by DGR Colorado Plateau | Aug 6, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Obstruction & Occupation
By Richard Arghiris / Intercontinental Cry
Protests against the Barro Blanco hydro dam in western Panama turned violent last Saturday, July 25, when riot police, claiming to act in self-defense, unleashed pepper spray and batons on some 50 Ngäbe activists, women and children among them. At least three protesters were badly injured in the clash.
The crackdown occurred during a visit to the area by the Panamanian Vice President Isabel Saint Malo, who, under the pretext of dialogue, convened three Ngäbe leaders behind closed doors at the Centro Misionero (Mission Centre) in the town of Tolé. Despite a reasonable request to be included in the meeting, leaders from local community groups were excluded. Activists responded to Saint Malo’s move by blockading the Carretera Interamericana, the country’s principle highway.
Protesters, including women and children, recover after clashes with the police. (Photo: Oscar Sogandares)
According to the Ngäbe, at around 10:15 am, in scenes reminiscent of the Martinelli years, the police reacted violently to disperse the 50-strong protesters, destroying their equipment, trashing their camps, and burning their banners.
The police deny improper use of force.
Edilma Pinto, 17, suffered a fractured foot during the police crackdown. (Photo: Oscar Sogandares)
Many fled the scene before 20 people were arrested (including several minors) and dispatched to the city of Santiago for processing.
While in the private meeting with Saint Malo, the Cacique of Muná, Chito Gallardo, and the Mayor of Muná, Rolando Carpintero, learned of the arrests and quickly intervened to have them returned. The injured were soon taken to the Casa Misionero for treatment and for the Vice President to bear witness.
According to one person at the scene, the vice president appeared coolly uninterested.
Some 20 Ngäbe protesters were detained by the police. (Photo: Oscar Sogandares)
For several weeks, hundreds of police units have been stationed in and around Tolé, including numerous SENAFRONT troops, an elite militarized squad funded in part by the United States. SENAFRONT is normally charged with defending the jungle frontier with Colombia, making their presence of considerable significance.
Under the US Leahy Law on Human Rights, the US Department of State is prohibited from providing military assistance to foreign units who violate human rights with impunity.
Partly funded by the US State Department, elite SENAFRONT troops have been dispatched to the area. (Photo: Oscar Sogandares)
The clashes on the Interamericana foreshadow greater unrest as Barro Blanco’s owner, Generadora del Istmo (GENISA) – a corporation owned by the controversial Kafie family, now mired in a high-level corruption scandal in Honduras – scrambles to complete the final 5-10% of the hydro dam’s construction.
The company has never sought the free, informed, and prior consent of the indigenous communities living on the banks of the Tabasará river, while the project’s funders, the Dutch and German investment banks FMO and DFE, admit to failing their own due diligence tests. Unfortunately, all funds have now been dispensed to GENISA and the banks themselves made a point of threatening the government when it suspended the project earlier this year.
The negative impacts of Barro Blanco have been identified by scores of technical teams, independent experts, international observers, and the United Nations. Those same impacts are nowhere to be found in GENISA’s Environmental Impact Assessment. Among them, the dam will displace several indigenous and campesino communities, including the community of Kiad, where a unique school and cultural centre is developing the written script of the Ngäbere language.
The ancient Ngabere language is taught at this school house in Kiad. (Photo: Richard Arghiris)
Additional impacts include the loss of farm plots and fish stocks — vital sources of sustenance for indigenous and campesino communities in the region – as well as the loss of several ancient petroglyphs, part of Panama’s national patrimony and a special significance to the Mama Tata religion, a Ngäbe revivalist movement that syncretises indigenous animism and Catholicism.
The Ngabere language is a great source of cultural pride. (Photo: Richard Arghiris)
Among the most devout followers of Mama Tata are the M22 resistance movement, who successfully blockaded the entrance to the dam for 38 consecutive days – until just ten days ago. International news footage of the groups praying and dancing on the highway may have influenced the government’s decision to enforce a ‘soft’ take-over of the site entrance. In contrast to the force deployed outside Tolé, Ngäbe women lying in the path of machinery were carefully removed.
