by DGR News Service | Feb 10, 2021 | Education, Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying, Movement Building & Support, Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization
This article originally appeared on Mongabay.
Editor’s note:
DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. We acknowledge that they are victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that not humans as a species are inherently destructive, but the societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption and accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy we call civilization.
Featured Image: The Belo Monte hydroelectric complex is the third-largest in the world in installed capacity, able to produce 11,200 megawatts. Copyright: PAC-Ministry of Planning, Brazil [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0].
By Philip M. Fearnside/Mongabay
- The company responsible for Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam claimed in a letter to the New York Times that the company respects Indigenous peoples, the environment and international conventions.
- The Arara Indigenous people contest the company’s claims and call attention to a series of broken promises.
- The Belo Monte Dam is notorious for having violated international conventions and Brazilian laws regarding consultation of Indigenous peoples, and for its massive environmental and social impacts.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.
Even in this era of “alternative facts,” the letter to the New York Times from Norte Energy (the company responsible for Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam) will surely be remembered as a classic.
The letter opens by claiming that “From the beginning, the deployment of the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Power Plant in the Brazilian state of Pará has been guided by respect for the local Indigenous populations and by laws, ratified protocols and conventions.” News of Norte Energia’s letter reached the local Indigenous populations, and they are rightly enraged. A response from the Arara People (Figure 1) is translated below. For whatever reason, the New York Times declined to publish it.
Letter from the Arara People to the World
We the Arara Indigenous People of the Iriri River are tired of being deceived by Norte Energia. We want respect! Ever since the Belo Monte Dam arrived, our situation has only worsened. Our territory has become the business counter of the world. Our forest is suffering a lot. With each passing day we hear more noise from chainsaws eating our territory. Our river is growing sadder and weaker every day. This is not normal. We are being attacked from all sides. We have never been in such need. We are very concerned about the future of our children and grandchildren. How long will Norte Energia continue to deceive us? Why hasn’t the disintrusion [removal of invaders] of our Cachoeira Seca Indigenous Land been carried out until today? We ask everyone to help us build a great campaign for the defense of our territory.
The Arara People will never abandon our territories. Our warriors will not allow our forest to be destroyed. Together we will protect our Iriri River.
Timbektodem Arara – President of the Arara People’s Association – KOWIT
Mobu Odo Arara – Chief
Norte Energia’s claim of being “guided by… laws and ratified protocols and conventions” is an amazing rewrite of the history of building Belo Monte a dam that managed to be completed despite massive efforts both within Brazil and abroad, to have those conventions respected. Belo Monte violated Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO-169) and the Brazilian law (10.088 of Nov. 5, 2019, formerly 5.051 of April 19, 2004) that implements the convention. These require consultation of affected Indigenous people to obtain their free, prior and informed consent. Note that the operative word is “affected,” not “submerged.” The claim was that the Indigenous people did not need to be consulted because they were not under water.
Downstream of the first of the two dams that compose Belo Monte is a 100-km stretch of the Xingu River from which 80% of the water flow has been diverted. Largely disappeared are the fish that sustained the populations of the two Indigenous lands along this stretch, plus a third located on a tributary. Both the ILO and the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States recognized violation of ILO-169 by not consulting Indigenous peoples impacted by Belo Monte. Over 20 cases against Belo Monte are still pending in Brazilian courts; only one case has been decided, and this was in favor of the Indigenous people. However, the case was appealed to the Supreme Court where it languished while the dam was built and has still not been judged.
Bribes paid by construction companies for the contracts to build Belo Monte were a star feature in Brazil’s “Lava Jato” (“Car Wash”) corruption scandal, with confessions from both the side that paid and the side that received. This scandal helped explain why Belo Monte was built despite the Xingu River’s long low-flow period when no or very few turbines at the main powerhouse can operate (2020 was a dramatic example). Climate change will make this worse still.
The Norte Energia letter asserts: “The plant has a valid operating license and generates energy for millions of Brazilians, grounded in the principles of environmental responsibility and social justice in deference to the culture of the local Indigenous populations.”
