In this episode of The Green Flame podcast, we focus on radical feminism. We speak with Saba Malik and Lierre Keith, with Aimee and Kara in the UK, and with Renee Gerlich in Aotearoa (New Zealand). This episode features music from Beth Quist and poetry by Dominique Christina. Special thanks to Beth Quist and Elizabeth R. for help with this episode.
Radical feminism is a branch of feminism that emphasizes the historical and contemporary importance of patriarchy as a system of oppression, and works to dismantle it by advocating for reproductive rights, fighting pornography and prostitution, opposing male violence, fighting back against the oppressive system of gender, and more. Radical feminism also ties together analysis of economic class, race, and other hierarchies within society.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Bios
Lierre Keith is an American writer, radical feminist, food activist, and environmentalist. Lierre is the author of the novels Conditions of War and Skyler Gabriel. Her non-fiction works include the highly acclaimed The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. She is coauthor, with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay, of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet (Seven Stories Press, 2011) and she’s the editor of The Derrick Jensen Reader: Writings on Environmental Revolution (Seven Stories Press, 2012). She’s also been arrested six times. She lives in northern California.
Saba Malik is a longtime radical feminist, environmentalist, and anti-racist organizer. She studies herbal medicine and loves to spend time in the forest with her children.
Renee Gerlich is a feminist writer and activist based in the Wellington region, in New Zealand.
Dominique Christina is an award-winning writer, performer, educator, and activist. She holds five national poetry slam titles in the three years she competed, including the 2014 & 2012 Women of the World Slam Champion and 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion. She is presently the only person to have won two Women of the World Poetry Championships. She is the author of 5 books.
Aimee and Kara are organizers and radical feminists based in the UK.
How bad is our current trajectory? Looking back through geologic history, there are a handful of examples of abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse, periods when runaway feedback systems changed the planet so suddenly that biomes didn’t have time to adapt. These events were always accompanied by mass death. About 55 million years ago the Earth experienced an era of rapid ecosystem collapse called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which was most likely triggered by a sudden increase in atmospheric CO2 and a cascade of self reinforcing climate feedback systems; this is eerily similar to what we’re witnessing unfold today. One shocking difference between today’s events and the PETM is the rate of change. It’s estimated that the PETM released about 0.24 gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere per year, over the course of 20,000 to 50,000 years. By contrast, humans are now releasing over 37 gigatonnes of CO2 per year (~150 times more). Compared to the PETM, what’s unfolding today is more akin to an explosion, which means Earth’s ecosystems will have dramatically less time to adapt. Any reasonable person would conclude that we’re now in the midst of a global mass extinction, and that the only rational response is to cease all industrial scale ecosystem destruction in order to mitigate the harm.
Unfortunately, humans have developed an extreme addiction to industrialism, an addiction so severe that many people prefer to retreat into delusion rather than face the consequences of withdrawal. A common excuse for continuing the addiction is that “ceasing industrial-scale exploitation of Earth’s ecosystems would result in a lot of people dying.” While this is technically true, it blatantly ignores the obvious conclusion that continuing industrial scale ecological exploitation will result in essentially all people dying, alongside the vast majority of other species. These ridiculous mental gymnastics would be painful for a healthy person, but they are commonplace among addicts — after all, immense cognitive dissonance is less excruciating than consciously acknowledging that you are cannibalising your children’s futures in exchange for modern concenviences. How then are we supposed to mitigate ecological destruction in the midst of a planet ruled by irrational addicts? It seems reasonable to rule out the possibility of doing so via consensus. What about mass mobilisation against industrialism? Given the fact that any meaningful action would result in a significant decline in the quality of life of every “civilised” culture on the planet, mass mobilisation seems unlikely; most of these people will be easily distracted by delusions and false solutions, both of which will be sold at rapidly inflating prices. So that leaves us with asymetric and unpopular solutions — after all, the majority of the world is addicted and addicts become upset when you take away their drug.
Deep Green Resistance approaches the problem from this perspective, that any viable strategies must be executable by small numbers of people and must not require public support.
If it was a baby, by then it would learn to refer to itself
by name, echo what people say and – what is comforting –
understand 10 times more than it can put into words.
18 months.
Can we transform the whole world of interwoven links
in a time it takes to decompose a cigarette?
Half home
Half asleep
You make yourself half of a usual coffee dose,
with half spoon of sugar
The mug this time definitely half empty
You comb half of your hair
While half of your dog
Wiggles its half tail
So you take it to the park
That used to be half as big
You only meet half people
Who half-heartedly tell you half-truths
And it is not until when you are back home at half eleven
That you realize that you yourself are just a half
The other part
Extinct
Forever
Though we know very little about lasting
Imagine the world in which half of what you call home is gone.
