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.
Some of these suggestions seem absurd to the point of risibility.
– “Learn about the edible wild plants in your area.” Well, there are some. Not many. And if all the many thousands of residents of the housing estate in England in which I dwell were to use them for food, medicine or anything else, there would be no wild plants at all.
– “Build your own home. ” Why, exactly? And where, exactly? On land needed for organic, regenerative agriculture? Because there’s not a lot of spare land in England. The need is for publicly owned social housing for all, not privileged Green revolutionaries living in their privately-owned oases .
– “Go hunting.” In the north-east of England, in a housing estate? For what, exactly? Dogs? Cats? That’d be popular. And what if even ten per cent of the English population, maybe six million, were to take up hunting, say using rifles? How many wild animals would survive?
– “Practice farming.” That’s the opposite of hunting, ecologically and historically. And my two square feet of available land in front of the flat I rent from a private landlord are unlikely to sustain even a hamster.
Sometimes I wonder at the sanity of Green revolutionaries who seem to dwell on a higher plane than most humans.
I am un-suscribing to Deep Green Resistance as a result of this article- and specifically the photo that accompnies it of a man with a gun. Your suggestions are impractical and unhelpful, and the LAST thing we need is more guys running around with guns! What folks need now are TOOLS and SKILLS.
Resolutions for 2021:
1. spend your money on tools and bulk food
2. if you have a little acreage make it a productive homestead
3. get to know your neighbors, share skills and tools
4. join local organizations- help with community planning
Hello Vicki,
we’re sorry for loosing you as a subscriber. We totally agree with your resolutions for 2021. But we are a resistance movement with the goal of bringing down the culture of empire by any means necessary.
@Vicki Mariner: I completely agree. However, your first two suggestions are themselves impractical for the many people living in poor housing with no space, money or transport for food in bulk, and no land to grow food in. This website is opposed to the socialism which would provide those – it is very focused on a neoliberal, individualistic approach which capitalists love even though it claims to be radical and anarchistic.
@Boris: you failed to add the last part of your sentence “bringing down the culture of empire by any means necessary and no matter how many people suffer and die so long as it’s not us.”
Dear James Simpson,
DGR cares deeply about human rights, always did and always will. None of us wants any people to die or suffer.
Guys, how do you expect to make a revolution without guns?
Especially when the ruling class has robocops and AI-controlled drones?
@BorisWu: well, I’m not convinced. The site is explicitly against any kind of socialist solutions, those which involve solidarity between all kinds of people and especially the poor in the Global South and North and the redistribution of wealth away from the vast inequality that capitalism and neoliberalist economics are increasing right now. Instead, it posits individualist solutions suitable only for wealthy survivalists living in rural USA – such as getting a gun for hunting, farming one’s own land, building our own homes and foraging in the local area. Those are absurdly impracticable for most of the world’s population, but those billions of people seem to be assigned here to the waste-bin of ‘inevitable deaths as the world collapses’.
I stick with this site because I agree with the basic notion that civilisation itself is at least partly the root cause of climate collapse. But capitalism drastically accelerated the process and ending it as soon as possible in favour of various kinds of radically democratic, socialist alternatives is more humane than giving up most of our species for lost.
James, as much as I share some of your reservations about DGR, the idea that growing food is only for rich people is ludicrous.
@I: It shouldn’t be that way, but it is so in most cities around the world. Here in the UK, we have the allotments system which is excellent but has to be rented at a cost and is not available everywhere. Land was taken out of the hands of most people hundreds of years ago: “The Inclosure Acts, which use an old or formal spelling of the word now usually spelt “enclosure”, cover enclosure of open fields and common land in England and Wales, creating legal property rights to land previously held in common. Between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual enclosure acts were passed, affecting 6.8 million acres (2,800,000 ha; 28,000 km2)…
With legal control of the land, landlords introduced innovations in methods of crop production, increasing profits and supporting the Agricultural Revolution; higher productivity also enabled landowners to justify higher rents for the people working the land.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts
Everyone should have access to land to grow food by right but the way this notion is discussed on this site seems to imply that it’s only for well-off people living in rural areas in privately-owned houses. The socialist way is for common ownership and common production, not private, selfish enclaves excluding others without sufficient wealth.
That we are opposed to state socialism (the examples of Lenin/Stalin/Mao) doesn’t mean we are against any kind of socialist ideas or even in favour of any form of capitalism/neoliberalism. Far from it, if you knew our analysis you would know that we are radical critics of capitalism.
We stand in strong solidarity with exploited and poor people all over the world.
I don’t think they mean only private property. Derrick Jensen (I think it was him) actually did suggest people rip off the asphalt of e.g. abandoned parking lots to create communal gardens. Whether this is feasible, whether you’ll be fined or forcefully evicted etc. is a very different issue, but the point is that every available space should in principle be used.