Wet’suwet’en Solidarity Actions #ShutDownCanada

Wet’suwet’en Solidarity Actions #ShutDownCanada

By Max Wilbert

Featured image: solidarity actions initiated by Deep Green Resistance in Eugene, Oregon shut down multiple Chase Bank locations in the area on February 13th. Photo: Max Wilbert.

Solidarity actions in the wake of a Canadian government raid on an indigenous community resisting pipeline construction are paralyzing the Canadian economy, shutting down factories, leaving hundreds of trains idling, and leading to shortages of propane, construction materials, and grain.

Over the past week, dozens of solidarity actions have been held across Canada, as well as in the U.S. and Europe. Significant train blockades in New Hazelton and in Tyendinaga Mohawk territory have stranded tens of thousands of travelers and led CN Rail corporation to “discontinue service in key corridors.” Occupations and demonstrations have disrupted key ports, political offices, banks, and transit corridors in more than 25 Canadian cities and towns.

Coastal Gaslink Pipeline

These solidarity actions are happening around the issue of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline, or CGL. CGL is in pre-construction and is a key component of “LNG Canada,” a $40-billion project which would export “fracking” gas from Canada to international markets, running through British Columbia. The project is expected to generate 13% annual profits. It has been given billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies by the Canadian government.

Five clans of the Wet’suwet’en Nation have opposed the CGL pipeline for over a decade. The Unist’ot’en Clan (Chief Freda Huson) and other Wet’suwet’en clans including the Gidimt’en and Likhtsamisyu have re-occupied their traditional land, built a healing center for indigenous youth, and now practice traditional medicine, hunting, gathering, & ceremonies. They have also evicted pipeline construction crews and surveyors regularly over the past five years. The pipeline is a major threat to their clean water, salmon runs, and the land which is the foundation of their culture.

Raid and Police Occupation

Last Thursday, after CGL corporation secured an illegal court injunction, Canadian federal police (RCMP) began a militarized raid on the indigenous land of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. Over the course of four days, RCMP arrested dozens of land defenders at gunpoint, including Freda Huson and Dr. Karla Tait, clinical psychologist at the Unist’ot’en Healing Center, and forcefully removed them from their land.

This is despite the 1997 “Delgamuukw” Canadian Supreme Court case which recognized title of the traditional leaders. The Canadian government, Coastal Gaslink, and funders like JP Morgan Chase (Chase Bank) are ignoring Canadian Law, indigenous law, and the danger to future generations, and are using violence to maximize their profits.

Deep Green Resistance Solidarity Action in Oregon

Deep Green Resistance stands with the Unist’ot’en. Our community has participated in solidarity actions in Canada, and this evening (February 13th) we organized disruption of three Chase Bank locations in Oregon to demand Chase cease funding the project, create additional political pressure, encourage customers of Chase to divest their funds, and to build awareness of the situation.

Led by Illahee Spirit Runners drumming to break up the humming monotony of these corporate offices, we took this action to disrupt business as usual, build strength in our community and in ourselves, and show our solidarity with the land and water defenders in Wet’suwet’en Territory. Our actions led to initiation of “lockdown procedures” at multiple Chase bank locations across the Eugene/Springfield area.

Night sky and stars at Unist'ot'en Camp, Morice River at Night

Night sky and forest overlooking the Wedzin Kwah (Morice River)  at Unist’ot’en Camp. Photo by Max Wilbert.

Strategic Analysis

(Note: we do not represent the Wet’suwet’en or speak on their behalf in any way, shape, or form. This is an independent, outside analysis. While we support their struggle, this does not imply that they agree with our analysis or support our strategy.)

The resistance of the five Wet’suwet’en clans to Coastal Gaslink, and to previous pipeline plans that were modified or canceled at least partially as a result of their work, has been successful thus far. This has been achieved by leveraging tactical and strategic advantages, by gathering a broad alliance of supporters, and through tenacity and hard work. Solidarity actions remain a powerful arsenal capable of causing millions or billions of dollars in economic damage to the Canadian state, and disrupting political operations. These actions can create a more favorable climate by increasing pressure on fence-sitting politicians, media, and populace, but could also backfire by empowering right-wing politicians and pro-state forces calling for increased repression.

It remains to be seen what will come next. Strategic options are relatively limited. It is clear that the pipeline company and Canadian government can and will bring force and money to bear, and with $40 billion on the line they are determined. However, they are also constrained by the court of public opinion, at least to some degree. Talk of reconciliation in Canada has created a political climate that limits the level of brutality which the government can bring to bear. However, as we have seen, they have attempted to bypass this by limiting the access of journalists, blocking people from filming, detaining and threating media with arrest, and otherwise limiting press freedoms. Grassroots people’s media has been important in partially bypassing these restrictions.

The Canadian government is unlikely to give up, and this fight may continue to be a long one. The Wet’suwet’en will not give up either. They are defending their ancestral land and the land of their children. It is unclear what the outcome will be. Broader political shifts in the Canadian government may present a large danger. Like neoliberal politicians in the U.S., the Trudeau administration’s two-faced language of reconciliation paired with violent escalation of repression and pro-industry wrangling will enable more openly conservative politicians to justify much more repressive measures. This parallels Obama’s responsibility for a massive increase in deportation and militarized repression of the uprising at Standing Rock, which in a sense paved the way for Trump’s increased escalation of racist rhetoric and policies.

More broadly, this fight is only one of countless fights globally. To reverse the existential threats of species extinction, global warming, desertification, ocean acidification, and the increasing corporate takeover, commodification, and destruction of the entire planet will require not just stopping new projects like Coastal Gaslink, but dismantling and shutting down the existing industrial infrastructure of the colonial extraction economy.

At Deep Green Resistance we believe the struggle of our time must be fundamentally revolutionary in character—that it will require the “forcible overthrow of the current social order, in favor of a new system.” Like slavery in the Antebellum south, colonialism is so deeply embedded in the Canadian and American systems that some form of warfare is likely to be necessary to uproot it. We do not believe in random acts of violence. A true revolutionary movement is built aboveground and underground, and consists of legitimate organizations coordinating struggle and seizing moments of opportunity without compromise. There are many possible ways this could play out, and we have our own ideas of what proper strategy may look like. We urge our readers to study and consider our strategy and other revolutionary strategies and historical case studies in detail, since victory will require a variety of perspectives working in parallel.

Radical Dreamwork

Radical Dreamwork

By Rebecca Wildbear

Cottonwood trees shaded the little river, while the rising sun brightened the blue sky and lit up the expansive slopes of the Sonoran Desert, dotted with prickly pear, saguaro, and cholla cactuses. I was in Aravaipa Canyon, a gorge in the Pinal Mountains of Southern Arizona, where I would prepare thirteen people to be in ceremonial conversation with the land for three days and nights. Aravaipa is an Apache name which means “laughing waters,” and the name fits. The river was brisk and clear as it churned its way around boulders and rippled over gravel bars in a playful, bubbling chorus.

On that first morning in the desert, I’d awakened with a dream.

I see a woman about to be raped. She’s yanked out of the driver’s seat of her car by a man who holds her captive while undoing his pants. A male friend turns to me and asks if he should try to stop it.

“Yes, absolutely!” I respond in haste.