Mention of the “valid operating license,” reminds one of the Federal Public Ministry in Belém describing Belo Monte as “totally illegal.” The dam forced its way past multiple legal challenges by means of “security suspensions,” a relict of Brazil’s military dictatorship that allows projects to go forward despite any number of illegalities if they are needed to avoid “damage to the public economy” (originally law 4348 of June 26, 1964, now law 12,016 of August 7, 2009).
With respect to Norte Energia’s boast that Belo Monte “generates energy for millions of Brazilians,” the dam does indeed produce electricity, although industry gets the biggest share: only 29% of Brazil’s electricity is for domestic consumption. Much more electricity would be available if the billions of dollars in subsidies that the country’s taxpayers gave Belo Monte had been used for other options, such as energy conservation, halting export of electricity in the form of aluminum and other electro-intensive products, and tapping the country’s enormous wind and solar potential.
Norte Energia’s letter concludes that Belo Monte is “grounded in the principles of environmental responsibility and social justice.” This is certainly a most memorable “alternative fact.” The implications for environmental justice of Belo Monte and other Amazonian dams are dramatic (see here in English and Portuguese).
by DGR News Service | Feb 7, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Listening to the Land, Movement Building & Support
Sage Songs: Or What the Thacker Pass Rabbits Know About Music
by Will Falk
Rabbits taught me that each sagebrush has a unique voice. I often take long walks across the steppes in Thacker Pass. It’s not uncommon to spy a rabbit – with one floppy ear pointed one way and one another – peeking out of the tangles of sagebrush branches.
Today, as I wandered across the basin floor, I asked Thacker Pass aloud if she wanted to talk with me today. As the words were pulled from my mouth by a strong, cold north wind, a rabbit sprang from bushes at my feet, throwing snow up with his strong back legs. I followed his tracks as long as I could until they crossed an exposed patch of dirt where the sun had thinned the powder. I dropped to my hands and knees to study the dirt for the imprint of rabbit feet. The wind blew with a gust.
And, that’s when I heard them.
The sage surrounding me reached towards the sun to let the wind wash through their branches and leaves. I was transfixed by the fragrant melodies formed in the frictions between sage and wind. I do not know for how many measures I knelt there listening to the unmetered chorus sung in keys no human singer can achieve swirling around me.
Eventually, I opened my eyes to find myself looking at the rabbit’s tracks a few yards away. As I crawled along the rabbit’s path, different sections of ensemble rose and fell. I realized that each individual sagebrush with its own specific pattern of leaves, specific orientation to the wind, and specific structure of branches contributed its own sonic hues to the masterpiece.
As I leaned my head towards the heart of the closest sagebrush, the sunshine fell through the clouds and the sagebrush’s twisting limbs. I recognized the sun as the great conductor of this symphony. I saw how the sagebrush grew towards the falling photons while intentionally choosing the specific patterns, orientations, and structures that, with the help of the wind, would create the most enchanting sounds.
It was the most fascinating song I’ve ever heard.
Finally, the wind touched my bones and reminded me that my blood would only remain warm on the exposed steppes for so long. As I rose from my crouch, I spotted the rabbit hiding under an ancient, thickly knotted sagebrush. He made eye contact with me, straightened his ears for a moment, and then settled back into the auditory rapture I had just emerged from.
#protectthackerpass
Image by Max Wilbert
Will Falk is a DGR member, lawyer for the natural world and is currently in direct action to protect Thacker Pass. He has also journeyed in conversation with the Ohio River. You can read about Will’s journey with the Ohio River here.
For more on the issue:
by DGR News Service | Feb 6, 2021 | Culture of Resistance, Movement Building & Support, Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization
How do we fight? All together. What is resistance? Organized.
Passions, Humour and the Vocabulary of Strife
by Trinity La Fey
“Men understood what it is to be in a war and you gotta’ be armed. Women don’t have that knowledge.” – Phyllis Chesler.
. . .