Construction of the dam has now resumed and M22 are continuing to pray day and night by the highway. They complain of psychological intimidation with the police shining high intensity lamps on their camp during the night and aggressively entering the temple they have built near the river banks.
Days before their eviction from the site entrance, M22 gather for prayers under police spotlights. (Photo: Oscar Sogandares)
For his part, Panamanian President Varela, who continues to talk condescendingly about giving the Ngäbe ‘the keys to the dam’ upon its completion, appears to have acquiesced to pressures from his own business community, tacitly enabling foreign corporations who respect neither the environment nor international law nor indigenous or human rights.
The Supreme Court has cheered him on by annulling a moratorium on hydro projects passed by the environment agency, ANAM, who were concerned with the stress being placed on Panama’s delicate but biologically rich watersheds. With the crackdown last week, the Panamanian government appears officially back to business as usual.
From Intercontinental Cry: https://intercontinentalcry.org/barro-blanco-protesters-injured-and-arrested-28467/#imageclose-28472
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Aug 5, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Obstruction & Occupation
By Richard Arghiris and Jennifer Kennedy / Intercontinental Cry
June 14, 2015
NGÄBE ISSUE ULTIMATUM TO THE GOVERNMENT OF PANAMA: CANCEL THE PROJECT BY MONDAY
A 30-strong splinter group of Ngäbe from the M10 resistance movement has blocked the entrance to the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam in western Panama, preventing workers from entering the site. The 15 year struggle of the Tabasará river communities to protect their livelihoods, their culture, and their ancestral heritage now appears to be entering a tense new phase. With negotiations exhausted and the dam 95% complete, M10 has an issued an ultimatum for the government to cancel the project by Monday, June 15, 2015. It is unclear how the government will respond.
“Being Ngäbe-Buglé cultural patrimony,” said Clementina Pérez, part of the group camped at Barro Blanco’s gates. “Our river, our mother earth, our ecology, our existence, we are here to make known to the national and international community that this patrimony belongs to us and to the church of Mama Tata. With the conservation of peace, liberty, justice and unity, liberation and social justice… [we ask] the President of the Republic the cancellation and removal of the dam from our communities, our river and our mother earth, which belong to us as original people of the Americas…”
Funded by European banks – the German Investment Corporation (DEG) and the Dutch Development Bank (FMO) – the dam is set to inundate a string of Ngäbe and campesino communities, all of whom have voiced their objections from the outset. The flood will destroy ancestral petroglyphs, fertile agricultural grounds, and Mama Tata cultural centres, including a unique school where the emerging written script of the Ngäbere language is being developed and disseminated. The dam will significantly impact the river’s marine life, wiping out migratory fish species which many communities – both up and down stream – rely upon for essential protein. None of the Tabasará communities have provided their free, informed and prior consent to the dam, a fact recently confirmed by the FMO’s own independent complaints mechanism (ICM).
“Lenders should have sought greater clarity on whether there was consent to the project from the appropriate indigenous authorities prior to project approval,” said an ICM report, published on May 29, 2015. “[The plan] contains no provision on land acquisition and resettlement and nothing on biodiversity and natural resources management. Neither does it contain any reference to issues related to cultural heritage…”
The report is the latest in a series of professional analyses that pour a thick layer of scorn over the dam project’s owner, Generadora del Istmo (GENISA). Demonstrably unlawful, GENISA has been condemned by numerous independent investigators, the United Nations, several international NGOs, and Panama’s own environmental agency, ANAM, who found a raft of flaws and short-comings in their environmental impact assessment.
But despite failing their own due diligence, the banks appear to have shrugged off the ICM report with an insipid call for “constructive dialogue” and “a solution for a way forward.” In February this year, the FMO chose to threaten the government of Panama after building work was temporarily suspended on the recommendation of ANAM. Writing to the Vice President, the FMO warned that the suspension “May weigh upon future investment decisions, and harm the flow of long-term investments into Panama.”
