more financially advantageous marriages for their sons, thus improving the family’s economic position. If a husband or father could not pay his debt, his wife and children could be used as pawns, becoming debt slaves to the creditor. These conditions were so firmly established by 1750 B.C. that Hammurabic law made a decisive improvement in the lot of debt pawns by limiting their terms of service to three years, where earlier it had been for life.
The product of this commodification of women—bridge price, sale price, and children—was appropriated by men. It may very well represent the first accumulation of private property. The enslavement of women of conquered tribes became not only a status symbol for nobles and warriors, but it actually enabled the conquerors to acquire tangible wealth through selling or trading the product of the slaves’ labor and their reproductive product, slave children.
…
To step outside of patriarchal thought means: Being skeptical toward every known system of thought; being critical of all assumptions, ordering values and definitions.
Testing one’s statement by trusting our own, the female experience. Since such experience has usually been trivialized or ignored, it means overcoming the deep-seated resistance within ourselves toward accepting ourselves and our knowledge as valid. It means getting rid of the great men in our heads and substituting for them ourselves, our sisters, our anonymous foremothers.
Being critical toward our own thought, which is, after all, thought trained in the patriarchal tradition. Finally, it means developing intellectual courage, the courage to stand alone, the courage to reach farther than our grasp, the courage to risk failure. Perhaps the greatest challenge to thinking women is the challenge to move from the desire for safety and approval to the most “unfeminine” quality of all—that of intellectual arrogance, the supreme hubris which asserts to itself the right to reorder the world. The hubris of the god-makers, the hubris of the male system-builders.
The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth.
What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming. But we already know that woman’s mind, at last unfettered after so many millennia, will have its share in providing vision, ordering, solutions. Women at long last are demanding, as men did in the Renaissance, the right to explain, the right to define. Women, thinking themselves out of patriarchy add transforming insights to the process of redefinition.
As long as both men and women regard the subordination of half the human race to the other as “natural,” it is impossible to envision a society in which differences do not connote either dominance or subordination. The feminist critique of the patriarchal edifice of knowledge is laying the groundwork for a correct analysis of reality, one which at the very least can distinguish the whole from a part. Women’s History, the essential tool in creating feminist consciousness in women, is providing the body of experience against which new theory can be tested and the ground on which women of vision can stand.
A feminist world-view will enable women and men to free their minds from patriarchal thought and practice and at last to build a new world free of dominance and hierarchy, a world that is truly human.
Dr. Gail Dines is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Wheelock College in Boston. She’s the author of multiple books and articles, and has been described as the world’s leading expert on the effects of pornography.
She’s the author of the highly acclaimed Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (Beacon Press); and co-editor of Gender, Race, and Class in Media. Translated into four languages, Pornland is the basis of a documentary released this fall by Media Education Foundation.
Dr Dines is president and CEO of Culture Reframed, a non-profit organization composed of academics, professionals and activists from a wide range of perspectives, that is dedicated to raising public awareness about the impact of pornography on children, youth and adults. If you want to know much more about her work, you can go to her website, www.gaildines.com.
“Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight.” —Derrick Jensen
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Deep Green Resistance is a radical environmental movement, dedicated to shifting activists towards strategies that have a real chance to stop the murder of the planet. Our allegiance is first and foremost to the land around us; we fight for the salmon, the pine trees, and the songbirds, not the solar panels and space shuttles so many ‘environmentalists’ have fallen in love with. We in DGR don’t want a more sustainable nightmare. We want a living world.
Deep Green Resistance recognizes that industrial civilization is incompatible with life on this planet – and when our way of living conflicts with the needs of the land, our way of living must go. This transition to a healthy and just relationship with the natural world is a massive undertaking, one that won’t be achieved with individual lifestyle changes and a green coat of paint on the latest mountain-killing mining rig. Real change will take a revolutionary heart. Anything less is a recipe for failure.
Deep Green Resistance has a roadmap for that revolution. We call it Decisive Ecological Warfare. We’ve studied the most successful movements in history, from the Irish Republicans to Mandela’s Umkhonto we Sizwe, and applied the lessons they can teach us to the fight for Earth liberation. Our goal as aboveground activists is to promote this strategic resistance, with the goal of triggering cascading systems failure within industrial infrastructure. In this mission, we are guided by a strict code of conduct, a steering committee of seasoned revolutionaries, and, most of all, an unwavering dedication to the land on which we live.
HOW CAN I HELP?
In the midst of all this destruction, it’s easy to feel hopeless. But there’s one nice thing about living in such dark times – anywhere you look, there’s great work to be done. Deep Green Resistance isn’t afraid to make the connections between open-pit mining and police brutality, between rape and deforestation, between acidified oceans and settler colonialism. We are proud anti-capitalists, anti-racists, and radical feminists, with members working on everything from pornography and prostitution to indigenous land rights and prison reform.
Whether on the front lines or behind the scenes, there is room for you in this war. So get in touch! We have members across the globe and resources in multiple languages. Head to our website, check our Facebook, or send us an email and introduce yourself. We’ll help you learn more about DGR, find opportunities for volunteering, and apply for greater involvement. You’ll also be able to download a free ebook copy of the Deep Green Resistance book.
DGR is working to create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary. In order to succeed, we’ll need teachers, healers, warriors, and workers. If you’re tired of the false solutions and the feel-good failures, Deep Green Resistance is for you, whatever your skills. In a fight like this, we need it all.
Remember: Deep Green Resistance is an aboveground organization, meaning we don’t engage in violence or property destruction. If you feel your talents would best be put to use in more militant actions, please do not contact us. This will keep you safer, and help us be more effective. We will not answer any questions related to any underground that may or may not exist.
“Our best hope will never lie in individual survivalism. Nor does it lie in small groups doing their best to prepare for the worst. Our best and only hope is a resistance movement that is willing to face the scale of the horrors, gather our forces, and fight like hell for all we hold dear.”