“But humour, after all, in patriarchy, is just seeing the way things are, you don’t have to try.[…]Meanwhile rape increases out there, the destruction of the environment increases out there, in here, but women are dealing and dealing. And think of the consequence of the therapeutic[. W]hat happens is objectification of the speaker[. I]nstead of real passion, they offer plastic passion.[…]When I feel passion, I feel: Love, for example, Joy, Sorrow, Rage, Hope, Despair. These are passions that are real. I name them, they have an object; they have an agent or a cause, right? You enrage me[. H]e did this and I hate it; I’m enraged at him, at them, etcetera. You can name the agent with real passions. Now, consider the plastic passions of therapy. You know, I see them as floating blobs, sort of bubbles. There’s never any cause out there. If there’s any problem it’s you. You have to deal with it, this blob that’s floating around. For example depression: depression, I suggest, is a man-made passion. I don’t think we have it. I just think[: ‘]Oh, I’m feeling depressed today. You see, I had familia for breakfast and . . . and I just can’t seem to get my shit together.’” – Mary Daly
. . .
Part of being effective in an organization is knowing where you belong in it. What are you good at?
For my part, I cannot say my strength is organizing others, but spectacle and argument in the most political sense. That doesn’t let me off the hook for trying to organize, which I do also, it just means that trajectory is best served by interest and aptitude. Recently, it was pointed out that my interest in male violence and environmental destruction is concerning from the outside. How many hours a week do I spend investigating all the crazy? I didn’t know. Okay, 80 hours+ is an unhealthy lacks balance, maybe I can scale it back. My experience in Policy Debate, was seasoned by a life where argument was an impassioned, often dangerous risk. As far back as I can remember, any serious discussion, of any kind, has been accompanied by a body reaction wherein I shake and weep. It does not impair my ability to listen or argue, but it does happen every time; I know why, it is non-negotiable. My body can be understood and interpreted, but not overridden.
Coming into the tournament practice of three hour debates was something I had stamina for. Success was a direct benefit of being able to ‘spar’ in a way that risked so little as to allow for the development of skill. Now, I know how to be an effective agitator. Which brings me to twitter. Last year was my first to really experience a social-medial platform, largely where public policy and debate have moved. Although it has proven to be a uniquely valuable resource, it was designed to be addictive to its traumatized product: the users. It is enemy territory.
There are specific reasons for entering that are a danger to forget.
It was not a place to move my real friendships into; it was a place to find strangers; it’s a place where the ethos is: fight me. These are sparring partners. From the insulated attempts at consciousness raising done here spring the people we don’t know we deal with every day: who mandate the policy of our lived lives by each interaction. From the ethereal melting pots of YouTube, and now twitter, I found common allies with the natural world and moved those relationships into physical reality. So many organizations awaited, about which I would otherwise have no awareness. Glad is not the right word, but I do not regret the time I have spent there, learning about who we have become.
If debate taught me anything, it’s that the person with the most evidence wins; and here we get to the messy stuff. On what grounds is truth provable if not by the self-evident nature of itself? We try definitions. Sometimes that doesn’t work. Why not? Why does the power of naming need to be as individuated as experience? Does it? What power do I have to name if I am not bothering to brave the conversation with people I don’t agree with, in places I don’t like?
Usually, if I see unironic pronouns in someone’s bio, it doesn’t matter how hilarious their tweet was, I cannot bring myself to follow them. Nowhere on my list of things to do today is getting doxxed by a misogynist; I’m busy. Monika Lewinsky gets a pass, because the thing is, it does matter what happens to our collective minds. Bean Dad doesn’t have a name anymore. His life is different now, because of a collective of people. Someone had retweeted a particularly vile passage saying, “this is psychotic behavior.” I thought, “Oh yeah?” and read all the way down. All the comments. Down to the bottom.
It was impossible to look away because it was a spectacle.
Some childless fathers outed themselves and everyone else – including all the colourful pronoun people and the radical feminists and the right-wing housewives and the left-wing teachers – we all came together and said “no”. It felt good because, psychotic, evil, psychopathic or complicit, we all know what wrong is, but also because the platform is addictive and fighting is a rush. It is an affront to need to fight, to feel a boundary violated (as anger induction has brilliantly been identified). It feels good to make it stop, to make it right, to fight back. To say no.