Half of everything you love, erased.
New WWF report found that forest animals populations have declined by 53 percent within just 50 years. 1000 times faster than natural extinction rate. Within our lifetimes forests might be inhabited just by the ghosts.
Angry beast
Surely am angry, but the beast? No, merely misunderstood beauty.
I was talking in season changes, waves, frequencies…
I cried, you built dams.
You will think of climate collapse as a payback, yet it is just another language.
One that finally you might comprehend.
Yours,
Earth
PS. Just kidding.
Never been yours.
Last tribe
They will want to know what we believed in.
What did the gods promised us, what miracles
we have been waiting for.
They will speculate what languages we spoke
as they were not able to describe the urgency
or to analyse solutions.
They will research what calendar we used
since it did not predict the end, or what kind of watches
showed that we still have time.
They will look for mitigating circumstances.
Proofs of mass hypnosis, amnesia, manipulation.
They won’t find anything.
Development
Our child would have uneven
teeth and a birth mark on the right
hip. The rest would be a fight
for domination: eyes that change
color, like mine, when I am happy,
or yours so black. that it is impossible
to distinguish them from pupils?
Yours curly or mine straight?
Maybe it would love spicy food
after me or have a pepper allergy
like its father. I wonder if it could
still choose its food.
Would it inherit your pure as seagull’s
laughter, or the one with a hidden question
mark like mine evolved? Would there still
be seagulls for the reference?
Most importantly: would it have lots
of reasons to laugh?
Hopefully it would get skin
after you as it is more resistant
to heat. But you disagree as my skin
colour is more resistant to humans.
You think that we would teach it to protect
nature. Before I leave, I respond
that by then there might not be much left
to protect.
Katrina Dybznska is an activist and educator. She won the second place award in the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize. She is the author of „Dzień, w którym decydujesz się wyjechać” (The Day When You Decide To Leave), Grand Prix of Rozewicz Open Contest 2017, and is a laureate of national competitions in Poland. She has been publishing short stories, concept book, science fiction, reportage and poetry, but feels most attracted to genre hybrids. Katrina is a graduate of the Polish Non Fiction Institute.
Featured image by Max Wilbert, used with permission.
I want to tell you a story. A story about permaculture, food chains, friendship, love and death. People are storytellers. We transport information through stories, or narratives, to use the more sophisticated term.
Actually I wanted to go with my good friend Cengiz to a political event, a meeting of the initiative aufstehen (stand up) about the resistance of the yellow vests in France. However, Cengiz decided to spend the evening with his newly hatched chicks, his cats and a good friend whom he looks after because she has addiction problems. He is one of the finest characters I have ever met. I taught him how to kill. We have already taken the lives of a many proud roosters together. At the same time, I have never met a person who cares more about his animal friends than he does.
Without him, I had no desire to go to the event. I wanted to spend such a wonderful spring evening in the garden. That was a good thing, because I think I learned much more there.
I heard voices all around me. It was the voices of the toads that migrated from the forest into my garden to perform their ecstatic mating rituals. The three ponds I have built over the last few years were suddenly full of toads, talking loudly to each other. I consider it a great honor that they lay their eggs in my ponds.
Derrick Jensen says “So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is.”
Listen. In medieval fairy tales, toads are a symbol of wisdom. In many tales there is the hero who suddenly understands the language of the animals after a magical initiation event. Medieval people still had a relationship to the natural world and an understanding of the wonders of life. What the toads tell me is that whether we call ourselves quite immodest Homo sapiens sapiens, the wisest of wise, wolves, bears, bison, toads or any of a thousand other names, we are all sitting on the same boat.
The world speaks. They all speak. The chicks who are calling for food. The toads with their mating cries. Trees communicate with each other and certainly with us. If we had not forgotten how to listen and if, as members of this culture, we had not largely given up our empathy, we could never allow this mass murder to happen.
It was not right to exterminate the wolves. The only way we can all permanently exist together is to recognize the needs and lives of others, as as important as our own lives and needs. Moreover, life is sacred. All life.
This is, in my understanding, the core statement of permaculture and the only way for us and all other species to survive. We can fantasize all we want about colonizing Mars or other planets. All this is pure technocratic ideology. It has never worked. We are still all on the same boat.
The toads are much smaller than the ones I saw 10 years ago. Through the war of our culture against insects, we are depriving them of food. Insects are the animal basis of the food chain. To exterminate them is an abysmal stupidity and will cost us dearly.
