Resistance News
April 9, 2019
by Max Wilbert
Deep Green Resistance
https://www.deepgreenresistance.org
Current atmospheric CO2 level (daily high at Mauna Loa): 411.33 PPM
A free monthly newsletter providing analysis and commentary on ecology, global capitalism, empire, and revolution. For back issues, to read this issue online, or to subscribe via email or RSS, visit the Resistance News web page. Most of these essays also appear on the DGR News Service, which also includes an active comment section.
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In this issue:
- With China no longer accepting used plastic and paper, communities are facing steep collection bills, forcing them to end their programs or burn or bury more waste
- Seattle: A City on the Cutting Edge of Empire
- Party With Ecocentric Values Challenges the Political Orthodoxy in Tasmania
- Indigenous Peoples Call for Help After Devastating Wildfires Sweep Through Their Communities
- Surviving the Violence of Transactivism: Interview with Ana Marcocavallo from Argentina
- WWF-Funded Guards Helped Poachers, Then Tortured Informant Who Tried to Stop Them
- Submit your material to the Deep Green Resistance News Service
- Further news and recommended reading / podcasts
- How to support DGR or get involved
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“[Laws like the Endangered Species act] exist not to protect the natural world, but to neutralize revolutionary energy”.
– Will Falk
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With China no longer accepting used plastic and paper, communities are facing steep collection bills, forcing them to end their programs or burn or bury more waste
[Link] Editor’s note: this article illustrates how recycling is a profit-driven industry operated by and for corporate power. As capitalism moves deeper into crisis, recycling will sometimes become more profitable, and sometimes collapse under situations such as this.
By Michael Corkery
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.
Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.
Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
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Seattle: A City on the Cutting Edge of Empire
[Link] by Max Wilbert
Seattle is the “cutting edge” of hyper-modern industrially-outsourced capitalism.
This is why, despite having the most progressive city government of any big city in the country, Seattle has been unable to address a crisis of homelessness or pass taxes on big corporations. The liberal, progressive culture of Seattle will never provide real solutions to the problems of capitalism and industrial civilization.
Despite any claims to the contrary, Seattle is an oligarchy run by the rich, for the rich. The city was created as an imperial outpost of a society hellbent on logging all the old growth forest and stealing all the land from the indigenous inhabitants. Today, it has morphed from primarily a lumber and salmon extraction site to a central managerial site for global techno-capitalism.
The psychology of an exploitative colonial state is reflected in Seattle’s dominant news organizations.
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Party With Ecocentric Values Challenges the Political Orthodoxy in Tasmania
[Link] by Dr. Geoff Holloway
Ecocentrism is an all-encompassing concept that covers geo-diversity and biocentrism but extends the latter. Also, by definition, eco-centrism is the basis of calls for the Rights of Nature and is the fundamental basis of Deep Ecology (including Deep Green Resistance). Eco-centrism is the opposite of anthropocentrism. This creates a divide within the Green/environment/conservation movement – but a largely unacknowledged divide (however, United Tasmania Group [UTG] has experienced clashes with the anthropocentric section of this movement).
As Kopnina et al point out (2018), anthropocentrism supports and is based on utilitarianism and human self-interest. They also argue that there is no such thing as ‘good’ anthropocentrism or, for that matter, ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ human interests. I have argued elsewhere about the limitations and consequences of utilitarian and bureaucratic attempts to redefine wilderness (Holloway 2018).
Anthropocentrism is not just about capitalism and economic elites, it is about the ideology that privileges humans above the rest of nature (Kopnina et al, 2017). Also, often over-looked conveniently by leftie conservationists is the fact that ‘socialism’, however defined, is based on (over) exploitation of nature.
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Indigenous Peoples Call for Help After Devastating Wildfires Sweep Through Their Communities
[Link] by Ana Barón / Intercontinental Cry
Este artículo está disponible en español aquí
An unprecedented wave of wildfires has swept through indigenous communities in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Three deaths have been reported, and up to 700 people have been listed in critical condition. In the aftermath of the fires, the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo Peoples have declared a state of emergency and turned to the international community for help.
Located on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is one of the world’s highest coastal ranges. Its millenary guardians are the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo, the four indigenous descendant communities of the ancient Tayrona civilization.