But it feels better to say yes and mean it. Strife is complex. The complexity is ever compounded by the emergent nature of life and time. What is going on between the living planet and industrial civilization may not be rightly classified as war until effective resistance has been established to fight back. While it closely resembles many things termed ‘war’ in the recent past, it is industrial civilization acting upon: destroying the living planet, while the living planet continues to provide industrial civilization with the capacity to do so. What do we call this? I am not the first to appreciate the parallel here to battery. We are, as Earthlings, wild things, born into enemy territory.
Industrial civilization has changed every landscape.
There has to be some calm, radiant center from which no strife emerges, a source of real Joy, some benevolence in which to thrive for survival to be worth it. Retreat into the ethereal is one psychological strategy, when even the body is colonized. Retreat into identity politics or lifestyle activism or isolated, survivalist enclaves may serve, for those afforded it. Always, always this escape, this endless exploration of colonized frontiers to flee. What if we weren’t afraid to say that we have real, physical enemies that we could defeat? What would that change? Inside such a whirlwind, it can be difficult to negotiate all the feelings alone and impossible to relate, if thoughts and feelings are able to condense enough to crystallize, with so many of the necessary terms made forbidden as negative or even the ignorance with which we all come to new terrain.
Why not start with hate? Who hasn’t heard that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it is indifference? Bullshit. Men don’t make torture porn of appliances. Love has never been required for the avalanche of revulsion and Rage that I understand as the experience of hating someone. They are not a food that just hasn’t grown on me. I don’t merely dislike them. It most often precluded any chance of love. How can I – why should I pretend to anyone that I have not felt this way, that, if so confronted with a gross boundary violation, I should not feel this way? What does it mean when someone hates back? Is it speak-able? Is it different somehow? How? I think about what it has taken for me to be able to say, “fight me,” and not mean ‘I hate you’: for disagreement to be a reason to engage, rather than refuse to listen or share, to neither presume to be the final arbiter of reality, nor assume bad faith, but to risk a little; or, to say, “hate me,” and mean it: to be able to withstand someone. Practice helps.
Better yet, Rage.
I think the reason Rage is so vilified is that, like Fear, it is no longer a personal experience, but a collective, spiritual, chemical one. The Fear. The Rage. Possessions of a sort: coming from somewhere, there for a reason and eventually something else’s food. When I feel Rage, I feel it overtake me. Often, I lose vision, or it darkens and pinpoints. I say things in a loud, clear voice that I do not remember after. I cannot hear the voices of strangers. When it breaks, it is like a disrupted spell. I shake afterwards. Rage has done heroic things through me, but with a steep tax.
Much like Fear, it is not because, in my subconscious, I am my own oppressor and I just need to love myself enough to love others. It is about pain aversion, death aversion; it is because our inner, ancient brain has signaled that there is a legitimate threat it does not find itself capable of matching right off. It is my amygdala saying “get out now”. That is not to suggest these states are incapable of being distorted into paralysis or unjudicious application, or that they are without their own character and momentum.
Rage can be blind, and has done less than heroic things through me.
Having an enemy is a hard thing to admit when the stronger urge is to give as the Earth does, to love as mothers do, but that doesn’t stop them from existing. Mothers know what to do when their children are threatened. The Earth becomes less generous daily. Having an enemy does change you; it draws out characteristics capable of matching the things our amygdala tells us are scary. That biology developed to address periodic threats, but not to run all day every day; we are supposed to change back. To resist, to truly stand our ground, we must know where we are. Not who we think, but what is functional, where we physically are. That is in our bodies, as part of the land. That is the territory from which we can no longer afford to retreat. Our visions of ourselves will change as arguments move through us. Truth, the singular, is something we will catch glimpses of and try to piece together. Doing that as a collective is language.