            My friend picks up a club that resembles a baseball bat and moves toward the rapist. My stomach knots; what if I’ve just sent my friend into a dangerous situation and he gets killed or hurt? I decide to join him and approach the rapist from behind, while my friend approaches him from the side. As we get closer, the rapist stops, and I feel surprised when he turns around with his hands held up in surrender.

Although our dominant culture marginalizes dreams, we must learn to pay attention to the wisdom and direction they offer. The Tz’utujil Mayan culture elected officials based on the number of villagers who dreamed of that person occupying the position.[1] The dreamwork of the Iroquois preceded the dreamwork of Freud and Jung. The Iroquois knew dreams were sacred and that to ignore them was to invite disaster;[2] they understood that the human soul makes its desires known through dreams.[3] Founder of Dream Tending, Stephen Aizenstat says dreams arise from the “World Dream;” they offer us a glimpse of the desires of the world so we may “act in the world, on behalf of the world…in Archetypal Activism.”[4] When the wisdom of our dreams guides our direct action, we’re able to bring together our visionary and revolutionary natures in a radical dreamwork. With the earth dreaming through us, we’re guided to take the actions that matter most.

Dreams hold a multiplicity of meaning and, like trees, rivers, and birds, each dream element has intelligence; it usually understands more than our waking ego. I guide others to recount their dreams in present tense, inviting them to be in the dream so its visceral impact has an opportunity to arise or burst forth.

On that morning in Aravaipa Canyon, I closed my eyes, returning to the dream about the rape. What was it asking me to experience and how could I steep myself in its mystery? The edgiest part of my dream was asking my friend to risk his life. I felt afraid that he could get hurt or die. I feel similarly when I send questers on a 3-day solo fast. Although I’ve taught them ways to be safe in the backcountry, anything could happen.

On a vision quest, each quester is invited to let go of their identity and listen for a deeper call—in this way, we discover who we really are and how we may serve the world. Questers are invited to undertake a psycho-spiritual death, an initiatory dismemberment, which can lead to a mature adulthood. Such a journey is inherently risky, even beyond the solo days.

Founder of Animas Valley Institute, Bill Plotkin writes that the great crises of our time stem from breakdowns in natural human development. He says that healthy, mature cultures have always emerged from nature: “from the depths of our individual and collective psyches, from the Earth’s imagination acting through us, from the mythic realm of dreams or the Dreamtime, from Soul, from the Soul of the world, from Mystery.” We can’t think our way into maturity; we cultivate our wholeness through allowing the natural world and our dreams to guide us.[5] Yet we can only become whole within a healthy Earth community. So what about the clear-cut forests, drained wetlands, and plowed prairies?

As mountains are mined, rivers are dammed and poisoned, and hundreds more species become extinct each day, my heart breaks at our human failure to protect our nonhuman relatives on whom we depend; they’re dying because they depend on us too. As the oceans fill with plastic, the ice melts, and greenhouse gas emissions grow higher each year, I feel the rape of the Earth alive in my body and psyche. Perhaps this dream invites me beyond myself. What if this dream is asking me to seek assistance in stopping the rape of Earth?

Rape is Acceptable

I had a lot of dreams about rape in my early thirties; it felt unstoppable. How surprising that this dream ends with my friend and I stopping the rape.

I remember guiding women survivors of violence on Women of Courage Outward Bound courses in my twenties. We’d listen to the women’s stories, the other two female guides and I, and then one night, to our surprise, we shared our stories in hushed voices, confessing that we too were survivors. The line between heroine and victim, wilderness guide and survivor, blurred.

It’s hard to perceive rape when you’re raised in a culture where rape is acceptable. As the most under-reported crime, rape[6] is notoriously under-investigated, largely unpunished, and rarely spoken about; less than one percent of rapes end in a felony conviction. Even then, a perpetrator does not often receive jail time, especially if they knew their victim; this sends a message that it’s acceptable to rape someone you know.[7] In eight out of ten cases of rape, the victim knew the person who sexually assaulted them,[8] and ninety-three percent of perpetrators of child sexual abuse are known to the victim.[9] Our culture barely acknowledges rape happens and nearly condones it. The rape of women, the abuse of children, and the destruction of land is our norm.[10]

Sister Carl, my junior high school teacher, repeated daily: “Silence gives consent, girls.” Perhaps she was trying to help us avoid some trauma she’d suffered. But what did the boys in the room hear? What if there wasn’t an opportunity to speak, or we were too young to understand? And what of the Earth? If we are deaf and dumb to her language, does our lack of hearing exempt us from the harm we cause? Perhaps the memory of Sister Carl’s words is echoed in the message of this dream: speak, act, stop the rape.

Rape is Legal

American law is orchestrated to protect abusers,[11] and it legalizes the right to exploit land and water, while simultaneously making it illegal to protect them. “Sustainability itself has been rendered illegal under our system of law,” said Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.[12] Our dominant culture, global industrial empire, does not acknowledge the rape of the Earth. Instead, it talks about acquiring resources and the right to exploit. While the Earth suffers massive environmental devastation, many call it climate change and focus on human survival, but dealing with climate change within the values of our dominant culture will only allow the rape to continue.[13]

Our ecological crisis is sourced in a “collective perceptual disorder,”[14] a “collective myopia”[15] that misses our innate connection to Earth. Our culture is founded on the misperception that nonhumans aren’t alive and have no feelings or consciousness; this allows us to perpetuate the lie that no rape is happening at all. To stop a rape, we have to perceive that one is happening, and to do that, we must recognize that we live embedded in relationship with all of life on the planet.

How will I ask people to help me stop the rape if they don’t see it? Dissociation, denial, and silencing perpetuate trauma; to heal, the truth must be told. Although the “ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness,” remembering terrible events is part of restoring justice.[16]

How would you respond if someone you love was threatened? When we see our earthly relatives being harmed, aren’t we equally responsible to act fiercely and lovingly to protect them, like a mother grizzly looking out for her cubs? Fighting back isn’t wrong; it’s relative to the situation in which we find ourselves. It is just as wrong and harmful “to not fight back when one should as it is to fight when one should not.”[17]

The Love of Trees

I know how it feels when others don’t see the rape. My neighbor friend and I were four years old when we had our first sleepover. When I returned the next day, sick with a fever of 103, no one guessed that my neighbor’s father, Jack, might have hurt me, even though his wife sometimes came over to our home when he was drunk to avoid being hit. No one found it odd when I said my vagina hurt and suddenly refused to attend nursery school. I screamed and cried until I was allowed to stay home. No one wondered why my friend, Jack’s daughter, was so troubled. I still remember when she stabbed me in the belly button with a needle. After playing with her, I often returned home with bite marks and bruises up and down my arms.

When I kept insisting that my vagina hurt, my mom took me to the doctor. She stayed in the room while the white-haired man examined me. I asked her later what he had said, and she told me that he said I needed to use less soap.

Being told everything was fine was confusing when my body knew a different truth—one that my mind didn’t know how to hold, let alone put into words. Although in the dream my friend could see the rape, no one saw it when I was four.