Last year I wanted to participate in the toad rescue operations that environmentalists carry out every spring. The toads have to cross roads on their way to their spawning grounds; the toad rescuers collect them in buckets and carry them safely across the road. Last year, the toad rescue was canceled because there were too few toads. They live in warlike conditions, but life wants to live. They still migrate, sing, mate and lay their eggs.
I had to think of the film Life is a Miracle by Serbian director Emir Kusturica, which takes place during the Bosnian War. The protagonist wants to commit suicide after his son was taken prisoner of war. But then the Serbian Militz hands him a young Muslim woman as hostage, with whom he falls in love. They sleep together while bombs fall in the background.
Life wants to live.
Recently, I killed two quails. It was hard. I cut their heads off with sharp poultry scissors. The eyes and beak opened a few more times in shock. The little body twitched in my left hand in agony. I cried. Then I plucked them, gutted them and ate them. It was the best meal I’ve had in months.
If you are a self-sufficient chicken farmer, you usually only have to perform the ritual of slaughter once a year. In autumn you kill the surplus roosters and the hens that no longer lay.
Since all my wonderful chickens, turkeys and also my young peacock were massacred this winter by a hungry marten, I have given up breeding chickens for the time being and now try quails.
Quails are smaller, but they are much more efficient feed converters and have a better ratio of body size to egg size. All processes are much faster in quails than in chickens, which means for me that I will have more meat more often, which in turn means that I will have to kill much more often.
I breed them in my incubator, I raise them, I feed them. Like all children, they are always hungry. They always want to eat and grow so fast that I can almost watch them getting bigger. With big intelligent eyes they look at me and shout “Feed us, feed us”, as little chicks all over the world call out to their parents. They scream for life. I love these little, sweet, intelligent birds and I love raising them. Most of them I will slaughter and eat one day.
I often feel like a cannibal eating his own children. But so is the harsh reality, adult knowledge, true wisdom: As long as we live on this earth, we consume the lives of others. Even the great Homo sapiens sapiens is, biologically, nothing but an animal. And as such we are part of the archaic food chain that we in the West destroy so diligently.
The whole history of the world is the history of eating and being eaten. One can explain the whole world in food chains, and understanding food chains means understanding the world. The real world, not the artificial structure of civilization that we have created from ideologies, slavery and exploitation. Civilized people think they can cross any natural boundaries, including food chains. A fatal error.
I consider vegetarianism and especially the extreme form, veganism, to be fundamentally wrong. I myself grew up mostly as a vegetarian, fortunately only from an age of about 8 years. I understand the moral arguments very well, but my body always said something different. I always had a ravenous appetite for meat and stuffed it into myself wherever opportunity presented itself. I think I might have grown bigger and stronger, if I had consumed more meat as a child.
Vegetarianism and veganism are modern phenomena with a religious character. The way our culture is treating our fellow creatures is a sin, without any doubt. But the vegan is pulling out of the affair, washes his or her hands in innocence, and often tries to convert others with religious zeal and a moral club.
Never before has a human society existed that could do without animal products. The Inuit, who consume almost exclusively raw meat and fish, have the best results in blood panels ever measured in humans. A friend of mine and her daughter, both of whom have been vegetarians for several years, have very poor blood panel results. The doctor explained two options: either eat meat or take a handful of vitamin supplements every morning. The 21 year old daughter chose the latter for moral reasons. Her pale skin and glassy eyes speak of malnutrition.
One last argument: Does any of you know a second generation vegetarian or vegan? I met one once. A 3 year old girl, whose mother was a very dogmatic vegan. Even her shoes featured the inscription “VEGAN” in big letters. Her little daughter was severely physically and mentally handicapped, could hardly speak, had glassy squinting eyes and such weak bones that her legs had grown crooked and she could not walk.
On my stove the bones of the slaughtered quails simmer slowly and for a long time, to later feed my own as nutritious broth.
I think that this woman will never free herself from the vegan ideology, because if she had to admit what she did to her daughter, she would have to spend the rest of her life in the hell of immeasurable guilt.
We all have to eat.
I can’t imagine a more intimate relationship than eating someone else. Your flesh becomes mine. We unite. This must be seen as a sacred act.
The least I have to do is to give my quails the best possible living conditions. And I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to worship them with rituals as holy animals. Haven’t indigenous people always done this, with salmon, bison, and many other animals that were their food source, before the Europeans exterminated them (the salmon, the bison, and the native humans…)?
When I take someone else’s life to eat or otherwise utilize him or her, I am responsible for the wellbeing of that species. Both for moral reasons and for pure self-interest. I want to continue eating in the future.