The government seems to have taken this threat to heart. Panama’s president, Juan Carlos Varela, who was elected to office in 2014, flip-flopped on Barro Blanco before finally falling in line. Last week, while proffering flimsy reassurances about having found a human rights solution, his government left the negotiating table and signaled an end to the suspension of works. M10 claims the work never stopped and has been continuing clandestinely. They are now mobilizing for action.
Clementina Perez (Photo: Oscar Sogandares)
“If this situation is not resolved,” said Clementina Pérez, “We will go to the Panamerican highway to ask together, at a national level, the cancellation of Barro Blanco…”
Rising with stark grey walls above the denuded banks of the Tabasará, Barro Blanco has become a symbol of the previous administration, its fundamental violence and contempt for the rule of law. The former President Ricardo Martinelli – now on the run in the United States and facing a corruption probe back home – provoked no less than four major uprisings as he grasped for land and resources in Panama’s indigenous territories. Heavy-handed repression resulted in the deaths of several protesters and bystanders, including an unarmed teenage boy who was shot in the face by police. Barro Blanco is the visible legacy of a proudly thuggish President who serially abused Panama’s Indigenous Peoples and plundered the country at will. Thus far, Varela has been keen to strike a more decent and humane tone. How he now handles the crisis evolving on the banks of the Tabasará River will be a demonstration of his sincerity, or lack of.
From Intercontinental Cry: https://intercontinentalcry.org/ngabe-block-entry-to-barro-blanco-hydro-dam-panama-28186/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 22, 2015 | Direct Action, Strategy & Analysis
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
I went up to Mauna Kea’s summit a few days ago to pule (to pray) with some of the protectors on a ridge inside the Thirty Meter Telescope’s (TMT) proposed construction site. When we reached the site, we were confronted by half a dozen large men in orange vests and hard hats brandishing cameras, audio recorders, and notebooks.
The boss told us we were trespassing on an active construction site and subject to arrest. I looked around and saw nothing but a handful of back-hoes, the open sky at 14,000 feet above sea level, and a sublime, obsidian-colored cinder field stretching to the clouds. Of course, as I’m writing this, construction on Mauna Kea has been suspended for more than two months.
Kaho’okahi Kanuha explained that we were simply here to say some prayers. The boss told us again we were subject to arrest, mumbled into a hand-held radio, signaled to his men, and began recording us with a camera. The six men took up positions surrounding us as we held hands and faced the sky with Kaho’okahi leading some chants. Some of the men folded large arms across their chests glaring at us, others recorded us on camera, and one circled us nervously. I’ve been in a few fist fights in my life – needless, pointless expressions of a toxic masculinity – and I felt like these men were revving themselves up for some sort of scrap.
It was impossible for me to pray like this. Kaho’okahi seemed completely unnerved and when I asked him about it, he said this happens every time he comes to pray. I remember my experiences in Mass when I was younger. I imagine a priest at the altar leading his parish in the prayers that, for Catholics, turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ – all while strong men in hard hats patrol the pews and record the liturgy.
This, of course, would never happen. So, I ask: When Kanaka Maoli pray on a mountain exceedingly more beautiful than any basilica or cathedral I’ve ever been in, why are they being harassed like this?
I spent the first six essays in this Protecting Mauna Kea series trying to answer this question. The answers I came up with are validated after spending the last two weeks up here. The TMT project is based on the dominant culture’s sense of entitlement, historical amnesia, and pornification of Hawaiian culture. What could resemble a porn shoot more closely than men with cameras intruding on and recording acts of intimacy?
I think I’ve demonstrated that the TMT project is enabled by a problematic worldview and should not be allowed to proceed. After Governor David Ige’s announcement last week that he would support and enforce the TMT’s construction, the Mauna Kea protectors want the world to know we never expected the State to help us. We must stop the TMT project and we must do it ourselves. The question becomes: “How do we do it?”
The occupation on Mauna Kea is an expression that the protection of Mauna Kea is the people’s responsibility. We cannot trust the government to stop the TMT. We cannot trust the police. We cannot trust the courts. We have to do it ourselves. In other words, nothing has changed since the occupation began over two months ago. In many ways, the occupation on Mauna Kea reflects all of our environmental and social justice movements around the world.