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Surviving the Violence of Transactivism: Interview with Ana Marcocavallo from Argentina
[Link] by Luis Velázquez Herrera / FRIA (Independent Radical Feminists of Argentina)
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, a group of radical women are about to speak in the middle of a crowd at the assembly “Ni Una Menos” (Not one more woman) that took place anticipating preparations for the coming March 8th, you can listen to the noise and a unison shout against them to “go away!”
There is a man standing beside them yelling with a defying fighting pose, pointing at them aggressively. He is dressed in a plaid miniskirt and white shirt. He is far taller than the average women present.
From the multitude of radical women that are preparing to speak, a woman with a calm expression appears, she wears a black blouse and short hair, asks for the microphone: “Freedom of speech, female partners, freedom of speech”!
Her name is Ana; she knows she is unwelcome, as are her partners from FRIA/Feministas Radicales Independientes de Argentina (Independent Radical Feminists of Argentina) and RADAR Feministas Radicales de Argentina (Radical Feminists of Argentina). They are attending what they thought was a democratic assembly to present their abolitionist stance against sexual exploitation. The man dressed in a miniskirt, who hasn´t stopped threatening them through shouts and flinging fists in the air, throws himself over her to take away the microphone.
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WWF-Funded Guards Helped Poachers, Then Tortured Informant Who Tried to Stop Them
[Link] by Survival International
Park officials in India’s Rajaji Tiger Reserve colluded with poachers in the killing of endangered leopards, tigers and pangolin, according to an investigation by a senior wildlife officer.
The accused officials range from the park director to junior guards. WWF-India boasts that it trained “all Rajaji frontline staff in skills that were vital for protection,” including law-enforcement. It also provided vehicles, uniforms and essential anti-poaching equipment to the guards.
The investigation, reported in India’s Down to Earth magazine, found that not only were officials helping to hunt down and kill wildlife, they also beat and tortured a man named Amit – an innocent villager who was trying to stop the poaching.
Officials are reported to have arrested Amit under false charges, resulting in him being detained for up to a month. He was also beaten and given electric shocks by a wildlife warden and two range officers.
These revelations of serious human rights abuses by guards trained and supported by WWF follow the recent Buzzfeed exposés that WWF funds guards who kill and torture people.
The involvement of those supposed to protect wildlife in hunting is common. A UN report in 2016 confirmed that corrupt officials are at the heart of wildlife crime in many parts of the world, rather than tribal peoples who hunt to feed their families.
Stephen Corry, Survival International’s Director, said today: “Rangers who poach as well as violate human rights won’t surprise those environmentalists who’ve been speaking against fortress conservation for years. Corrupt rangers often collude with poachers, while tribal people, the best conservationists, bear the brunt of conservation abuses.”
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Contact Deep Green Resistance News Service
[Link] To repost DGR original writings or talk with us about anything else, you can contact the Deep Green Resistance News Service by email, on Twitter, or on Facebook.
Email: newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
Twitter: @dgrnews
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Please contact us with news, articles, or pieces that you have written. If we decide to post your submission, it may be posted here, or on the Deep Green Resistance Blog.
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Further news and recommended reading / podcasts
Will Falk—Derrick Jensen Resistance Radio—March 24, 2019
Karla Mantilla: author of Gendertrolling—Derrick Jensen Resistance Radio—March 31, 2019
Andrew Glikson, Earth & Paleo-climate scientist—Derrick Jensen Resistance Radio—April 7, 2019
White Shamans & Plastic Medicine Men
Cherry Smiley on Indigenous Feminism
Porn, Trafficking and the Social Construction of Masculinity
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How to support DGR or get involved
Bring DGR to your community to provide training
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“The tough gangster type of detective fiction was of little use [in underground operations], and, in fact, likely to be a danger. Help and support to the Norwegian resistance could only be provided by [people] of character, who were prepared to adapt themselves and their views—even their orders at times—to other people and other considerations, once they saw that change was necessary. Common sense and adaptability are the two main virtues required in anyone who is to work underground, assuming a deep and broad sense of loyalty, which is the basic essential.”
– Colonel John S. Wilson, leader of the Norwegian Section of the Special Operations Executive in British Exile during WWII
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