But I wasn’t alone; I lived in trees. The thick, ancient trunk of a giant ash tree that rose well over 100 feet in my backyard was the center of my world. Down the hill in a grove of pines, I played in needles, sometimes climbing to the tippy top, arms and body wrapped around the thin tip, the weight of my body gently swaying from side to side. In summer, I crawled to the far reaches of the cherry tree’s branches, eating more berries than made it into my basket for mom’s cherry pie. The maple tree grew in the front yard; I went there to hide, high behind walls of green leaves, where I could see all and no one could find me.

I sensed the trees had feelings, lives; they were living beings with whom to be in relationship. Did the trees know my secret? Is that, in part, why it felt like they looked after me? All trees know rape; ninety-seven percent of North America’s native forests have been cut down.[18] I didn’t know why my young body returned again and again to be held in the branches of these elders who surrounded my suburban home. Or why I turned to the smell of pine and bark instead of human skin or voice when I hurt. Now, I imagine that something in my cells trusted their love and wisdom; they nurtured me.

The Rape of Earth

The Apache who named Aravaipa Canyon no longer live here. Sitting at the edge of the river, I marvel at the joyful laughter of its flowing waters. During the 19th century, the Aravaipa band of Apaches living here fought many battles with the U.S. Cavalry. Hispanic and Anglo settlers began grazing stock and developing copper mines in the watershed. In the infamous Camp Grant Massacre, a death squad of American pioneers—including Tohono O’odham Indians, as well as Mexican Americans and Anglo-Americans from Tucson—descended upon an Apache camp before dawn on April 28, 1871. Those sleeping were clubbed to death, while those awake were shot by men stationed in the bluffs above. [19]

arvaipa canyon wilderness in arizona, a stream running through the bottom of a canyon with saguaro cactus and tall red-rock cliffs

Arvaipa Canyon wilderness

In less than an hour, the raiders had claimed the lives of nearly 150 Apaches, mostly women and children; the men were away hunting. With no casualties to themselves, they sold twenty-nine children into slavery in Mexico. This is neither the largest nor the most brutal of attacks on Native Americans, but it came at a time when a “peace policy” had been promised by the federal government. President Grant expressed outrage and sought to punish the attackers. Although a trial was held for 100 alleged participants, no justice was had; a jury of twelve Anglos and Mexican Americans from Tucson took only nineteen minutes to find the accused not guilty.[20] The remaining Apache were relocated to White Mountain Reservation to the northeast.[21]

The rape has been happening for the last 6,000 years as “indigenous people and their tribal societies have been targeted” by the predatory expansions of civilization.[22] Species disappear by the hour.[23] Capitalism is a war against the planet—operating off the slave labor of poor people and countries, poisoning our waters, air, and lands, and destroying ecosystems through mining and agriculture. With patriarchy, “men become real men by breaking boundaries—the sexual boundaries of women and children, the cultural and political boundaries of indigenous peoples, the biological boundaries of rivers and forests, the genetic boundaries of other species, and the physical boundaries of the atom itself.[24]

Civilization is brutal and unsustainable; agriculture is dependent upon imperialism and genocide. As feminist and environmentalist Lierre Keith said, “You pull down the forest, you plow up the prairie, you drain the wetland. Especially, you destroy the soil.”[25] Shifting from fossil fuels to green energy is a false solution. Green technology markets solutions while denuding the planet; corporations and government profit.[26] Ecosystems are devastated by solar and wind projects, and the increased mining and consumption they entail. Our political system is bankrupt, and violence against women and the Earth are “legitimated and promoted by both patriarchal religion and science” and “rooted in the eroticization of domination.”[27]

The Earth Created Us This Way

Three saguaro cactuses surrounded us in Aravaipa Canyon; each one about thirty feet tall with barrel appendages on each side that look like arms. I shared my dream with the questers in our opening council. “Will you help me stop the rape?” I said. “Put your body between the rape and the rapist?” I raised my voice, uncomfortable with the ferocity of my words. The rim across from us was some distance away, but several moving dots caught my eye. I slowly deciphered them as five bighorn sheep moving causally along the mountainside.

Harrison[28], a young man in his late twenties in graduate school, later shared his view over dinner.

“There’s not a problem,” he said. “The Earth is dreaming us; she created us this way.”

“It’s not a problem that 200 species go extinct each day?” I responded, feeling stunned.

“Extinctions have happened throughout history,” he answered. “It’s all part of her plan.”

“Extinctions have never occurred at this level. This isn’t a passive geological event, it’s extermination by capitalism,”[29] I said. “Yes, the Earth is dreaming us, but we’re sick and disconnected. This isn’t her plan.”

“We shouldn’t treat the Earth like a victim,” he responded. “She’s whole. She doesn’t need us to rescue her. She can take care of herself. She’s more powerful than we know.”

“Isn’t it possible for someone to be both whole and harmed by another?” I asked. “Life is far more complex than a drama triangle—victim, rescuer, perpetrator. This is about honoring the Earth and all of life as Sacred, regardless how powerful she is.”

“Activists are too angry, and protesting doesn’t change anything,” Harrison stated. “Tapping into the imaginative powers of Earth and soul is more powerful—shifting our consciousness.”

“Listening to dreams and perceiving our larger mythic potentialities is imperative, but so is direct action; there are forests, prairies, and animals alive today because of activists and revolutionaries,” I responded. “Perhaps it’s not either-or, but both-and. Each perspective, dream, and revolution are relevant. The mythic is happening, and the rape is happening too. It seems necessary we attend to both. Why are you opposed to seeing the rape?”

A Morsel of Empathic Resonance

While apprenticing on a women’s quest in my early thirties, I asked the dream-maker to help me remember what happened when I was four. Sleeping on the edge of a red rock cliff, I awoke to roaring thunder and the grove of ponderosa pines lit up in the lightning’s glow. Jack was in my dream. “I’m the one who abused you,” he said.

In the months that followed, I remembered the grey streak that ran through his curly black hair, and the disturbing way he looked at me in later years when we both found ourselves at the curb taking out the trash. With the support of trees and humans, my body re-experienced and integrated the memories that arose. It took years to trust what came and even longer to speak about it; it’s not a story I often share.

Those victimized in our culture are invalidated and stigmatized, but my story is only a small thread in the tapestry of violence that pervades and envelopes our culture. My trauma has gifted me with a small morsel of empathic resonance for what most other living beings on this planet endure far more often than I.

By the age of five, I wasn’t allowed to play with my neighbor; my mother had grown concerned about the reoccurring bites and bruises. The giant ash, the grove of pines, and the cherry and maple trees with whom I grew up were far less fortunate; all have since been chopped down. Although my parents had moved, I returned to pay my respects for the lives and deaths of those loving trees who raised me and were my family. I remember them often in my imagination.

The Questions of Displaced Descendants of Slaves

I remember weeping in love and loss while huddled in the crowded adobe hall with over 100 people; Martin Prechtel was sharing the rare and forgotten history of indigenous peoples worldwide. We listened to their music and heard about their creation stories, animals, and daily life. We wept over the rape, the slavery, the injustice, and so much beauty already lost. We asked questions: How did we get here from there? What birthed the original destructive culture that grew to destroy all others? How can we, the displaced descendants of slaves, live and die in a way that feeds life?

