Alex Rose: Love is a Verb

Alex Rose: Love is a Verb

By Alex Rose / Deep Green Resistance Cascadia

We won’t fight for what we don’t know. We won’t die for what we don’t love.

Members of normal communities, living communities, love their community. They love their neighbors. They love their sisters and brothers. They are willing to fight for their community. They are willing to die for it, to protect it, to preserve it.

But this culture takes us from our communities, the lands and families that we belong in, that we belong to. Not knowing them, not loving them, we stand by with a confusion and a pain, not knowing what to do as they’re put upon the rack, stretched and tortured, pulled and prodded, and eventually killed. We don’t know why we hurt. It’s a pain we can’t name, a pain that wells up in places we didn’t know were a part of us.

Pulled and torn apart, our communities are erased and destroyed. We are alone, with walls erected between us. Born and raised in this nightmare, we are all but unable to see it for what it is. We know little beyond the fear and loneliness of this culture, and are terrified of those Others, those inexplicably familiar figures we can’t help but glimpse through the fog that this culture wraps us in. Our terror and fear is molded into hate, and we become the stonemasons ourselves, forever building up the walls that separate us from everyone, everything else we once knew and loved, until these walls become our prisons, and we find ourselves living—locked—in perpetual and solitary confinement.

And this kills us, our isolation. It kills everything. This world of life built upon reciprocity, is murdered, slowly atomized and compartmentalized away to nothing. Stripped of meaning, we are all of us—human communities, watersheds, prairies and oceans—slowly and entirely stripped physically apart into oblivion.

But this isn’t how it has to be. This wandering pain and loneliness isn’t what we are; it is what we’ve become. But it’s not what we must be.

Go and listen to the land, she is calling you. Go stand in the rain and listen as it kisses your face. The wind blows, playing with your hair, and the trees are dancing. Go and sit and listen to them. Listen to the language we used to know.

Go and talk with the trees. Listen to the frogs and hummingbirds and cactus; they will tell you stories. They will tell you about who they are. They will tell you about who you are. Listen to them. Talk to them. Cry with them. Learn them and learn to love them.

This is not easy. Civilization is built on the isolation, the alienation from life that is killing everything worth loving. Feeling that love and that pain is deeply challenging to our manufactured sense of self, our identity and being, to our prisons.

But we need that love and pain. We need the world, both to live and for our lives to have meaning. And unless we learn to listen to it, to know it and to love it and come home to those living communities (those we’ve been told don’t really exist), we will watch—distantly, half-feeling and half-awake—as they slip from existence, while we struggle with a pain and a grief we can’t seem to name or explain.

They feed and shelter us, they teach us, they help us to become ourselves. We need them. We need to know and love them. We need to fight for and defend them. And many of us will have to die for them.

Our love cannot be static, for love is a verb, and it must call us to act. It is not enough to say who and what we love; we must show it by our actions. We must love our homes, our extra-human communities, and we must protect them from the omnicidal slaughter that is the dominant culture, civilization. If we don’t love them enough to stop their enslavement, imprisonment and murder—by any means necessary—then our love is a lie.

We are alive in a living world, a world dancing and humming. The talking, laughing, crying and singing, living and dying is there, all around us in the world. It is the world. And it is a world that calls for our participation, a world that wants to know and love us and wants us to know and love it.

Go and sit with the ocean, the mountains the desert, rivers, trees, frogs, finches, mushrooms, and rocks. Listen to them. Listen to them calling you back, back into being and back into community. Listen to their stories, their dreams, their wisdoms and their songs. Listen until you know them, and then keep listening. Know them, love them, find your home there with them and then fight, protect and defend them.

From Roots and Rain

Aboriginal land management techniques beneficial to small mammal populations

Aboriginal land management techniques beneficial to small mammal populations

By Max McClure / Stanford University

Western Australia’s Martu people set small fires as a matter of course while hunting lizards. But the technique may also buffer the landscape against two extremes – overgrown brush and widespread lightning fires – that hurt Australia’s endangered small mammals.

When species start disappearing, it usually makes sense to blame it on the arrival of humans. But in the case of Western Australia’s declining small-mammal populations, the opposite may be true.

The Aboriginal Martu people of Western Australia have traditionally set small fires while foraging, leaving a patchwork landscape that proves a perfect environment for bilbies, wallabies, possums and other threatened mammals.

Stanford anthropologists have discovered that when these controlled burns cease, the desert rapidly becomes overgrown – and a single lightning strike can send wildfires tearing through hundreds of square miles of tinder-dry mammal habitat.

The paper, authored by Stanford anthropology Associate Professor Rebecca Bliege Bird, senior research scientist Douglas Bird, postdoctoral scholar Brian Codding and undergraduate Peter Kauhanen, appeared recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hunting with the Martu

Martu Native Title, deep in Australia’s Western Desert, contains some of the most remote human settlements in the world. Parnngurr, a Martu community with a population of around 80, is located more than 200 miles from the nearest mining outpost.

Making the most of the harsh, arid landscape’s resources, the Aboriginal Australians hunt bustard, emu and kangaroo and collect a wide variety of fruits, tubers and seeds. But their most important resource is the sand goanna – a 4-foot long burrowing lizard that accounts for nearly 40 percent of all foraged calories.

The goanna hunt likely hasn’t changed in thousands of years. In winter, when the lizards are hibernating, groups of women head out from the camps and set fire to patches of the spinifex grass covering den entrances.

Once the brush has been cleared, the woman who sets the fire has first rights to dig out any goanna burrows she finds in the fire scar.