The truth is – on the whole – environmental and social justice movements around the world have been getting their asses kicked. If they weren’t, 200 species a day wouldn’t be going extinct around the world. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be losing indigenous languages at a rate relatively faster than species. If they weren’t, 95% of North America’s old growth forests wouldn’t have been clear cut. If they weren’t, every mother around the world wouldn’t have dioxin – a known carcinogen – in her breast milk. And, why are they getting our asses kicked? One reason is we’ve trusted those in power to do the right thing for far too long. The good news is – while construction on the Mountain is suspended – we have the opportunity to avoid mistakes other movements have made.
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A couple days ago in a freezing cold, clinging mist, the Mauna Kea protectors called a 5:30 AM meeting in the now-famous crosswalk on the Mauna Kea Access Road to talk strategy in light of Governor Ige’s recent announcement. Some protectors lamented the announcement and were understandably scared about what was coming next. Others maintained that the TMT project was illegal anyway, and the courts would never let it proceed. Still others cited Kingdom of Hawai’i precedents and referred to the recent war crime charges filed with the Canadian government, to assure us the TMT was dead in the water. Finally. the boldest proudly proclaimed – with a hint of the false bravado that often accompanies anxious realizations – construction equipment would have to roll over their dead bodies to get to the construction site.
I stood silently in the circle listening. I am not Hawaiian and have no place arguing with those whose land I presently occupy. My mind was filling with memories of my experiences as a public defender. I recalled the cop in Kenosha, WI where I worked who put a gun to the temple of young Michael Bell’s head and murdered him as his mother and sister watched on for the crime of possibly breaking his bail conditions. I recalled that the cop was promoted and still on the force in Kenosha.
My stomach began churning as I felt that old feeling of helplessness sitting in a wooden chair in a courtroom next to another client being sentenced to prison while there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. There was no brilliant legal argument I could make, no impassioned plea the judge would listen to. The judge had power and armed men at his command, and I did not. It was as simple as that.
My heart was tugged back to Turtle Island, the so-called North American continent where the arrival of Europeans has meant the total extermination of dozens of aboriginal peoples. I think of the Taino who were annihilated within a few decades after Columbus’ contact with them. I can almost hear Tecumseh’s voice calling out from now-dead villages in present-day Ohio and Indiana asking what happened to the Pequods, the Narragansetts, and the Pocanokets. These peoples were wiped out by European colonizers while most of Tecumseh’s people, the Shawnee, were removed at gunpoint from their homelands in the Ohio valley hundreds of miles away to Oklahoma.
Some of the protectors here tease me, calling me “America’s ambassador to Hawai’i.” Listening to some of the protectors insist that the courts, the police, and the government would never let the TMT project happen, I wanted to explain that I understand the dominant culture we’re fighting against. I wanted to say I benefit from this culture. I was raised within in. I’ve lived amongst the type of people who run those courts, sit in their government, and become the police. I know what they are capable of and that many of them are sociopaths with no regard for the well-being of those who oppose them.
I didn’t say this, though, because I knew these feelings brought me too close to acting like the White Savior come to save aboriginal peoples from their ignorance. The truth is Kanaka Maoli understand very well – much better than I – the genocidal tendencies of the dominant culture occupying their lands. They do not need my reminder. I write about this now, only to narrate my relief when Kaho’okahi said, “I understand everyone’s concerns, but the way we’re going to win this struggle is pule plus action.”
**********************
Pule plus action. I agree with Kaho’okahi. Protecting Mauna Kea requires a strong spirituality, requires prayers, but it also means real, physical actions in the real, physical world. We need prayers, yes, just like we need those battling the TMT project in the courts, just like we need those signing petitions against the TMT project, just like we need those donating to the Mauna Kea protectors’ bail fund. But, at the end of the day, the surest way to stop the TMT project is to physically, actually stop the TMT project. This is what the encampment on Mauna Kea has always been about. The protectors are determined to place their bodies in between Mauna Kea’s summit and the construction equipment escorted by the police that will soon come to build the telescope.
I hope with all my heart that the courts will make the right decision and prohibit the TMT’s construction. I hope with all my heart that when the police receive their orders to pacify resistance on the Mountain that they will turn in their resignation papers. But, I’m not holding my breath. History has shown over and over again that the courts and the police will not help us.