Bolad’s Kitchen is a never-before-seen school which aimed to help us remember an intact human approach to living in sacred relationship with Earth. I returned there for seventy days over four years, in my mid-thirties. Martin had grown up on a Pueblo reservation and apprenticed to a Tz’utujil shaman. He taught us an ancient economics. Fellow participants and I made beads, and later repaid our debt to the Earth for the obsidian rocks and shells we borrowed. We made pottery, moccasins, and felt, always offering the best back to the Holy Earth. She is starving and grieving, because she has not been given the ritual food and gifts she needs to live.

Martin shared stories of indigenous cultures who responded to attack in two ways. Some acted directly, fighting to protect their land, animals, and people; they were often killed or enslaved. Others acted mythically, returning to the “origination” place of their creation stories; there they waited to die intact, so their death would send out an echo that feeds all of life. But what if it isn’t either-or but both-and? What if we could act both mythically and directly? What if our revolution to stop the rape was sourced in both our ability to attune to our dreams and our willingness to resist our dominant culture?

Stopping the Rape

My dream seems to imply that we can stop the rape. I write to weave the world of dreams with direct action, so that our dreams can guide us. The weaving of mythos with revolution can support us in stopping the rape. Dreams are “willful, living beings”[30] that can re-align us with earth’s wishes. Through dream incubation, artists ask for a dream to guide their creation, and the dream that comes is “for the work of art, which uses us to birth itself.”[31] Similarly, we can invite the Earth to dream through us, and guide us toward the actions that matter most. When we act on our dreams, more dreams come to guide us further. In this way, dreams can come to guide our life. Dreams have led me to heal and discover my soul; they direct me now to guide and write; they urged me to write this piece.

Dreams offer pivotal clues about our deepest purpose. Each soul’s story feeds and seeds the mythic sinew of our human potential while also empowering our creative service on behalf of Earth. Just as individual transformation requires a journey of dismemberment, so too must our patho-adolescent civilization dismember and dismantle. Civilization will fall no matter what we do, and it’s likely to be messy and dangerous. To stop the rape, we must stop industrial civilization from continuing to harm people and the planet.

Radical change is necessary rather than minor reforms; it doesn’t work to “ask for justice from a system which is deeply invested in injustice.[32] We’ve been taught to solve problems by getting along, but this strategy isn’t effective with an abuser, and global industrial empire can be likened to an abuser. Abusers “feel entitled to exploit, will do anything in order to exploit, and will exploit precisely as much as they can get away with,” and as eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen says, the only way to stop an abuser is to place him “in a situation where he has no other choice.”[33]

How may we bring this radical change about? We need stealth, resistance, ferocity, and creativity. We need to cultivate a relationship with our dreams, the more-than-human world, and our deep imagination. We need humans willing to fight for what we love by all means necessary to dismantle industrial civilization. Judith Lewis Herman says it’s “morally impossible to remain neutral.” Bystanders are forced to take sides. It’s tempting to side with the abuser, because doing so risks nothing and requires nothing from us; it also appeals to “the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil.” Acknowledging rape asks bystanders “to share the burden of pain.” It demands “action, engagement, and remembering.”[34]

Global industrial empire and a living planet can’t exist at the same time. If you love the Earth, are you willing to stand with her? What happens to Earth happens to us; to side against her is to rape ourselves.

Primal Scream

The cottonwoods shaded us as we sat in final council. Harrison shared an encounter with a teddy bear cholla—a cactus so thick with spines, it almost seems covered in fur.

“It told me to slow down so I could listen better. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot,” he said. “I later touched a hurt place on a barrel cactus, and a surprising flood of painful memories returned of a time when I was abused.”

Harrison’s demeanor was soft and somber. I wondered if his experience would shift his perspective on the rape of Earth. Many women in the group had shared stories of rape earlier in the week. One woman had dreamed about a primal scream of pain for the feminine and the Earth. She carried it out on the land.

“I wanted to hold that scream forever,” she said. “Perhaps my writing can be a voice for it.”

As we paused to take in her words, a squadron of javelinas wandered into a neighboring field to eat some nuts from under the truffle trees. Javelinas are pig-like animals with tusks; they roam the gulches in family bands (like the Apache did).

I shared too.  “You may see me as a strong guide, living her mythic purpose. Yet I’m also someone who has been harmed by the violence of our culture. The young girl inside me who carries this hurt also holds gifts. I love her. She lives within my mythos, her heart connected to the heart of the world in a cave underneath a world tree. That little girl who found comfort in the arms of the trees still speaks to me today—if I’m still enough to listen. She informs how I love, guide, and write.  She chisels a sensitivity into my bones that attunes me to the rape of Earth and feeds my fervor to act.”


Author Bio

Rebecca Wildbear is a river and soul guide who helps people tune in to the mysteries that live within the Earth community, dreams, and their own wild Nature, so they may live a life of creative service. She has been a guide with Animas Valley Institute since 2006 and is author of the forthcoming book, Playing & Praying: Soul Stories to Inspire Personal & Planetary Transformation.

Image is Toppling Over the Edge of the World [Collage] by Doug Van Houten ©, used with permission.

Upcoming Radical Dreamwork Event

Rebecca & Doug will offer an Animas Valley Institute program to Deep Green Resistance members and allies, June 26 – 30, 2020, A Wild Mind Intensive for Activists & Revolutionaries: Partnering with Earth & Dreams. We’ll deepen our ecological perception and engage in radical dreamwork…and more!

See the flyer for full description ~

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57aa148c579fb35739b5a8e0/t/5dc2386072a5cb0a5d29a3f8/1573009507740/AnimasDGRflyerFinal2.pdf

Or register on-line  ~

https://animas.org/event-registration/?ee=364


References

[1] Martin Prechtel, Long Life Honey in the Heart (North Atlantic Books, 2004).

[2] Tika Yupanqui, The Iroquois Dream Experience and Spirituality, webwinds.com, 1998.

[3] Derrick Jensen, Dreams, (Seven Stories Press, 2011).

[4] Stephen Aizenstat, Dream Tending: Awakening to the Healing Power of Dreams (Spring Journal, Inc., 2011).

[5] Bill Plotkin, “Self-Development and Cultural Transformation #6,” Musings, animas.org, March 2019.

[6] National Sexual Violence Resource Center, nsvrc.org/node/4737.

[7] Lili Loofbourow, “Why Society Goes Easy on Rapists,” Slate, May, 2019.

[8] National Sexual Violence Resource Center, nsvrc.org/node/4737.

[9] RAINN, rain.org/statistics/children-and-teens.

[10] Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance (Seven Stories Press, 2006).

[11] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 1997).

[12] Sean Butler and Will Falk, “Rights for Lake Erie? Why Corporate Rights and Preemption Must Go,” DGR News Service, December 2019.

[13] Aimee Cree Dunn, “An Open Letter to Climate Activists in the Northwoods…and Beyond,” DGR News Service, December 2019.

[14] David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous (Vintage, 1997).

[15] Laura Sewall’s essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception” was published in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes,  and Allen Kanner (New York: Random House, 1995).

[16] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 1997).

[17] Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance (Seven Stories Press, 2006).

[18] Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance (Seven Stories Press, 2006).

[19] Ari Kelman, “Murder, purely,” The Chronicle, April 2008.