The practice is so ingrained in Martu culture that the Martu language has words for every stage of plant growth following a fire, ranging from nyurnma – a fresh fire scar – to kunarka – a landscape overgrown with spinifex.

“If you’re out hunting with Martu, it involves fire all the time,” said Douglas Bird. “You can’t understand any of their values without factoring in the fundamental role of fire.”

Comparing scars

The Martu were cleared from their lands in the mid-1960s to make way for the British government’s Blue Streak missile tests. Until the people won the official title to their territory again in 2002, an Alabama-sized portion of the Western Desert that they had previously managed saw no controlled fires.

Without human intervention, El Niño-driven monsoons had allowed dense spinifex to spring up in some areas and sprawling lightning-caused fire scars to appear in others.

“You ask the Martu people, and they explain, ‘We left, and the fire regime broke down,'” Douglas Bird said.

Now, 10 years after the Martu’s reinstatement of traditional hunting practices across their territory, the researchers compared a decade’s worth of fire scars in hunting grounds to land without an Aboriginal Australian presence.

The differences were stark. Where Martu women had hunted for goanna, the fire scars were smaller and more clustered, and there was a greater variety of ground cover.

Outside these areas, lightning strikes had burnt a small number of enormous scars, often larger than 10,000 hectares in size.

“Without the Martu, it’s very much like what we have in California,” said Rebecca Bliege Bird. “The desert is covered with a large, contiguous set of fuels.”

The burning also seemed to buffer against major seasonal changes – spreading fires throughout the year, rather than concentrating them during periods of extreme drought.

Managing for mammals

Evidence suggests that the lightning-style landscape is no good for small mammals. Thick brush is difficult to travel through – spinifex is tipped with painful silica points – and large fire scars mean few resources and more exposure to predation.

Australia’s mammal populations are disappearing faster than anywhere else in the world, and there’s reason to believe that the decline coincided with the collapse of Martu fire regimes.

“Presumably the same resources have been used for at least 5,000 years,” said Douglas Bird. “That’s plenty of time to get strong coupled interactions between humans and other mammals.”

Alternately, the researchers suggest, there is evidence that Australia’s climate variability was less extreme before humans arrived. Aboriginal peoples’ burning practices may have recreated the conditions mammals had originally evolved in.

“It challenges a bias that a lot of ecologists have,” said Rebecca Bliege Bird, “which is that all human impacts are negative.”

Western Australian Environment and Conservation officials have taken note of Martu strategies and currently conduct extensive prescribed burns across Western Australia, but official resistance to hunting and gathering remains.

“The government would rather come up with an interventionist policy than support these traditional processes that provide the same services,” Rebecca Bliege Bird said.

From Stanford University News: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/july/australia-hunting-fire-071212.html

Ben Barker: The Story of a River

Ben Barker: The Story of a River

By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin

The Milwaukee River runs through the place where I live. Really, it is the place where I live, or at least part of it. This place would not be what it is without the river.

On a warm, sunny day the river will call to me in a bodily way to come into the water, or at least to feel it with my hands or feet. I’m sure this relationship between river and human, river and bird, river and insect, is older and more sacred than I can imagine.

When the river calls to me in this way, I want so badly to get in. I want to spend all of the warm and sunny days heeding this call, and the other days watching from the river’s side, listening and learning.

What breaks my heart is that I will not enter this river and let its waters caress my body, at least not today or any time soon, because its waters are full of poison.

Less than ten years ago, my friends and I would swim in the river on every warm and sunny day. Then, a number of them started experiencing rashes on their skin or felt sick from accidentally letting some of the river water into their mouth. We stopped swimming in the river. The poison dumped or seeped into the river continues to build, and the river continues to be killed, while we essentially stand aside and mourn.

I’m tired of mourning and I’m tired of hearing that this destruction is natural, inevitable, “just the way things are.”

What made clear in my own life that this river was changing for the worse, that it was being killed, was when I no longer wanted to let its waters touch my body. While obviously bad in itself, there’s a larger picture here that must be looked at.

There are living beings—including the river itself—whose lives depend on this river. When the river dies, so to do the fish, bugs, birds, and other animals who drink and eat from the river, who call the river home. Thus, each year that there are more and more pollutants from agricultural run-off in the river, there are less and less songbirds and frogs.

Prior to the arrival of Europeans on this continent, human beings lived here who loved the Milwaukee River. They were indigenous peoples called the Menominee, Potawatomi, and Fox, among other tribes. The lives of these human beings were firmly intertwined with the life of the river. These human beings ate and drank from the river, prayed to the river, and listened to the river’s wisdom.

Those sustainable human cultures were victims—and continue to be victims—of large-scale murder—genocide—at the hands of white settlers. The same people who committed these atrocities against the indigenous humans are now killing the river. Both the river and the human beings who love it—and know how to live sustainability with it—are targets of the dominant culture, industrial civilization. In order to control, exploit, and pollute the river, the humans who depend on it for sustenance must also be displaced or eradicated. We can see how this happened here at home in the case of the Milwaukee River, but we must see further that this has happened everywhere and is the story of civilization.

Currently, every stream in the United States is contaminated with carcinogens. 99% of native prairies have been destroyed.  99% of old growth forests are gone. 90% of the large fish in the oceans are gone. It’s estimated that unless there is a dramatic shift in course, global warming will become irreversible in around 5 years, eventually rendering all life on this planet doomed.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The destruction can be stopped and we must stop it. Clearly, the river, the land, indigenous humans, and so much more life, are the victims of an abusive system. Like all perpetrators, the way to stop them is to aim at the root of the problem and remove or block their ability to abuse. Basically, the goal is to return the circumstances to the way they were before the abuse started, with the victims free and safe. The abuse of civilization has been a campaign of 10,000 years, so obviously there is much to be done to stop it. But, what choice do we have other than to start now and try?