We cannot be punished out of or persuaded into what we observe. We can only listen as we are able and share with those who’ll listen. Conversationally. Physically, to resist takes good health: strength, endurance and flexibility. Fighting is a tough one. Having been in fights, I don’t get ideological about this. Being in a fight is a physical experience, different than sparring, horsing around, different from heated discourse. Once in a fight, verbal or physical, it’s almost got its own world. Inter-dimensionality makes so much sense in fights. Everything is distorted, sharp and slow. Waves of fight wash in an ebb, leaving tired, heaving creatures who want to slink off and lick wounds but aren’t sure if it’s done yet. It is very important to pick your enemies and your battles. I say this because I need to hear it. Who is really prepared to have a conversation about something, and who is a drone? Who is a dangerous drone: know when to walk away; know when to run. Practice helps, but practice sucks and is expensive.
When I think about The Sorrow of war, and of warriors, I do not pathologize it.
Sorrow is not a sickness or a pastime of the feeble. Sorrow is the reasonable expression of experiencing loss and pain. To be forbidden the experience of our own grieving stifles our health and ability to heal. You feel your own real feelings all day. I say to me. Being emotionally resilient cannot mean repression, which only putrefies whatever is being buried, but a capacity to be uncomfortable, to reflect and change.
In the service of making Sorrow an illness, the language of ‘internalization versus externalization’ and of ‘self-esteem’ or ‘self-loathing’ has emerged to replace the terms ‘oppressed versus oppressor’ and ‘trust in others to listen’ or ‘desire to cease pain’. Fuck ‘em. Do you. Healing requires a nurturing environment, with the cause of harm removed, wherein you are not forced to react to villainy. That is not universally afforded to everyone. To whatever extent you can, balance between the work against and the work for. That ‘for’ is you too: your Joy, your Love, which all dies with you, or before, if it is not nurtured, lived and shared. Once hurt, healing takes time and can hurt more than the injury. Take your time. Feel your pain. Heal. Remember.
When The Bards used satire, they deposed kings.
They would only ever use satire for this reason and only when absolutely necessary. What kind of power is that? The remaining shadow of this tradition, in lore, is the Jester: the only court member who can get away with telling the truth. What kind of power is it when the king doesn’t get your jokes, but the rest of the court does and they do nothing? When Machiavelli wrote The Prince, he did it as a work of satire. Today his name is synonymous with authoritarianism as a ruling strategy. What power is it when no one gets your jokes? Theory is important, but action more so. As our actions are stifled, so our thoughts about potential actions. How to get free? Together. While spectacle might hold attention, only collaborative, permeable theory has the strength to make action inevitable, even desirable by far over the alternative: that we will continue to degenerate into increasingly stratified cybernetic zombies until we drive to extinction every last Earthly biome. What power?
Unfortunately, the sociopathic and necrophilic are better at war; unclouded and unbothered by the ramifications, those traits are designed to win wars. Clinical psychopathy was previously thought to be rare. Now, the very structure of modernity demands sociopathy as a baseline business model while the vast, common traumas of peoples’ personal lives are made unspeakable and left to fester. That is a recipe for a populace physically incapable of empathy on a massive scale.
So, back to being part of something worthwhile:
can there be legitimate honour in some twitter feeding frenzy? Where does honorable conduct live? What does empathy feel like when the person across from you has none? Are they an enemy? How to keep from catching? How to know? Without the capacity to feel shame: to know when we have done wrong, used The Rage unjudiciously, been paralyzed when we should have acted, or nursed an addiction, we would have no sense of our accomplishments. Workaholism has not delivered The Joy of accomplishment like pornography does not deliver The Joy of relationships. Maybe integrity is not something we are born with or into, but something slowly earned by learning to recognize its absence. Without the capacity to feel that vacuum, we wouldn’t have sought.
Joy guides. In shared pleasure, laughter, play, in being among beloved, I learn the codes of social conduct from people who can say, “fight me,” and mean ‘I love you’. Without the capacity to reflect, in discomfort, we cannot recognize patterns. Bean Dad is not my friend, but he is not my real enemy either. That flash community dispersed and the Earth remains largely undefended.