Seriously, I think that a hunter-gatherer culture is the most respectful way of dealing with our fellow creatures. Stable natural communities, from which healthy, strong, wild animals can be hunted when needed, to which appropriate respect is shown in cult and ritual. I would like to hunt, and in a healthy culture I would certainly be a hunter. But the completely degraded ecosystems no longer allow this. Animal husbandry is therefore a necessary compromise.
From a permaculture perspective, the final solution of a reasonable culture would be a large-scale and worldwide ecological restoration, solely for reasons of morality and justice. The restoration of habitats and the transition to a respectful, strictly taboo- and ritual-regulated extraction by hunting as source for meat.
If, for example, the American prairies, with their 100 million murdered bison were restored, one could have a considerable amount of high-quality bison meat every year, without the enormous ethical problems and environmental hazards of factory farming.
Currently, the United States spend about 69 million dollars per hour to finance its gigantic military apparatus. In Germany, this sum amounts to a paltry 5,023 thousand dollars per hour, and rising. If we would spend these gigantic sums not for imperialism, war, murder and destruction, but for ecological restoration and thus for the future of our children, projects like the vital cleaning and regeneration of the oceans and the regeneration of healthy, game rich forests, meadows and prairies would appear quite feasible.
Unfortunately, our culture seems to strive for the apocalypse as the final solution.
Preventing it from destroying the food chains and ultimately all life on the planet must be our common and most sacred duty. For moral reasons, for reasons of justice and for pure self-interest. Because we all have to eat. Now and in the future.
Over the last few days, a small gang of anarchists and social ecologists have been smearing Deep Green Resistance with accusations of “eco-fascism.” Normally, we like to ignore these ridiculous lies and the toxic people who make them. But for the sake of clarity, and because the issue of eco-fascism is an important one that we don’t often touch on, please know:
Deep Green Resistance is 100% an anti-fascist organization. All forms of fascism, “ecological” or otherwise, rest on a foundation of white supremacy, patriarchy, and industrialism – three atrocities that DGR categorically rejects. It is an inherently hateful, destructive ideology that has no place in the environmentalist movement or anywhere else. As part of our dedication to resisting all forms of oppression, many of our members have put their lives on the line organizing against white nationalists, Nazis, and other reactionary scumbags. Be assured that any endorsement of fascism is and always will be grounds for dismissal from Deep Green Resistance, and that we consider the entire notion to be morally depraved and philosophically bankrupt.
These most recent accusations are dishonestly capitalizing on an interview one of our leaders, Derrick Jensen, did with Hubert Collins. Collins reached out to Derrick and asked for an interview, which Derrick gave. Unfortunately, Collins posted the interview on Counter Currents, a right-wing news website that hosts anti-feminist, conservative, and white nationalist content. Derrick was unaware of Collins’ views and disavowed him completely upon finding out. Nothing in the interview itself even hints at any fascist views or duplicitous motives. And if you don’t trust us, trust them – Collins himself prefaces the interview by saying that Derrick is an opponent of white supremacy and “surely hates everything about Counter Currents.”
This is actually a fairly common problem with prominent leftist voices – Noam Chomsky, for example, once gave an interview to Hustler magazine without realizing it would be sandwiched in between vile pornography. Of course, the armchair activists attacking us are not receiving interview requests from anyone, so it stands to reason that they wouldn’t understand how things like this can happen. But happen they do, and only the most disingenuous and opportunistic trolls would see them as evidence of secret fascist sympathies.
There is nothing new to these accusations, of course. We in Deep Green Resistance have been routinely smeared as fascists for years now. The reason why is simple: Because DGR proudly rejects the white-chauvinist, Eurocentric settler mindset of the modern American left. Most fundamentally, we are not a human supremacist organization. We believe that environmentalism exists to defend the health and freedom of the whole living world, of which human beings are merely a small (but precious!) part. Further, we believe that, when our way of living comes into conflict with the health of the land and the non-humans with which we share it, our way of living is what must go.
For many people, these are upsetting statements; for those activists whose idea of liberation is tied up with air-conditioned subway cars and automated luxury goods, they can be downright terrifying! It’s no wonder, then, that so many techno-utopians are quick to assume that we support sterilization, eugenics, “population control,” or even mass killings or genocide. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. All those things are both morally unacceptable and practically foolish. DGR advocates for the targeted abolition of industrial civilization, not indiscriminate destruction or mass extinction. To be honest, we find it particularly sad that so many “environmentalists” simply cannot imagine a biocentric worldview apart from these atrocities – but their lack of imagination is not our fault, and we’d appreciate it if they stopped making up nonsense.