Who or what do you love? Surely you love something or you wouldn’t be here. What would you do to defend your beloved?

I love the Milwaukee River. I want to see this river come back to life, year after year regaining health. I want to see no more poison seeping into the river, no more dams suffocating it, no more destruction of any kind. I want to see all of that destruction reversed and those who would commit abuse stopped and held accountable for their crimes against life.

I love the Milwaukee River and I love life. I will do whatever is necessary to defend the living, before the planet is killed entirely. Will you join me?

From Kid Cutbank: http://kidcutbank.blogspot.com/2012/05/story-of-river.html

Music of Resistance: An Interview with Big Dudee Roo

Music of Resistance: An Interview with Big Dudee Roo

By Ben Barker / Beautiful Resistance Distro
What follows is an interview with Aurora Lewis and Max Lockwood of Big Dudee Roo, an ecologically-inspired music group from Wayland, Michigan. I had a chance to talk with them around the new year of 2012 about their new album, what inspires them, and being part of a culture of resistance. Visit their website to learn more about them.

Beautiful Resistance Distro: Hello, It’s Ben for Beautiful Resistance Distro. I’m honored to have the chance to have a discussion with members of the music group Big Dudee Roo. To start, would you please give a brief explanation of who you are and what you do?

Max: We’re a folk-rock band from Wayland, Michigan. We write a lot of original music and play a lot of shows around Michigan. I think our music has a wide range of themes, as far as the songs that we write. Me and Nate, our banjo player, tend to focus on different environmental and social justice themes, in sort of a way that relates to people individually and emotionally. As far as the music itself goes too, we really try to focus on having a unique, original sound that is still grounded in folk and rock influences, and those genres. We pay really close attention to the songs. There’s really no virtuosic playing in the band. Everyone kind of plays their role and contributes to the song itself without stepping all over the song. You know, there’s not a lot of solos or anything. So, it’s sort of more egalitarian the way we make music.

Aurora: Yeah, I think mostly we all just love to play. You know, we just love music.

Max: And, we’re all really close friends. We all grew up in the same small town here in Southwest Michigan. So, we have a close bond with each other.

BRD: When did you start playing music together as Big Dudee Roo and what first led you to begin using your gifts as musicians as a tool for expressing your personal views on environmental, social, and political issues?

Aurora: As far as when Big Dudee Roo started playing: like we said we all went to the same high school. Everybody else in the band is a few years older than me. I’m Max’s little sister. They started playing— Max and Nate played 7th and 8th grade talent shows. And then Justin was your friend too, and so is Kurt, so they started playing together.

Max: Kurt was actually Justin’s next door neighbor. We needed a drummer and Justin was like, “I think Kurt’s a drummer”. And Kurt used to babysit Justin back in the day because they live right next to each other.

Aurora: Yeah, and then I started singing backup with them when I was about fourteen years old and I officially joined the band when I was about sixteen.

Max: And, we used to be called Big Dudee Roo and the Raptors.

Aurora: We all had nicknames; raptor nicknames.

Max: It’s such a long name that no one could remember or get it right. They’d be like, “What…did you just say?” So for practical purposes we just cut off “the Raptors”.

Aurora: Yeah, there was one venue that put up a flyer about us that said “Big Dundee Roo and the Rafters”.

Max: As far as when we started using our musical talents to support or promote different political and social causes: that was something that attracted me about music right from the beginning. When me and Nate were in 8th grade we had a pop-punk band. That’s how we got our start. I was attracted by—back then I remember there was a band called NOFX that I was into. They had some political songs, some anti-Bush songs and I thought that was so cool. So, when I first started writing songs that was something I started doing really early, trying to write protest songs. Then, over the years our political consciousness as individuals and as a band grew a lot and I personally got really into Deep Green Resistance activists and writers. I read a lot of Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith and even spent some time over in Bellingham, Washington, working with some members of Fertile Ground, who are still really great friends today. So, it’s always been important to me, and I think it’s important to everybody in the band, to see music not just as pure entertainment, but as something that can make people think and get at their emotions. You know, on one hand music is entertainment—you want to make music that sounds good and that people are going to enjoy, that they can dance to, move to—but on the other hand it’s always been more than that for me. I remember in high school I was totally obsessed with the band Pearl Jam. It sounds funny, but I was totally attracted to how they did things like took on Ticketmaster for having a monopoly. A lot of their songs actually deal with feminist issues. There are lots of songs that concern abortion and also songs about the abuse of the culture. That was something that really attracted me. Anyways, we love—like last year when we got to play at Candlelight Collective in West Bend—that was so much fun and we had such a great night. Because a lot of times we play in bars and different places aren’t necessarily paying close attention to the words, and maybe even not the music, sometimes. So, it was great to play at a place like that where everyone was super engaged and playing attention to the words we were saying. And, we could tell the stories about the songs. That just feels so good. Those are the shows we love to play.

Aurora: The gems.

BRD: Many of your lyrics seem to express affinity and love with the natural world, as well as anger for the destruction of it. Does the land where you live inspire your songs, and if so, how? Are there any specific nonhuman neighbors who inspire each of you?