After switching from Debate, to Drama, then Humour, and then Duo, I tried Poetry.
If the performance arts taught me anything, it’s to know your audience. The judges didn’t care who was right, who had the evidence, whose argument was impenetrable, they wanted you to make them cry, and they wanted to love you. It helped if you made them laugh, but they had to want to see you at finals: you couldn’t bore them. The best way to do that was not universal, but that is, nearly universally, the way people judge.
Gloria Steinham’s work wasn’t popular because she was the best writer in the second wave, but because she was able to infiltrate male exploitation of poor women with her beauty and expose it to the middle class. Andrea Dworkin’s work wasn’t unspeakable. She spoke it; it was unhearable because she shouted it in overalls, with a big mouth and crazy hair. They were the spectacle. Not because they wanted to be, not because they particularly enjoyed the attention, but because they were women. What they had to say barely got through the endless attention given to their appearances. Because they were women: without the spectacle, we wouldn’t have even that much.
Marry Harris Jones wasn’t ‘The Most Dangerous Woman in America,’ at 83 years old, because she organized people, although she did that also, but because she put people to shame.
Her power was in stamina. My power will never be in being a body in the street, although I do that also, but in being one of many, in the sheer amount of evidence collected, in being able to illustrate an argument that can stand for itself, in knowing an audience well enough to make sure that they can hear it, in remembering our place in the Earthly legacy of women this side of the burnings.
My place is to float away alongside them, like ash, when my time comes, to forfeit all my names back into dust and droplets. Until then, I will fight and convalesce and it will mean ‘I love you’.
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
by DGR News Service | Jan 31, 2021 | Indigenous Autonomy, Movement Building & Support, Repression at Home
DGR stands in solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. They are often decisive defenders of the landbase that is their home and also the most vulnerable people, facing endless attacks, harassment and genocide by the culture of empire.
This is an excerpt from an article originally published on Mongabay.
- The Philippines’ Department of National Defense has unilaterally terminated an accord that ensured the 17 campuses of the University of the Philippines were off-limits to the military and police.
- The defense secretary justified the move by alleging that insurgents from the banned communist party and its armed wing are using the campuses’ sanctuary status as cover for their recruitment and propaganda purposes.
- The decision has alarmed displaced Indigenous students who are harboring at UP’s Quezon City campus after the military bombed or took over their schools in a counter-insurgency campaign that began in 2018.
- Critics say the move is the latest blow to human rights and environmental activists in the Philippines, following the recent enactment of an anti-terrorism law seen as giving the armed forces free rein to perpetuate abuses in a country already rated as the most dangerous in Asia for environmental and land defenders.
MANILA — Indigenous youths harboring from a military-led counterinsurgency in the Philippines may soon lose the only safe space they have known for the past two years.
Under a nearly 40-year pact, the 17 campuses of the University of the Philippines are off-limits to the country’s military and police. Since 2019, a group of 68 Indigenous students and teachers have taken refuge at the UP campus in Quezon City, where they attend a makeshift school following the forcible closure of more than 160 schools catering to Indigenous communities, or lumad, in the southern island of Mindanao.
But in a letter dated Jan. 15 this year to the UP president, National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana unilaterally declared an end to the pact, effectively stripping the sanctuary status of the campuses of the country’s leading public university.
Lorenzana cited “recent events” that identified UP students as members of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (CPP/NPA), and said that “national security issues” and the safety of students against rebel recruiters are the main driving forces for the termination of what’s known as the UP-DND accord or the Enrile-Soto accord.
“The Department is aware that there is indeed an ongoing clandestine recruitment inside UP campuses nationwide for membership in the CPP/NPA and that the ‘Agreement’ is being used by the CPP/NPA recruiters and supporters as shield or propaganda so that government law enforcers are barred from conducting operations against the CPP/NPA,” the letter, addressed to UP President Danilo Concepcion, says.
The Department of National Defense (DND) says it will not “station military or police” on campuses and will not “suppress activist groups, academic freedom and freedom of expression.” The DND has nothing to gain from suppressing these activities, Lorenzana wrote: “We want them [the youth] to see their Armed Forces and Police as protectors worthy of trust, not fear.”