Deep Green Resistance has also been accused of supporting nationalism, Trumpian border walls, and even white separatism. These are more ridiculous lies. No one in DGR approves of the Trump administration’s policies towards migrants, or those of any imperial politician. However, unlike many other American leftists, our hatred of colonial borders comes from the colonial part, as opposed to the blanket rejection of any and all restrictions on movement. We believe that the land belongs to its indigenous keepers, and that their historical and cultural ties to that land are to be celebrated, revered, and protected. We don’t believe that “the Earth belongs to everyone,” or that a perfect world would be one in which the children of colonizers are allowed “free movement” over the lands of the colonized. In our perfect world, settler-colonialism is abolished and what belongs to the indigenous is returned to the indigenous – not redistributed to the settler nation.
Unfortunately, this is enough to have many anarchists and social ecologists – steeped as they are in the Manifest Destiny ideology and its pathological hatred of boundaries – to accuse us of closet fascism. Some have gone so far as to compare our defense of indigenous land ownership to the “Blood and Soil” politics of the National Socialists in Germany! The Eurocentric chauvinism required to conflate every possible form of national identity with the specific depravity of white supremacy is as dumbfounding as it is disgusting. We can only encourage these folks to look beyond 20th century European history for a change, as uncomfortable as that might make them. Hopefully, they would come to learn from indigenous notions of tribal, national, and ethnic identity that are distinct from Europe’s pathetic and vicious fixation on the colonial fantasy of race.
You may have heard the expression, “When you’re used to privilege, equality can feel like oppression.” Well, the settler-colonial left needs to learn that when you’re used to complete and total freedom, any boundary can feel like fascism. After all, prominent leftist heroes like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault condemned the “police state” for preventing men from raping children. Other leftist figures in the United States denounced the Black Panthers and the American Indian movement as “bourgeois nationalists” for excluding whites. We in Deep Green Resistance are tired of this Eurocentric, patriarchal chauvinism, never moreso than when it is passed off as some sort of radical devotion to social justice. We will continue to organize as a radically anti-colonial, radically anti-patriarchal, radically anti-industrial – and yes, radically anti-fascist – movement. We encourage those who make a name for themselves smearing us to get off Facebook and Twitter for a moment and try to do the same.
Human industrial civilization is killing the planet. This we know. How do we know? Because every square mile of ocean has at least 50,000 pieces of floating plastic in it, because we burn 3 million gallons of fossil fuels every minute, because 90 percent of the large fish in the ocean and half of the world’s forests are gone.
When people ask “How can we stop climate change?” what they are really asking is “How can we stop climate change without substantially changing how we live on the planet?” and the answer is: we can’t. That’s like asking how we can save the salmon and the Orcas without removing dams, stopping industrial logging, stopping industrial agriculture, stopping industrial fishing, stopping industrial plastics, and stopping climate change. Again, the answer is: we can’t.
So the right question to ask is not “How can we stop climate change?”, the right question to ask is “Where is my loyalty?” And if our answer to the question “Where is my loyalty” is anything other than “With nature” then we can’t expect life on this planet to go on much longer.
We cannot live and thrive on this planet without functioning ecosystems, without abundant biodiversity, without clean air and a healthy climate, without clean water, without intact forests. When we place our loyalty with nature, everything else falls into place. When we place our loyalty with nature, everything we must do to stop climate change, to save the Orcas, to save the salmon, to save the forests becomes crystal clear. When we place our loyalty with nature, stopping climate change is easy.
We civilized industrial humans abdicated our loyalty to nature a long time ago, when we began extracting more from nature than we give back, in order to accumulate capital. Now-a-days we call this capitalism. We forgot that “nature” is in fact our family, our relatives, our life blood, and began to think of nature as our property. After a while, we civilized beings became so infected with the sickness we know as capitalism that we even wrote laws protecting our right to nature as property. Most people now believe that we have the right to treat nature as our property, which often means we believe we have the right to use it and destroy it. But this “property” — meaning rivers, trees, soil, animals, earth, water, air — is not ours to own. Rivers, trees, soil, animals, earth, water, and air are beings in their own right. They have been here longer than us and they will be here long after we’re gone. They have just as much right as we do — perhaps even more so — to exist and to flourish on Planet Earth.
How dare we treat nature as property!
Upton Sinclair wrote that it’s hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. Every aspect of how our current industrial civilization operates on Planet Earth depends on our not understanding that the trees, the rivers, the salmon, the orcas, the air we breathe, the entire living earth, are all our relatives, and that our very lives depend upon theirs.
Well it’s time to wake up. It’s time to pay attention. It’s time to understand. Nature is not our property. We are nature. Nature is our life blood. Nature has the right to exist and flourish. It’s time to place our loyalty with nature.