Max: Totally. Yes, to all of that. Actually, where we’re sitting right now is our parents’ house where we grew up as kids. Right back here behind me there used to be an old swamp marshland with pretty old growth oak forest, actually, which is surprising because we’re in a suburban area. But, somehow that survived. But not for long: when I was thirteen it was all clear cut and there was going to be a condominium development back there, but the developer ended up going bankrupt. Now there’s just a road back there with no houses. The swamp was filled in and now it’s kind of restoring itself. There’s a pond, and a lot of frogs back there now. Despite the destruction, it is fun to watch it come back because it’s just being left alone. That’s been kind of interesting. As a little kid, we used to spend a lot of time back in those woods. I remember there used to be turtles in our backyard all the time and deer right behind the fence. This land had definitely inspired a lot of my own lyrics, as I take a lot of walks back there. I distinctly remember one song—it’s called “Yours is my Origin”, from our first E.P.—where I was sitting here in summer with the slider door open, and I could hear birds outside and the wind rustling through the trees. I was playing the guitar and I would walk around in circles and I could literally feel the trees giving me inspiration for the words in the song. I would just feel it. I’d sit down and look out there and then I’d write a lyric down, and then go back and forth. And, as far as individual animals, I have always had a strong connection with ravens and crows. And there’s a song about ravens and a song about crows on the new album. So, that shows up a lot, too. They’re even in my dreams.

Aurora: Max has a song that he wrote on our new album, and it’s called “Being Free”. There’s one specific line that, when we’re playing shows live, I just close my eyes and get really inspired by because it says, “this land isn’t our land, this land is its own.” It reminds me of when the woods behind us were totally clear cut and it was so sad. I was like nine years old. And I remember me and my mom went out there and we tried to do all this stuff to get the developers to stop. She went to so many city council meetings trying to fight it and get them to leave the woods, but it never worked. I’m always really inspired by that line in Max’s song because this land is totally its own, it’s taking a new form and it’s rebuilding itself and making itself its own again. And, I feel a really big connection to animals. I get really inspired by the way they interact with each other. Especially birds; how they can all fly in unison, and it’s totally intuitive for them. They all fly as one and it’s amazing and I love to watch that happen and it really inspires me.

BRD: I was actually humming “Yours is my Origin” as I was walking around the forest today.

Aurora and Max: Awesome!

BRD: You recorded most of your latest album live in a barn. Can you explain more about making this album and about the barn itself?

Aurora: Oh gosh, there’s so much to be said about the barn. Well, first of all it was beautiful. It was huge and it was one of our friends, totally just lent his barn to us to record. So, when I got up there and saw it for the first time, I was just in awe. There were Christmas lights hung everywhere in this huge barn. The guys stayed up there for three days straight. They slept there, they cooked there, everything. I never slept there because I was only needed for the vocals which we did on the third day. So, when I went there I remember thinking it was so awesome and there were roosters down beneath the barn, there were hens. There’s so much to say, but it was just really sweet.

Max: When we recorded it, we played the music live in the barn. It’s a big open area. And, in quiet moments on the CD, you can hear the roosters from down below. Or you can hear crickets or frogs outside or swallows flying around the barn.

Aurora: Yeah, there’s a whole track: “Crickets and Frogs”.

Max: The barn is old and beautiful and there were bats flying inside it with us at night, when we would fall asleep. It was a great weekend too because it was a full moon. And, the barn has all these Christmas lights strung up in it and there’s great lighting in there. We would flip on all the lights in the barn at night and we’d go outside and walk down the hill. There was the great line of Osage Orange Trees that are old and all packed close together and we would stand along there and look up at the moon and then look at the barn and just feel like “wow, I can’t believe we’re here right now”. It was such an amazing experience to record the album like that. The way we did it, too, you can really hear the sound of the barn on the record. We even had one or two microphones set up to capture the ambient sound of the music reverberating in the barn. I think it’s a pretty unique sound and we’re really lucky to be able to do it there. Greg Peterson and his family were so kind to us. Oh, I should say that Greg’s son, Adam, is around our age—a college student—and he’s very environmentally conscious. He had the coolest bike I’ve ever seen. He had taken a used copy of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, cut out all of the pages, and glued it around the frame of the bike, everywhere. So, his bike frame was Sand County Almanac. It was just so cool.

BRD: That’s amazing! What responses has your work evoked from your community?

Max: Good question. Well, it depends. I think we have friends and fans who are really plugged in to the political and environmental aspects of the music and we get a lot of feedback from that, especially from you all, who really picked up on that and are inspired by it, which in turn inspires us a lot. We’ve got friends here who are also really inspired by that. Honestly, and unfortunately, it’s tough to say what our community is because for one thing we’re kind of all spread out about the state right now. When I think of our community, though, there is a strong music community here of different artists and musicians and friends. We’ve been getting a really great response from that community. We had one of our friends, and I think a hero of everybody in the band, Samuel Seth Bernard, who is another Michigan artist—he and his wife May Erlewine do a lot of music together, and they are very inspirational to us—play lap steel guitar on the new CD. He has a lot of songs that confront the destruction of the natural world in a very positive manner. He played on the new album and loved it and says a lot of great things about us, so that felt great. You know, it’s tough to say right now because on one hand we haven’t gotten our music out there that much because we haven’t been around very long.

Aurora: Lately we’ve been getting pretty enthusiastic responses to our music, whether that is because people like our music or our lyrics or both, or us as people. It’s been really awesome and inspiring.

Max: Actually, now that I think about it I would say we really just started to build a community that’s in our fans and friends. It’s pretty cool because while we don’t have a whole ton of fans right now, the fans we do have are really devoted and we give and take a lot from those people. That’s been really cool to see and that’s what we want: a more close relationship with our friends and fans who appreciate the music.