[20] Ari Kelman, “Murder, purely,” The Chronicle, April 2008.

[21] Edward Abbey, “In the Land of ‘Laughing Waters’,” The New York Times, January 1982.

[22] Aimee Cree Dunn, “An Open Letter to Climate Activists in the Northwoods…and Beyond,” DGR News Service, December 2019.

[23] Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance (Seven Stories Press, 2006).

[24] Lierre Keith, “The Girls and the Grasses,” DGR News Service, August 2015.

[25] Lierre Keith, The Girls and the Grasses, DGR News Service, August 2015.

[26] Max Wilbert, “The Moral Argument for Ecological Revolution,” DGR News Service, November 2019.

[27] Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth (Bear & Company, 1993).

[28] Name and identifying details have been changed.

[29] Justin McBrien, “This is Not the Sixth Extinction. It’s the First Extermination Event,” Truthout, September 2019

[30] Derrick Jensen, Dreams (Seven Stories Press, 2011).

[31] Robert Bosnak, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art, and Travel (Routledge, 2007).

[32] Shahidah Janjua, “By Any Means Necessary?” DGR News Service, December 2019.

[33] Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance (Seven Stories Press, 2006).

[34] Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books, 1997).

Lake Erie Bill of Rights: Time for Direct Action

Lake Erie Bill of Rights: Time for Direct Action

By Will Falk

Featured image: Harmful algae blooms in Lake Erie in 2017. Public domain photo via NASA.


On Tuesday, January 28, at 10 AM, a hearing will be held in the United States District Courthouse in Toledo, OH in the case Drewes Farms Partnership v. City of Toledo. At stake in this case is the constitutionality of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. It is possible – likely, even – that the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), democratically enacted by the people of Toledo, will be struck down by United States District Judge Jack Zouhary at this hearing.

If Zouhary strikes LEBOR down, he will do so despite a clear expression of the people of Toledo’s political will. LEBOR, after all was enacted with a 61% majority of the 15,000 Toledoans who voted on it. If Zouhary strikes LEBOR down, he will do so despite the ongoing harm current industrial and agricultural processes are causing to Lake Erie and all those who depend on Lake Erie’s water. If Zouhary strikes LEBOR down, he will do so despite the intensifying danger that once again a toxic algae bloom will get so bad that hundreds of thousands of Toledoans will be left without drinking water. And, perhaps the worst if of all, if Zouhary strikes LEBOR down, all those who worked so hard to see LEBOR enacted will be tempted to despair, to give up.

Do not despair. Do not give up. LEBOR represents only one of many tactics that can be used to protect Lake Erie.

To date, we have only employed indirect methods for protecting Lake Erie. We have asked the government and the courts to protect Lake Erie and they have consistently refused to do so. We have asked Zouhary to validate a democratically enacted local law. Hell, we asked Zouhary for permission to simply argue on Lake Erie’s and LEBOR’s behalf in Drewes Farms Partnership v. City of Toledo and he wouldn’t even grant us that. It is time we stop asking. It is time we stop using merely persuasive means for change. It is time we act directly to protect Lake Erie.

What would it mean to “act directly” to protect Lake Erie? The term “direct action” has been used so often in environmental and social movements in so many different contexts that it is in danger of losing its meaning. It is difficult to locate a clear definition of direct action in activist or academic literature rooted in a radical analysis, so I have formed my own. My definition has three parts: First, direct action involves a clearly-defined and obtainable goal. Second, the success of that goal is demonstrable by a quantifiable reduction in the opposition’s physical power. Third, it is primarily the actions of those engaging in the direct action that produce the desired goal.  

It is important that a proposed action begins with a clearly-defined and obtainable goal because an action involving a poorly-defined goal makes it difficult to determine the scope of the action. And, proposed actions with unobtainable goals will be, by definition, ineffective. Planning to change the world through an educational program designed to illustrate the evils of the fossil fuel industry, for example, is neither clearly-defined nor obtainable. What does it mean “to change the world?” And, how will you possibly reach enough people to effect this change? Planning to disable a factory farm producing manure runoff into the Lake Erie watershed, however, is both clearly-defined and obtainable. Direct actionists can, without too much imagination, envision a successful action.

Once a clearly-defined and obtainable goal is established, the direct action must be designed to materially affect the opposition’s physical power. Let’s say activists come up with a plan to drop a banner that says “Rights for Lake Erie!” from the rafters of the Ohio State Capitol Building. The plan is both clearly-defined, and with some clever security dodging, obtainable. This action, however, is not direct action because there is no way to quantify how, or even if, the banner affects Lake Erie’s polluters ability to pollute.

Let’s consider another hypothetical plan: Activists plan to blockade trucks transporting manure through northern Ohio where the manure will be spread on farms. And, they plan to blockade these trucks for 24 hours. This plan has a clearly-defined and obtainable goal. The goal also reflects an understanding of power. Trucks transporting manure is one of the primary methods agricultural corporations use to pollute. Depriving these corporations of their manure for one day may not be a big hit to corporate power, but it is quantifiable.

It is primarily the actions of those engaging in the direct action that produce the desired goal. Another way to say this is: There is a clear causal link between the direct action and the desired goal. If the goal is to restrict the movement of trucks transporting manure, for example, then the planned action must literally restrict the trucks. Yet another way to say this is: direct action does not leave it to external decision-makers (governmental, judicial, or otherwise) to produce the desired goal. Direct action is not an appeal to those in power. It does not rely solely on moral persuasion, shame, or economic cost-benefit analyses.

This chart, excerpted from the book “Deep Green Resistance,” shows a taxonomy of action: a broad classification of different types of resistance actions that can be taken, including various types of direct action.

Viewed through this lens, the efforts to enact LEBOR, while heroic, are not direct action. LEBOR was a response to the toxic algae bloom that occurred in August, 2014 and left 500,000 Toledoans without drinking water during the hottest time of year. Toxic algae blooms, which have become a regular occurrence in Lake Erie, are primarily fed by agricultural runoff and are exacerbated by climate change. To stop the algae blooms requires stopping the agricultural runoff. In order for citizens to use LEBOR to stop agricultural runoff, first requires the federal courts to rule that LEBOR is constitutional and valid. Not only do we need Zouhary to rule in favor of LEBOR, but, if Zouhary rules in favor of LEBOR, it’s likely that Drewes Farms Partnership and the State of Ohio would appeal Zouhary’s decision to the Sixth Circuit. Then, if the Sixth Circuit ruled in favor of LEBOR, Drewes Farms Partnership and the State of Ohio, would likely appeal to the Supreme Court.

So, before we could ever use LEBOR to bring actions against agricultural polluters for violating Lake Erie’s rights, we’d have to convince three different courts to uphold LEBOR. Even if we succeeded in convincing each level of the federal courts to rule in favor of LEBOR, we would then, in each case brought against agricultural polluters under LEBOR, need to convince a judge that the actions of agricultural polluters violate Lake Erie’s rights.  In other words, LEBOR is not direct action because it relies on external decision makers – the courts – to produce the desired goal.