Hope is not going to keep the destruction off Mauna Kea. It is much more likely that hope will bind us to ineffective strategies like trusting the government and hugging the police when they come to arrest us.
The Mauna Kea protectors insist on observing kapu aloha – a practice of love and respect – on the Mountain. I will not question this practice, but I will point out that our opponents do not observe kapu aloha. I fear that the more effective we become at stopping their project, the more violently they will respond.
I do not write this from a place of despair. I write this to give a clear-eyed vision of the effort it’s going to take. If we’re going to keep the TMT project from completion, we are going to have to do it ourselves. We’re going to have to show up in numbers large enough to overwhelm the police. We’re going to have to produce a mass of humanity thick enough to clog the Mauna Kea Access Road – and we may have to do it day in and day out for weeks. It will take a tremendous amount of bravery, shrewd strategic thinking, and a deep commitment from all of us. Or, in Kaho’okahi’s words, it’s going to take pule plus action. This is nothing new, though, and I believe we will win.
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Mar 8, 2015 | Property & Material Destruction, Repression at Home, Strategy & Analysis
In 1993 Michael Carter was arrested and indicted for underground environmental activism. Since then he’s worked aboveground, fighting timber sales and oil and gas leasing, protecting endangered species, and more. Today, he’s a member of Deep Green Resistance Colorado Plateau, and author of the memoir Kingfishers’ Song: Memories Against Civilization.
Time is Short spoke with him about his actions, underground resistance, and the prospects and problems facing the environmental movement. Due to the length of the interview, we’ve presented it in three installments; go to Part II here, and Part III here.
Time is Short: Can you give a brief description of what it was you did?
Michael Carter: The significant actions were tree spiking—where nails are driven into trees and the timber company warned against cutting them—and sabotaging of road building machinery. We cut down plenty of billboards too, and this got most of the media attention. We did this for about two years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, about twenty actions. My brother Sean was also indicted. The FBI tried to round up a larger conspiracy, but that didn’t stick.
TS: How did you approach those actions? What was the context?
MC: We didn’t know a lot about environmental issues or political resistance, so we didn’t have much understanding of context. We had an instinctive dislike of clear cuts, and we had the book The Monkey Wrench Gang. Other people were monkeywrenching, that is, sabotaging industry to protect wilderness, so we had some vague ideas about tactics but no manual, no concrete theory. We knew what Earth First! was, although we weren’t members. It was a conspiracy only in the remotest sense. We had little strategy and the actions were impetuous. If we’d been robbing banks instead, we’d have been shot in the act.
Nor did we really understand how bad the problem was. We thought that deforestation was damaging to the land, but we didn’t get the depth of its implications and we didn’t link it to other atrocities. We just thought that we were on the extreme edge of the marginal issue of forestry. This was before many were talking about global warming or ocean acidification or mass extinction. It all seemed much less severe than now, and of course it was. The losses since then, of species and habitat and pollution, are terrible. No monkeywrenching I know of did anything significant to stop that. It was scattered, aimed at minor targets, and had no aboveground political movement behind it.
Clearcuts in the Swan Valley, MT near Loon Lake on the slope of Mission Mountains. Photo by George Wuerthner.
TS: What was the public response to your actions?
MC: They saw them as vandalism, mindlessly criminal, even if they were politically motivated. This was before 9/11, before the Oklahoma City bombing; the idea of terrorism wasn’t so powerful, so our actions weren’t taken nearly as seriously as they would be now.
We were charged by the state of Montana with criminal mischief and criminal endangerment. The state’s evidence was solid enough we thought we couldn’t win a trial, so we pled guilty on the chance the judge wouldn’t send us to prison. Our defense was to say, “We’re sorry we did it, it was motivated by sincerity but it was dumb.” And that was true. We were able to get our charges reduced from criminal endangerment to criminal mischief. I got a 19 year suspended prison sentence, Sean got 9 years suspended. We both had to pay a lot of money, some $40,000, but I only spent three months in county jail and Sean got out of a jail sentence altogether. We were lucky.