But despite the secretary’s reassurances, the news has triggered alarms for Indigenous students, who could now be targeted in military raids. The development threatens a repeat of the military attacks on Indigenous schools that occurred after President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in Mindanao in 2017, says Ruis Valle of the Save Our Schools Network (SOSN).
In 2018, the military conducted a series of campaigns and operations to crack down on lumad schools in Talaingod, in Mindanao’s Davao del Norte province, after Duterte threatened in 2017 to bomb the schools.
He had accused the CPP/NPA of using the schools as training grounds.
Since then, more than 160 schools catering to Mindanao’s Indigenous inhabitants have been bombed or transformed into military detachments, and completely shut.
The group of Indigenous students and teachers who sought sanctuary at UP’s Quezon City campus have consistently called for the reopening of Indigenous schools forced to close by the government, the SOSN says. It adds the now-scrapped UP-DND accord “served as a protective barrier for lumad children from direct military and police harassment.”
Human rights and environmental groups have also expressed concern at the DND’s latest move, calling the accord’s termination an attack on UP “as a democratic space.”
Since 2012, the university has “opened its doors to the lakbayan and kampuhan of indigenous people, national minorities, and farmers protesting mining plunder, land grabs, and other attacks against their ancestral lands,” the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, an NGO, said in a statement to Mongabay.
The university has also been “one of the few safe spaces” for environmental and human rights defenders to mobilize amid the government’s militaristic approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. Duterte signed a controversial anti-terrorism law during the lockdown, which critics say worsens an already fragile climate for environmental defenders and Indigenous groups in the Philippines. Eco-watchdog Global Witness rates the country the most dangerous for environmental and land defenders in Asia.
“The University of the Philippines is one of the pillars of academic freedom and critical thinking in the country,” Kalikasan said. “It is because of this freedom and critical thinking that the University can produce great minds that have excelled in different fields, including environmental protection and defense.”
Featured Image: The University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, Quezon City, Metro Manila.
Image by Ramon FVelasquez via Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
by DGR News Service | Jan 4, 2021 | Movement Building & Support
This list of radical new years resolutions comes from Deep Green Resistance volunteers and organizers.
Learn survival skills.
Learn about the edible wild plants in your area. Build your own home. If the past year has demonstrated anything, it is that the industrial civilization and global supply chain cannot be relied upon. Practice farming. Go hunting. When the system eventually comes down, will you be able to provide yourself with that which is the most essential to you?
Learn self-defense.
We are at a war with those destroying the planet. Not all of us need to be in a combat situation. In fact, most of us will hopefully never face violence. But all of us defenders of life on Earth need to be prepared for situations where our physical safety may be compromised.
Build a community of resistance.
As much as the individualist doctrine wants us to believe, we are not isolated beings. We are a part of a web of relationships. We need these relationships to survive. We need our community to survive. One of the end goals of DGR is to create strong communities of resistance. A resistance community is self-sufficient, resilient, and most importantly, actively opposes the dominant culture.
Build strong relationships with organizers / allies.
A strong network of allies give us logistical, physical and emotional support throughout our actions. However, not all of these organizers share the same political ideology with us. Nevertheless, we can, and should, work together to find common cause. Participate in their activities. Interact and share each other’s worldviews. Build trust and solidarity.
Self Care as part of political warfare.
With homage to Audre Lorde, you must do everything you can to care for yourself. Warriors are needed. Take some of the love and awe you have for others and the natural world and give it to yourself. Take that break, dance, spend time with loved ones, grow tomatoes, light candles in the bath, get enough sleep, eat nourishing food, and take action. There is a balance to be had; sometimes you need to rest and sometimes getting involved in front line resistance, direct action, writing, etc. is the right path for you at the moment.
Read.
Some incredible minds have taken time to put their thoughts and careful analysis on paper. We can benefit from decades of thinking and learning with very little effort. There’s also a lot of pith out there so be discerning or ask for recommendations.