BRD: What experience or impact do you hope a listener or audience member will take away after hearing your music?

Max: That’s a tough one because it’s such an individual thing for everybody. Personally, I think the number one thing for me as a song writer—I think a lot of my own opinions come through a lot in the songs and that’s always going to happen, but I’m not necessarily looking for people to think like me. Really, what I want the most is for people to think for themselves and sort of take an honest appraisal of what’s happening in the world. If they like my view of it, that’s great, but if it sort of convinces them to just think for themselves and be inspired to do something, that’s the most that I can hope for. Also, to feel more of a connection to themselves and to their community and their friends and family and build on that, build community. One of the songs I’m proudest of on the new record is “You are Your Own”, because it emulates all of those things for me, even just the title “You are Your Own”. That’s what I want people to get out of it, I think.

Aurora: I think that some of the best things that happen after a show or after somebody hears our album is when somebody says to me or Max or anybody else In the band, something like “Oh my gosh, that was so inspiring. I want to just get up and do something and take action now.” Like, I had a couple of people say that. I feel like that’s the best thing that can happen when somebody hears our music. Whether somebody says it to us or is just thinking it, awesome. That’s the best thing that can happen, is that it inspires people and makes them want to do more for themselves and everybody else.

Max: I’m really excited that we’re putting this album out right after the whole Occupy movement has really politicized young people in this country for the first time in a long time and now it’s sort of unavoidable to think about these things. Just in our home base, Grand Rapids, Michigan, for the size of the city, there’s a really strong Occupy group there with quite a few people who are Deep Green Resistance-type folks. It’s just great that there’s that cultural shift that’s happened, so those themes in our music are maybe a little more easily picked up on because people are just thinking about those things more right now. I hope that’s true.

Aurora: Well said.

BRD: Resistance seems to be a reoccurring theme in your songs; resistance to ecological destruction, sexism, capitalist culture. Would you like to see your music as being part of a culture of resistance? Please explain.

Max: Yes, of course. I think a lot about where music fits into that, and I think it is really important. One thing I’m thinking is there’s a lot of music out there that’s really popular, that a lot of young people listen to and are influenced by, that is totally toxic. A lot of the most popular music just scares the crap out of me. To think that young people are hearing this—like, what’s that Rhianna song, whips and chains excite me or something?—that’s just scary. So, the people who are creating those songs and are promoting abuse or destructive attitudes have really good, well produced music with really talented people to help them, and I think we deserve that too. We deserve to have a lot of really great music and art and writing, poetry—you name it—that supports causes that we identify with, like how we feel about these things. Obviously, music isn’t something that has very direct effects as being part of a culture of resistance. Music isn’t going to sequester carbon or anything like that. But, I think it is important and has a really strong ability to foster community. It just brings people together in a way that doesn’t happen very often in this culture. I think it’s really important to have music to build solidarity within a culture of resistance. Also, I see our music as trying to bridge the gap between the people who are actively working in the culture of resistance and the people who would support it if they knew more what it’s truthfully about. Those people might never take strong action, but it’s that unquantifiable crowd that supports the idea of resistance or its legitimacy, just in their conversations with friends and family, or anything like that. Just that base of support that I think is really important but it’s hard to put your finger on what it is exactly. So, we’re trying to create culture, and we’re trying to create it where there isn’t a culture of resistance so we have to start from the ground up.

Aurora: I think it would be really cool if we had more young people that listen to our music, because a lot of young kids and teens grow up listening to some really degrading, awful music. I totally did when I was twelve years old. That effects people subconsciously so much more than anyone will ever know. I think it’s really cool when young people listen to our music because subconsciously and consciously, I think they start to say, “Oh, this is what’s happening and this is making me wonder what they are talking about”. They start, maybe, to recognize what’s going on.

Max: How I first got into anti-civilization thought is Pearl Jam, like I said, has an album called “Yield”, and it has a song—they were all passing around Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael when they wrote the album—called “Do the Evolution” that Eddie Vedder always said is pretty much directly based on that book and his reaction to it. I loved them and so I went and picked up Ishmael and I read it in about a day and a half. I was about fifteen years old and it totally blew my world open.

Aurora: That’s what started me with realizing what was going on.

Max: So, I’m a perfect example of the fact that music can lead someone down that path. From there I got into Derrick Jensen. Also, I think music is inherently emotional and gets at people’s emotions in a very deep way; it gets at their deepest fears and desires, even when it doesn’t have words attached to it. I heard someone say music is “what feelings sound like”. That’s so true. When it’s connected—like our lyrics—to political or environmental causes that we feel strongly about, that we want people to feel similarly about, that emotional aspect helps a lot.

BRD: Do you have advice for other writers, musicians, or artists who are creating politically focused art?

Aurora: It’s awesome that people are taking a political focus in their music and there seems to be a lot more of that today but a lot of young artists, poets, authors, musicians don’t know what to do with all of their political work and they don’t know how it’s going to help the world or where it’s going to go or if they can do anything with their work. But, you totally can. I’m a really firm believer that if you have a piece of work and you show it to one person, that’s making a difference. I personally believe that. So, don’t give up. Show it to as many people as you can and get it out there with the resources that you have and make it known. It doesn’t matter if it’s one or one thousand people; I really think that if one person sees your work it can make a difference.