I am not in any way suggesting that the tremendous efforts Toledoans have put into LEBOR have been a waste. They have not been. The efforts to enact LEBOR placed the question of rights of nature before the people of Toledo and secured a clear, democratic expression that the people of Toledo do, in fact, support rights of nature. This strengthens the moral superiority of our claims. Not only are we justified in stopping agricultural polluters because they are poisoning Toledo’s drinking water, we are justified because the majority of the community believes Lake Erie should have rights to be free from this pollution.

In many ways, it would be easier if we could convince the courts to uphold Lake Erie’s rights. If the courts recognized LEBOR, we could sue polluters. And, in those lawsuits, after finding that the polluters have violated Lake Erie’s rights, judges could order armed men and women (the police) to force polluters to stop polluting. The important thing to recognize though is that the police do not own a monopoly on power. We have the power to stop polluters from polluting, too. Factory farms can be occupied. Access to manure can be limited. The capacity to distribute manure can be impaired.

It is true that those who effectively engage in direct action to protect Lake Erie will place themselves in danger. It is possible that direct actionists will be arrested, that the police will respond violently, and that the media and members of the public will criticize and ostracize us. But the truth is violence is already being used against us. Poisoning a city’s drinking water is violence. And, if we don’t succeed in stopping this poisoning, more nonhumans will be murdered, more humans (especially the most vulnerable among us such as children and the elderly) will get sick and may even die, too. If we don’t succeed in stopping this poisoning, in other words, the violence will only intensify.

Fear in the face of these dangers is understandable. The question is: How do we overcome the fear? Bravery is a personal thing. It is something each individual must find for her or himself. No one can find it for you.

Personally, I find my courage on Lake Erie’s shore. I find it witnessing the sick, pale bellies of dead perch floating through the thick, green scum that forms on Lake Erie’s surface and suffocates fish every summer. I find it in the scent of the rotting corpses of dogs, deer, foxes, gulls, eagles, herons, and the many other animals who drink and feed from Lake Erie. I find it in the looks on the faces of children who arrive cheerfully on Lake Erie’s beaches in the heat of summer only to find the lake is too dangerous to swim in. I find it in the rashes that form on the skin of children who were unaware of the danger toxic algae blooms pose. I find it in the vomit of those unlucky enough to unknowingly drink toxic Lake Erie water. I find it when I read studies about the cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and other illnesses toxic algae blooms cause. I find it when I remember that only a few short centuries ago, indigenous peoples bathed on Lake Erie’s shores, celebrated the deliciousness of Lake Erie’s fish, and drank freely of Lake Erie’s waters with no inkling of the destruction to come.

I find my courage when I realize that all of this is only going to get worse if we don’t act, directly and decisively, to protect Lake Erie’s life-giving water.


Will Falk is a writer, lawyer, and environmental activist. The natural world speaks and Will’s work is how he listens. He believes the ongoing destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today. For Will, writing is a tool to be used in resistance.

Will graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and practiced as a public defender in Kenosha, WI. He left the public defender office to pursue frontline environmental activism. So far, activism has taken him to the Unist’ot’en Camp – an indigenous cultural center and pipeline blockade on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in so-called British Columbia, Canada, to a construction blockade on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i, and to endangered pinyon-juniper forests in the Great Basin.

His writing has been published by CounterPunch, Earth Island Journal, CATALYST Magazine, Whole Terrain, Dark Mountain Project, the San Diego Free Press, and Deep Green Resistance News Service among others. His first book How Dams Fall: Stories the Colorado River Told Me was published in August, 2019 by Homebound Publications.

http://willfalk.org/

We Provide Training For Resistance Groups

We Provide Training For Resistance Groups

One of the biggest barriers to effective resistance today is that most people who want to resist don’t have the knowledge or skills. That’s why Deep Green Resistance offers trainings and workshops to aspiring organizers and revolutionaries.

Our trainings are tailored to your needs and adapted to your specific situation. These trainings aim to move us from ineffective protest to material resistance. Typical subjects we cover include:

For more information on these trainings, check out this interview between Derrick Jensen and Max Wilbert. If you are interested in attending or helping to organize a training, please contact us: training@deepgreenresistance.org

 

Strategies for Resistance: Decisive Ecological Warfare

Strategies for Resistance: Decisive Ecological Warfare

Decisive Ecological Warfare (DEW) is the strategy of a movement that has too long been on the defensive. It is the war cry of a people who refuse to lose any more battles, the last resort of a movement isolated, co-opted, and weary from never-ending legal battles and blockades.

The information in the DEW strategy is derived from military strategy and tactics manuals, analysis of historic resistances, insurgencies, and national liberation movements. The principles laid out within these pages are accepted around the world as sound principles of asymmetric warfare, where one party is more powerful than the other. If any fight was ever asymmetric, this one is.

The strategies and tactics explained in DEW are taught to military officers at places like the Military Academy at West Point for a simple reason: they are extremely effective.

When he was on trial in South Africa in 1964 for his crimes against the apartheid regime, Nelson Mandela said: “I do not deny that I planned sabotage. I did not do this in a spirit of recklessness. I planned it as a result of a long and sober assessment of the political situation after many years of oppression of my people by the whites.”

We invite you to read this strategy, and to undertake that same long and sober assessment of the situation we face. Time is short.

Click here to read the DEW strategy on our website


Featured image by Arthur T. LaBar, CC BY-NC 2.0

A Taxonomy of Action, Part 3: Direct Conflict and Confrontation

A Taxonomy of Action, Part 3: Direct Conflict and Confrontation

This post is excerpted from the book, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. Click here to buy a copy of the book or read it online. The book includes a detailed exploration of the morality of different forms of resistance, and is highly recommended reading. This is part 3 in a series. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.


Ultimately, success requires direct confrontation and conflict with power; you can’t win on the defensive. But direct confrontation doesn’t always mean overt confrontation. Disrupting and dismantling systems of power doesn’t require advertising who you are, when and where you are planning to act, or what means you will use.

Back in the heyday of the summit-hopping “anti-globalization” movement, I enjoyed seeing the Black Bloc in action. But I was discomfited when I saw them smash the windows of a Gap storefront, a Starbucks, or even a military recruiting office during a protest. I was not opposed to seeing those windows smashed, just surprised that those in the Black Bloc had deliberately waited until the one day their targets were surrounded by thousands of heavily armed riot police, with countless additional cameras recording their every move and dozens of police buses idling on the corner waiting to take them to jail. It seemed to be the worst possible time and place to act if their objective was to smash windows and escape to smash another day.

Of course, their real aim wasn’t to smash windows—if you wanted to destroy corporate property there are much more effective ways of doing it—but to fight. If they wanted to smash windows, they could have gone out in the middle of the night a few days before the protest and smashed every corporate franchise on the block without anyone stopping them. They wanted to fight power, and they wanted people to see them doing it. But we need to fight to win, and that means fighting smart. Sometimes that means being more covert or oblique, especially if effective resistance is going to trigger a punitive response.

That said, actions can be both effective and draw attention. Anarchist theorist and Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin argued that “we must spread our principles, not with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda.” The intent of the deed is not to commit a symbolic act to get attention, but to carry out a genuinely meaningful action that will serve as an example to others.