Resist. Resist. Resist.
The dominant system is fucked up in all imaginable ways. Everyday we come across situations where we can either comply with or resist the system. Some days resistance means helping organize a blockade, other days it just means voicing a radical opinion within a trusted group of people. Seize these opportunities. Resist to the dominant system whenever you get the chance.
by DGR News Service | Jan 2, 2021 | Movement Building & Support
Max Wilbert responds to the statement “we are all doomed.”
by Max Wilbert
Anyone who is honest about the present state of affairs on this planet knows that things are very bad.
The oceans are dying. Coral reefs are collapsing. We’re living through a 6th mass extinction event; around 200 species are driven extinct every single day. And things are getting worse, fast. Emissions are rising, not falling. Pollution is increasing. Population is exploding. Energy consumption is skyrocketing. The permafrost is thawing and life as we know it—perhaps life itself—is under serious threat.
Meanwhile, economic inequality is at it’s highest level ever. The rich grow ever richer as the poor work to the bone, grow sick, and die. Meanwhile, popular culture glorifies technology, fast cars, and pornographic images. We live in a culture of adolescents ruled by sociopaths. The Amazon is falling, the forests burn, and millions of tons of plastic churn through the seas.
Despite how bad things are, there are multiple issues with the mentality of “we are doomed.”
First, it presupposes failure. That is not something we can afford at this point. If we have already failed in our minds—if we are already convinced of our defeat—that is a problem.
It is a victory for the dominant culture when we have lost our will to fight. One of the main objectives in any war is to destroy the opponents will to continue fighting. The dominant culture is always trying to destroy our will to fight, in many different ways, through all kinds of different propaganda. This is something that we need to overcome. When we become apathetic, when we say “there is nothing that can be done,” we are surrendering. And I, for one, do not mean to surrender until ever last tree, every last fish, and every last human being is dead.
As long as there is wildness and beauty in this world, there is something worth fighting for—and there is no time to waste wallowing in self-pity.
In some senses the doomer mentality is a parallel to the consumer mentality that says “everything is okay, go on with your shopping.” These two mindsets (doomer and consumer) coexist together very well. Both allow the status quo to continue.
A truly oppositional mindset looks at the dominant culture that is destroying life on this planet, sets itself in conscious political opposition, and organizes from this mentality, not from a sense of doom.
We need to organize with an understanding of reality. Things are very bad. We are deep in a hole. It’s not hyperbole to say that humans could even be driven extinct due to runaway global warming, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, and the collapse of the soils. These are serious trends, but it is not too late for life on this planet.
Action now can make a difference.
I have interviewed some of the top climate scientists in the world, and without exception, they all told me “it is not too late.” Everything we can do now to reduce the destruction of the natural world will create a better future.
Does this mean we have a great future? That everything is going to be fine? That there will be no problems? That we will live in utopia in no time?
Not at all. We are in for some dire times ahead. It is possible that in years to come we will look back at years like 2020 and, despite coronavirus, we may say “that was an easy year.” It’s likely that things will get worse.
It is ironic to me that many doomers, like me, actually have a roof over their head, food, and clean water. Many people around the world are already living in a state of collapse. In the short term, the future is grim.
So what can we do instead of simply saying “we are doomed” and then walking away? The more mature response is based on love for the planet, the beings on it, our family and friends, both human and non-human. The mature perspective works to protect and enhance the future no matter how much hope there is.
If you love then you keep fighting.
Sometimes you win. Sometimes you will change the situation and improve outcomes. There is no magic formula to make things better, but we can make fundamental changes. We can. We must.
If we defeat ourselves in our minds by believing that we are doomed, without taking action and fighting for what we love, then our souls have already been defeated.
If you would like to hear more about this subject, you can listen to an interview Max did with Michael Dowd on his “Post Doom” podcast.
Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists in post-WTO Seattle. He is the editor-in-chief of the Deep Green Resistance News Service. His latest book is the forthcoming Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About Itco-authored with Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith. His first book, an essay collection called We Choose to Speak, was released in 2018. He lives in Oregon.