Max: To speak to that, I think it’s a funny way that political art impacts people. I think it’s unusual that people immediately respond to it. With recorded music especially, somebody hears a band they like and they pick up the CD and go home and maybe flip through the lyric booklet and go, “Oh, wow”, and have a more instant relationship with the words and what the band is saying politically. A lot of times there’s not an immediate recognition that people have really picked up on your political message. It happens with time; when they come back to it they read it a second time and then they really get drawn into that. Then, maybe that picks up their consciousness a little bit and maybe they’ll research for themselves more. And, not everybody does that. It’s a fairly small amount of people that might end up actually doing that, but that’s still so important and it’s those people who really have a strong connection with the work. Another thing is that something I’ve struggled with, personally, while trying to make political songs or writing is what is the line between being preachy—I don’t want to say that you shouldn’t be preachy, if you need to preach. Basically, the rule should be if there’s something in you that you feel needs to get out and that people need to hear, that you need to express, that’s the number one thing. You shouldn’t even question for a second what it is. If you feel strongly it needs to be out there, then it’s got to be out there. I think for me, like I said, I really want people to think for themselves, and I don’t want people to think like me. I want them to figure things out for themselves and I’ll give them the information that I have and the feelings that I have, and put them out there for them to think about. Once you put a work out there, you can’t control the way people are going to think about it, the way they are going to interpret things, so you have to try to be as clear as you can with the feeling you want to express. That said, I have a lot of strong opinions and I can’t help but put those forth in the art that I make. It’s a fine line to walk. For me, I try not to be too preachy, but at the same time I try to be direct and clear about the way I feel about things. You can’t worry about what everyone is going to think about your music or your poem or your artwork. There are always going to be some people that don’t like it, and some people that really like it. When you make that connection with the people that really do like it, it’s just the most beautiful thing. So that’s what’s important.

BRD: Is there anything else you’d like to mention before we end the interview? Any websites or contact information you’d like to plug.

Max: Yeah, our CD is online and we all the social networking things—facebook, twitter. Both of our CD’s are available at bigdudeeroo.com and you are selling our CD in Beautiful Resistance Distro, which is really cool, we’re really excited about that. That’d be a great place to pick it up. It’s called Listen to Your Discontent. To everyone out there: keep in touch, find us online, and hopefully we’ll see you in the flesh someday.

BRD: Great. Thank you!

Aurora and Max: Thank you.

From Kid Cutbank: http://kidcutbank.blogspot.com/2012/01/music-of-resistance-interview-with-big.html

Book Review: Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

Book Review: Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance

Lester Brown’s exhaustively researched book, Plan B 4.0 – Mobilizing to Save Civilization, is a bold and impressive effort to chart a course to ecological sustainability, one of very few books that attempts this worthwhile goal. Brown lists 4 steps that Plan B 4.0 focuses on to achieve sustainability:

  1. Stabilize climate by cutting emissions by at least 80% by 2020
  2. Stabilize population at 8 billion or lower
  3. Eradicate poverty
  4. Restore natural earth systems (soil, aquifers, forests, grasslands, oceans)

These are excellent goals to begin with, and show that Brown is extremely serious about his mission, and is truly concerned about justice and the welfare of the human population. They also show that he understands one of the fundamental obstacles to true change – the interlocking relationship between environmental destruction and human exploitation. For example, Brown calls for debt relief for poor nations – an admirable position against the interests of international financiers and for the interests of poor and exploited people. Few analysts truly understand this relationship at both a theoretical and real-world level, and Brown moves beyond the average call for sustainability by acknowledging the seriousness of this issue.

Plan B lays out a compelling and comprehensive vision of the converging crises that are threatening life on earth – from oceanic collapse and peak oil to soil erosion and food instability. Brown understands that the collapse of global civilization is likely if business-as-usual continues. The undermining of the biological life-support systems of the earth has left life as we know it teetering on the brink. For many species and communities around the world, it is already too late.

The fundamental basis of Brown’s approach is that it is a social change approach. Brown understands that social problems require social solutions. While personal lifestyle changes (to transport, diet, and other consumption) are an important and moral way to address these problems, they are not sufficient to solve ecological and social injustice by themselves. This is an important step – a foundation for serious political work. From here, we can analyze each of the goals of Plan B 4.0 for strategic soundness, moral rigor, and good scholarship.

Step 1: Stabilize Climate

Brown’s approach to solving the climate problem relies on several strategies. First, he advocates massive adoption of alternative energy. Second, he calls for replanting of billions of trees to sequester carbon and rehabilitate habitat. Third, he describes an efficiency revolution centering on recycling, reusing, and refining urban planning and architecture and material flows throughout global society.

The focus on replanting of forests and restoring habitat around the world is extremely important and is an admirable goal, as is the elimination of coal and gasoline as energy sources. However, the fundamental failure of Brown’s approach to solving climate change is the insistence on maintaining an industrial way of life. Efficiency in cooking, housing, and production is doubtlessly important, but too many of Brown’s solutions call for centralized industrial production instead of local self-sufficiency – the maintenance of privileged lifestyles.

In short, while Brown’s plan is truly radical, he does not go far enough. In advocating massive production of solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and trains, a “smart grid,” and other industrial technologies, Plan B 4.0 does not question the fundamental system of resource extraction and industrial production. It does not question global capitalism, which will continue to get rich by feeding on human and non-human communities.

The industrial products sold within the capitalist economy are created through a complex global system of mining, refining, production, distribution, and trashing/recycling. In each stage of this process, natural communities of humans and non-humans are exploited, poisoned, and destroyed for the sake of luxury goods like cars and electricity.