Four Methods of Direct Confrontation

There are four basic ways to directly confront those in power. Three deal with land, property, or infrastructure, and one deals specifically with human beings. They include:

  1. Obstruction and occupation;
  2. Reclamation and expropriation;
  3. Property and material destruction (threats or acts); and
  4. Violence against humans (threats or acts)

In other words, in a physical confrontation, the resistance has three main options for any (nonhuman) target: block it, take it, or break it.

Nondestructive Obstruction or Occupation

Let’s start with nondestructive obstruction or occupation—block it. This includes the blockade of a highway, a tree sit, a lockdown, or the occupation of a building. These acts prevent those in power from using or physically destroying the places in question. Provided you have enough dedicated people, these actions can be very effective.

But there are challenges. Any prolonged obstruction or occupation requires the same larger support structure as any direct action. If the target is important to those in power, they will retaliate. The more important the site, the stronger the response. In order to maintain the occupation, activists must be willing to fight off that response or suffer the consequences.

An example worth studying for many reasons is the Oka crisis of 1990. Mohawk land, including a burial ground, was taken by the town of Oka, Quebec, for—get ready—a golf course. The only deeper insult would have been a garbage dump. After months of legal protests and negotiations, the Mohawk barricaded the roads to keep the land from being destroyed. This defense of their land (“We are the pines,” one defender said) triggered a full-scale military response by the Canadian government. It also inspired acts of solidarity by other First Nations people, including a blockade of the Mercier Bridge. The bridge connects the Island of Montreal with the southern suburbs of the city—and it also runs through the Mohawk territory of Kahnawake. This was a fantastic use of a strategic resource. Enormous lines of traffic backed up, affecting the entire area for days.

At Kanehsatake, the Mohawk town near Oka, the standoff lasted a total of seventy-eight days. The police gave way to RCMP, who were then replaced by the army, complete with tanks, aircraft, and serious weapons. Every road into Oka was turned into a checkpoint. Within two weeks, there were food shortages.

Until your resistance group has participated in a siege or occupation, you may not appreciate that on top of strategy, training, and stalwart courage—a courage that the Mohawk have displayed for hundreds of years—you need basic supplies and a plan for getting more. If an army marches on its stomach, an occupation lasts as long as its stores. Getting food and supplies into Kanehsatake and then to the people behind the barricades was a constant struggle for the support workers, and gave the police and army plenty of opportunity to harass and humiliate resisters. With the whole world watching, the government couldn’t starve the Mohawk outright, but few indigenous groups engaged in land struggles are lucky enough to garner that level of media interest. Food wasn’t hard to collect: the Quebec Native Women’s Association started a food depot and donations poured in. But the supplies had to be arduously hauled through the woods to circumvent the checkpoints. Trucks of food were kept waiting for hours only to be turned away.31 Women were subjected to strip searches by male soldiers. At least one Mohawk man had a burning cigarette put out on his stomach, then dropped down the front of his pants.32 Human rights observers were harassed by both the police and by angry white mobs.33

The overwhelming threat of force eventually got the blockade on the bridge removed. At Kanehsatake, the army pushed the defenders to one building. Inside, thirteen men, sixteen women, and six children tried to withstand the weight of the Canadian military. No amount of spiritual strength or committed courage could have prevailed.

The siege ended when the defenders decided to disengage. In their history of the crisis, People of the Pines, Geoffrey York and Loreen Pindera write, “Their negotiating prospects were bleak, they were isolated and powerless, and their living conditions were increasingly stressful . . . tempers were flaring and arguments were breaking out. The psychological warfare and the constant noise of military helicopters had worn down their resistance.”34 Without the presence of the media, they could have been raped, hacked to pieces, gunned down, or incinerated to ash, things that routinely happen to indigenous people who fight back. The film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance documents how viciously they were treated when the military found the retreating group on the road.

One reason small guerilla groups are so effective against larger and better-equipped armies is because they can use their secrecy and mobility to choose when, where, and under what circumstances they fight their enemy. They only engage in it when they reasonably expect to win, and avoid combat the rest of the time. But by engaging in the tactic of obstruction or occupation a resistance group gives up mobility, allowing the enemy to attack when it is favorable to them and giving up the very thing that makes small guerilla groups so effective.

The people at Kanehsatake had no choice but to give up that mobility. They had to defend their land which was under imminent threat. The end was written into the beginning; even 1,000 well-armed warriors could not have held off the Canadian armed forces. The Mohawk should not have been in a position where they had no choice, and the blame here belongs to the white people who claim to be their allies. Why does the defense of the land always fall to the indigenous people? Why do we, with our privileges and resources, leave the dirty and dangerous work of real resistance to the poor and embattled? Some white people did step up, from international observers to local church folks. But the support needs to be overwhelming and it needs to come before a doomed battle is the only option. A Mohawk burial ground should never have been threatened with a golf course. Enough white people standing behind the legal efforts would have stopped this before it escalated into razor wire and strip searches. Oka was ultimately a failure of systematic solidarity.

Reclamation and Expropriation

The second means of direct conflict is reclamation and expropriation—take it. Instead of blocking the use of land or property, the resistance takes it for their own use. For example, the Landless Workers Movement—centered in Brazil, a country renowned for unjust land distribution—occupies “underused” rural farmland (typically owned by wealthy absentee landlords) and sets up farming villages for landless or displaced people. Thanks to a land reform clause in the Brazilian constitution, the occupiers have been able to compel the government to expropriate the land and give them title. The movement has also engaged in direct action like blockades, and has set up its own education and literacy programs, as well as sustainable agriculture initiatives. The Landless Workers Movement is considered the largest social movement in Latin America, with an estimated 1.5 million members.

Expropriation has been a common tactic in various stages of revolution. “Loot the looters!” proclaimed the Bolsheviks during Russia’s October Revolution. Early on, the Bolsheviks staged bank robberies to acquire funds for their cause. Successful revolutionaries, as well as mainstream leftists, have also engaged in more “legitimate” activities, but these are no less likely to trigger reprisals. When the democratically elected government of Iran nationalized an oil company in 1953, the CIA responded by staging a coup. And, of course, guerilla movements commonly “liberate” equipment from occupiers in order to carry out their own activities.

Property and Material Destruction

The third means of direct conflict is property and material destruction—break it. This category includes sabotage. Some say the word sabotage comes from early Luddites tossing wooden shoes (sabots) into machinery, stopping the gears. But the term probably comes from a 1910 French railway strike, when workers destroyed the wooden shoes holding the rails—a good example of moving up the infrastructure. And sabotage can be more than just physical damage to machines; labor activism has long included work slowdowns and deliberate bungling.

Sabotage is an essential part of war and resistance to occupation. This is widely recognized by armed forces, and the US military has published a number of manuals and pamphlets on sabotage for use by occupied people. The Simple Sabotage Field Manual published by the Office of Strategic Services during World War II offers suggestions on how to deploy and motivate saboteurs, and specific means that can be used. “Simple sabotage is more than malicious mischief,” it warns, “and it should always consist of acts whose results will be detrimental to the materials and manpower of the enemy.” It warns that a saboteur should never attack targets beyond his or her capacity, and should try to damage materials in use, or destined for use, by the enemy. “It will be safe for him to assume that almost any product of heavy industry is destined for enemy use, and that the most efficient fuels and lubricants also are destined for enemy use.” It encourages the saboteur to target transportation and communications systems and devices in particular, as well as other critical materials for the functioning of those systems and of the broader occupational apparatus. Its particular instructions range from burning enemy infrastructure to blocking toilets and jamming locks, from working slowly or inefficiently in factories to damaging work tools through deliberate negligence, from spreading false rumors or misleading information to the occupiers to engaging in long and inefficient workplace meetings.