Electric cars and alternative energy do not address this fundamental destruction that is required for industrial technology to exist. Wind turbines, to use one example, still require mining for bauxite, the ore refined into aluminum. In central India (and other regions around the world) mountains containing bauxite are blown up and strip-mined to extract bauxite. About six tons of bauxite and a thousand tons of water a required to produce one ton of aluminum. There is no sustainable way to do this – most rich countries have exported this process to poor nations. The pollution is hidden.

This process not only destroys or displaces the non-human life on these mountains, but leads to runoff, pollution, and extirpation of indigenous communities. Smelting bauxite requires extremely high temperatures – usually provided by big dams – and leads to vast amounts of carbon emissions and other air pollution. And the entire system of distribution depends on vast ocean-going ships that burn bunker fuel, one of the dirtiest fossil fuels. It is estimated that one container ship releases as much carbon dioxide as 50 million cars.

Another example: the Toyota Prius, widely praised by environmentalists (including Brown), requires 5 times as much energy to produce as an average car due to the complex process of creating electric motors, circuitry, and batteries. Accounting for production energy and transportation fuel and average over the lifetime of the car, a Prius actually uses 1.4x as much energy per mile as the average American car.

Solar panels provide another example. The average solar cell requires the mining of about 2,000lbs of earth material for Silicon. The production process is extremely dangerous – in China, workers at a solar panel factory went on strike in 2011 because of the pollution released by the plant had toxified a lake nearby that was causing respiratory problems and cancers in the community.

This is just touching the surface of the devastation that is wrought by these “environmentally friendly” technologies. These technologies also require rare earth minerals like cadmium and tellurium, which simply do not exist in sufficient quantities to allow mass adoption of alternative energy.

This reliance on technological solutions is one the major failings of Plan B 4.0. Brown has bought into the hype surrounding these alternative technologies, when in reality they only represent more of the same – more resources extracted from poor nations, more money flowing to corporations and rich nations, more pollution, more destroyed communities. While the standards of research and scholarship in Plan B 4.0 are generally very high, Brown does not apply the same rigorous research methods to the technological solutions he advocates.

A better model for halting global warming would revolve around the creation of land-based communities that are able to take their sustenance from within healthy, flourishing ecosystems that they coexist with. This model is the way of life practiced by humans for 99% of our existence, so it is clearly not impossible, but it would require addressing the serious issue of population, to which Brown turns next.

Step 2: Stabilize Population

In addressing overpopulation Brown is facing an issue before which many have balked, with good reason. There is a history of racism, eugenics, and forced sterilization that makes population reduction a touchy issue to deal with directly.  But Plan B 4.0 takes the right tact. Brown’s plan calls for massive programs of education and empowerment of women, combined with government incentives for small families, widespread family planning programs, and universal birth control availability. This humane and effective model has been used around the world in places like Iran with great success.

While this approach is laudable, Plan B 4.0 could use a slightly more radical feminist analysis. While Brown does call for the education of women, he does not explicitly state that empowered women rarely chose to have large numbers of children. High birth rates usually occur in patriarchal arrangements where women have few rights and little power of their own. Acknowledging this fact and working to dismantle patriarchal social forms will be a much more difficult task than the more straightforward path that Brown presents, but will lead to more lasting and fundamental change in birth rates and the overall direction of society.

Step 3: Eradicate Poverty

By acknowledging the fundamental connections between global poverty and environmental degradation, Brown goes further towards truth than many of his contemporaries. He advocates for debt relief for poor nations, which would go a long way towards relieving the pressures on “developing” nations. He calls for an increase in small gardens and other simple techniques that reduce burdens on poor people around the world, planting forests and allowing degraded lands to fallow.

However, without access to land, poor people have no chance for survival. The critique of contemporary land grabs is an important part of Plan B 4.0. Here Brown details how food importers, nations that cannot grow enough food to support their population, are purchasing and leasing arable land in poor nations to grow food for export. Many times these poor nations cannot even feed their own population, so these vast foreign-held farms must employ armed guards to ensure that the food is not taken back.

Brown understands that agriculture, logging, and overgrazing are devastating much of the land around the world through salinization, soil erosion, and desertification, and that this process is destabilizing populations and leading to poverty and social breakdown.

However, Brown is lacking a fundamental critique of industrial agriculture as a practice. He advocates the use of pesticides and fertilizers, which are overwhelmingly toxic and derived from fossil fuels. He advocates for increased efficiency in irrigation, while acknowledging the fact that 70% of the fresh water used worldwide is used for irrigation. And he advocates for the use of genetically modified and high-yield varieties, which is a gamble with the genetic code. This is also leading to a narrow range of varieties, which are more vulnerable to future disease of plague. The result has been an arms-race between GMO and pesticide companies and the constantly evolving creatures that feed on monocropped fields.

Even more fundamentally, Brown does not appreciate the fact that annual monocrop agriculture is the practice that has enabled rampant overpopulation. Population tracks food supply, and it has been well documented is recent years that many creatures (including humans) regulate their own population based on the food available. When humans began farming the land and stopped getting their food from within biodiverse, perennial ecosystems, they stopped paying attention to these natural limits. They were not sharing their food anymore.

This lack of sharing is also the foundation of modern ecological devastation. After all, agriculture is the practice of clearing natural ecosystems and replanting them for human use. The forests and grasslands that have fallen before the plow are the primary location for species loss worldwide. Ninety-eight percent of old-growth forests and 99% of native grasslands are gone. Human population has grown in direct proportion to the decline in non-human populations worldwide, because they have been consumed by civilization, by agriculture.

Brown’s failure here is the same as above – he has no fundamental critique of capitalism (the dominant economic system) and civilization (the dominant form of social organization – a way of life based on annual monocrops and life in cities). These systems are a major reason why people are poor.

By extracting resources in destructive ways and exploiting workers for less than the full value of their labor, capitalism impoverishes people around the world. A large class of poor people is required for the functioning of the global economy – it is structurally mandated. And civilization is a social form that inevitably leads to overshoot of natural limits, colonial expansion, wars of conquest, further environmental damage, and finally collapse (for a further explanation of these ideas, see Sources). Any efforts to address poverty will have to first deal with the stifling influence of capitalism and civilization.

Step 4: Restoring Earth

The final goal of Plan B 4.0 is to restore natural ecosystems around the world – oceans, grasslands, soils, and forests. In order to protect biodiversity and the range or natural services provided by these ecosystems, Brown advocates massive replanting of forests (as previously mentioned), soil conservation measures, and the creation of protected marine zones in the ocean, as well as a program of parks and other measures to protect biodiversity.

Replanting forests is an important way to restore the life-support systems of the planet, and Brown is the right advocate for it. However, he also advocates for an increase in plantation style forests to be grown for timber and pulp products. While the US Forest Service is a division of the Department of Agriculture, forests are not fields, and few soils can sustain more than three consecutive harvests of timber before soils are too depleted to continue. An imposition of human standards upon a natural system decreases the health of the system, and as such, plantations are not a long-term solution.

Restoring soils is perhaps the most critical task in this section. Terrestrial life as we know it is only possible because of a thin layer of topsoil – without it, plants cannot grow. Brown’s tactic of allowing steeper slopes and other marginal farmland to fallow and return to forest is a good one, but he still lacks a full critique of agriculture as a practice. Annual monocropped fields lead to erosion and loss of soil fertility – this type of agriculture kills the soil. This is true around the world, except in small river valley regions where alluvial soils are constantly replenished.

However, these natural wetlands are also biodiversity hotspots, which means the one place where agriculture can be practiced somewhat sustainably is also the place where it will lead to the biggest loss of habitat for other creatures. Brown’s plan for protecting biodiversity is not elaborate – there are almost no details in the book. But any course of action that does not challenge the human appropriation, destruction, and toxification of land, water, and atmosphere will not lead to substantial progress in the conservation of biodiversity.

Conclusion

Plan B 4.0 is a unflinching attempt to chart a course for sanity, but Lester Brown and his researchers fail to apply the same rigor to human society and proposed solutions that they apply to environmental problems. Brown states that in 1950 the world economy was based on “sustainable yield, the interest of natural systems.” This is simply not true. Europe was deforested before industrialization. So was the Middle East. The forests and soils of North Africa fueled the Roman war machine until they were exhausted, and now support only goats and olives – ecological poverty food that can survive on desiccated, impoverished soils. The forests of the United States were felled largely before the mechanical saw. While industrialism greatly accelerated in the 1950’s, the problem goes much deeper than that.

Brown’s approach, along with the approach of many other environmentalists, is fundamentally anthropocentric and short sighted. He does not account for the experience of prehistory, that span of 99.7% of human existence when the natural world flourished alongside us. He does not even mention indigenous people, the only communities that have truly lived in a sustainable manner. Any understanding of environmental sustainability must advance from the basic position that humans have the ability to coexist with the natural world. These model societies exist, but they are being destroyed by the very industrialism that Brown supports with his calls for alternative technology (for example, the Dongriah Kondh of the central Indian foothills).

Instead of exploring how human societies may better conform themselves to the needs of the land, Brown falls into the trap of reform – how can we adapt nature to better fit our needs? How can we maintain the energy grid, industrial production, a high population, and the conveniences of globalized capitalist civilization while simultaneously addressing environmental problems? The fundamental answer to this question is that such a solution is not possible. In failing to see this point, Plan B 4.0 stumbles and falls along with the vast majority of the environmental movement.

USDA study finds that prairie restoration improves groundwater quality

By Ann Perry

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists are studying the overall improvement in water quality when native prairie vegetation is restored to fields once cropped with corn and soybeans. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists in Ames, Iowa, were part of a team that examined changes in groundwater during prairie establishment at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge near Prairie City, Iowa. ARS is USDA’s chief intramural scientific research agency.

ARS researchers Mark Tomer and Cynthia Cambardella work at the agency’s National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in Ames. Their group studied concentrations of nitrates and phosphorus in groundwater in a 17-acre field that was being converted from corn and soybean row-cropping into a reconstructed prairie. The researchers set up groundwater monitoring wells and collected water samples from 2002 through 2009.

After a final soybean harvest in 2003, the field was seeded with native grasses and forbs. As the prairie became established, nitrate concentrations in groundwater samples declined and stabilized within five years. Initially, nitrate levels in groundwater samples taken at higher slopes averaged 10.6 parts per million (ppm), levels that can fuel the downstream development of the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico.

But nitrate levels in groundwater samples taken near surface waterways averaged only 2.5 ppm, and after 2006, nitrates disappeared from the shallow groundwater near the waterways. Further upslope, groundwater samples still had measurable nitrate levels in 2006, but levels diminished to around 2 ppm after 2007.

Unlike nitrate, however, phosphorus levels did not decline. Between 2006 and 2009, phosphorus concentrations averaged 0.14 ppm along the ephemeral waterways, while average upland concentrations were only around 0.02 ppm. The higher phosphorus concentrations were found in shallow groundwater wells adjacent to grass waterways. When groundwater levels rose enough to produce overland flows that contribute to stream flow, the phosphorus concentrations were high enough to threaten local water quality.

From Physorg: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-prairie-quality.html