Ever since the industrial revolution, targeting infrastructure has been a highly effective means of engaging in conflict. It may be surprising to some that the end of the American Civil War was brought about in large part by attacks on infrastructure. From its onset in 1861, the Civil War was extremely bloody, killing more American combatants than all other wars before or since, combined. After several years of this, President Lincoln and his chief generals agreed to move from a “limited war” to a “total war” in an attempt to decisively end the war and bring about victory.

Historian Bruce Catton described the 1864 shift, when Union general “[William Tecumseh] Sherman led his army deep into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and South Carolina, destroying their economic infrastructures.” Catton writes that “it was also the nineteenth-century equivalent of the modern bombing raid, a blow at the civilian underpinning of the military machine. Bridges, railroads, machine shops, warehouses—anything of this nature that lay in Sherman’s path was burned or dismantled.” Telegraph lines were targeted as well, but so was the agricultural base. The Union Army selectively burned barns, mills, and cotton gins, and occasionally burned crops or captured livestock. This was partly an attack on agriculture-based slavery, and partly a way of provisioning the Union Army while undermining the Confederates. These attacks did take place with a specific code of conduct, and General Sherman ordered his men to distinguish “between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly.”

Catton argues that military engagements were “incidental” to the overall goal of striking the infrastructure, a goal which was successfully carried out. As historian David J. Eicher wrote, “Sherman had accomplished an amazing task. He had defied military principles by operating deep within enemy territory and without lines of supply or communication. He destroyed much of the South’s potential and psychology to wage war.” The strategy was crucial to the northern victory.

Violence Against Humans

The fourth and final means of direct conflict is violence against humans. Here we’re using violence specifically and explicitly to mean harm or injury to living creatures. Smashing a window, of course, is not violence; violence does include psychological harm or injury. The vast majority of resistance movements know the importance of violence in self-defense. Malcolm X was typically direct: “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.”

In resistance movements, offensive violence is rare—virtually all violence used by historical resistance groups, from revolting slaves to escaping concentration camp prisoners to women shooting abusive partners, is a response to greater violence from power, and so is both justifiable and defensive. When prisoners in the Sobibór extermination camp quietly SS killed guards in the hours leading up to their planned escape, some might argue that they committed acts of offensive violence. But they were only responding to much more extensive violence already committed by the Nazis, and were acting to avert worse violence in the immediate future.

There have been groups which engaged in systematic offensive violence and attacks directed at people rather than infrastructure. The Red Army Faction (RAF) was a militant leftist group operating in West Germany, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. They carried out a campaign of bombings and assassination attempts mostly aimed at police, soldiers, and high-ranking government or business officials. Another example would be the Palestinian group Hamas, which has carried out a large number of violent attacks on both civilians and military personnel in Israel. (It is also a political party and holds a legally elected majority in the Palestinian National Authority. It’s often ignored that much of Hamas’s popularity comes from its many social programs, which long predate its election to government. About 90 percent of Hamas’s activities are these social programs, which include medical clinics, soup kitchens, schools and literacy programs, and orphanages.)

It’s sometimes argued that the use of violence is never justifiable strategically, because the state will always have the larger ability to escalate beyond the resistance in a cycle of violence. In a narrow sense that’s true, but in a wider sense it’s misleading. Successful resistance groups almost never attempt to engage in overt armed conflict with those in power (except in late-stage revolutions, when the state has weakened and revolutionary forces are large and well-equipped). Guerilla groups focus on attacking where they are strongest, and those in power are weakest. The mobile, covert, hit-and-run nature of their strategy means that they can cause extensive disruption while (hopefully) avoiding government reprisals.

Furthermore, the state’s violent response isn’t just due to the use of violence by the resistance, it’s a response to the effectiveness of the resistance. We’ve seen that again and again, even where acts of omission have been the primary tactics. Those in power will use force and violence to put down any major threat to their power, regardless of the particular tactics used. So trying to avoid a violent state response is hardly a universal argument against the use of defensive violence by a resistance group.

The purpose of violent resistance isn’t simply to do violence or exact revenge, as some dogmatic critics of violence seem to believe. The purpose is to reduce the capacity of those in power to do further violence. The US guerilla warfare manual explicitly states that a “guerrilla’s objective is to diminish the enemy’s military potential.” (Remember what historian Bruce Catton wrote about the Union Army’s engagements with Confederate soldiers being incidental to their attacks on infrastructure.) To attack those in power without a strategy, simply to inflict indiscriminate damage, would be foolish.

The RAF used offensive violence, but probably not in a way that decreased the capacity of those in power to do violence. Starting in 1971, they shot two police and killed one. They bombed a US barracks, killing one and wounding thirteen. They bombed a police station, wounding five officers. They bombed the car of a judge. They bombed a newspaper headquarters. They bombed an officers’ club, killing three and injuring five. They attacked the West German embassy, killing two and losing two RAF members. They undertook a failed attack against an army base (which held nuclear weapons) and lost several RAF members. They assassinated the federal prosecutor general and the director of a bank in an attempted kidnapping. They hijacked an airliner, and three hijackers were killed. They kidnapped the chairman of a German industry organization (who was also a former SS officer), killing three police and a driver in the attack. When the government refused to give in to their demands to release imprisoned RAF members, they killed the chairman. They shot a policeman in a bar. They attempted to assassinate the head of NATO, blew up a car bomb in an air base parking lot, attempted to assassinate an army commander, attempted to bomb a NATO officer school, and blew up another car bomb in another air base parking lot. They separately assassinated a corporate manager and the head of an East German state trust agency. And as their final militant act, in 1993 they blew up the construction site of a new prison, causing more than one hundred million Deutsche Marks of damage. Throughout this period, they killed a number of secondary targets such as chauffeurs and bodyguards.

Setting aside for the time being the ethical questions of using offensive violence, and the strategic implications of giving up the moral high ground, how many of these acts seem like effective ways to reduce the state’s capacity for violence? In an industrial civilization, most of those in government and business are essentially interchangeable functionaries, people who perform a certain task, who can easily be replaced by another. Sure, there are unique individuals who are especially important driving forces—people like Hitler—but even if you believe Carlyle’s Great Man theory, you have to admit that most individual police, business managers, and so on will be quickly and easily replaced in their respective organizations. How many police and corporate functionaries are there in one country? Conversely, how many primary oil pipelines and electrical transmission lines are there? Which are most heavily guarded and surveilled, bank directors or remote electrical lines? Which will be replaced sooner, bureaucratic functionaries or bus-sized electrical components? And which attack has the greatest “return on investment?” In other words, which offers the most leverage for impact in exchange for the risk undertaken?

As we’ve said many times, the incredible level of day-to-day violence inflicted by this culture on human beings and on the natural world means that to refrain from fighting back will not prevent violence. It simply means that those in power will direct their violence at different people and over a much longer period of time. The question, as ever, is which particular strategy—violent or not—will actually work.