TS: As you said, this was before the obsessive fear of terrorism. How do you think that played into your trial and indictment, and how do you think it would be different today?
MC: Had it happened after any big terrorism event, they would have sent us to prison, there’s no doubt about that. States have to maintain a level of constant fear and prove themselves able to protect citizens.
The irony was, I’m not sure I wanted to be serious—there seemed to be something protective in not being all that effective, in being intentionally quixotic, in being a little cute about it. There was a particularly comical aspect to cutting down billboards, and that was helpful only when I was arrested. It made it look less like terrorism and more like reckless things I did when I was drunk, and a lot of people approved of it because they thought billboards were tacky. I want to emphasize that cutting down billboards is nothing I’d advise anyone to consider, only that a little bit of public approval made a surprising difference to my morale, and may have positively influenced sentencing. But the point, of course, is to be effective and not get caught in the first place. These days, if someone gets caught in underground actions, they will be in a lot more trouble than ever before.
TS: How did you get caught?
We left fingerprints and tire tracks, we rented equipment under our own names—like an acetylene torch used to cut down steel billboard posts—and we told people who didn’t need to know about it. We assumed we were safe if they didn’t catch us in the act and because our fingerprints weren’t on file, and we couldn’t have been more wrong. The cops can subpoena anyone’s fingerprints, and use that evidence for something in the past. The importance of security can’t be overstated—and we didn’t have any. Even with a couple rudimentary precautions, we might have saved ourselves the whole ordeal of getting caught. If we’d read the security chapter of Dave Foreman’s book Ecodefense, I don’t think we would have even come under suspicion. Anyone taking any action, above- or underground, needs to take the time to learn security well.
It’s not just saving yourself the anguish of arrest and prison time. If you’re rigorous about security, you might be able to have a real chance at changing how the future of the planet plays out. You can have no impact at all in a jail cell. In our case, we definitely could have stopped timber sales with tree spiking even though that tactic was extremely unpopular politically. It was seen as an act of violence against innocent lumber mill workers instead of a preventative measure to protect forests. The dilemma never got past that stage, though. We had little chance of having any reasoned tactical considerations—let alone making reasoned decisions—because we were always a little too afraid of being caught. With good reason, it turns out.
TS: What have you learned from your experience? Looking back on what you did all those years ago, what’s your perspective on your actions now? Is there anything you would have done differently?
MC: Well I definitely would have taken steps to not get caught. I would have picked my targets more carefully, and I would have entered into an understanding with myself that while my enemy is composed of people, it’s only a system, inhuman and relentless. It can’t be reasoned with; it has no sanity, no sense of morality, no love of anything. Its job is to consume. I would have tried to focus on that guiding fact, and not on the people running it or who were dependent on it. I would have tried to find the weaknesses in the system, and then attacked those.
I’d have tried not to allow my emotions to dictate my strategy or actions. Emotions might get me there in the first place—I don’t think you could get to such a desperate point without a strong emotional response—but once I arrived at the decision to act, I would have done everything I could to think like a soldier, find a competent group to join with, and pick expensive and hard-to-replace targets.
TS: I assume you didn’t just wake up one day and decide to attack bulldozers and billboards. What was your path from being apolitical to having the determination and the passion to do what you did?
MC: When I was struggling with high school, my brother loaned me a stack of Edward Abbey books, which presented the idea that wilderness is the real world, precious above all else. The other part was living in northwest Montana, where you see deforestation anywhere you look. You can’t not notice it, and there’s something about those scalped hills and skid trails and roads that triggers a visceral, angry response. It’s less abstract than atmospheric carbon or drift-net fishing. You don’t see those things the way you see denuded mountainsides. My family heated the house with wood, and we would sometimes get it out of slash piles in the middle of clearcuts. I had lots of firsthand exposure to deforested land. I wondered why the Sierra Club didn’t do something about it, how it could be allowed. We would occasionally go to Canada, and it was even worse up there. No one can feel despair like a teenager, and I had it in spades. If Greenpeace won’t stop this, I reasoned, well then I will.
I started building an identity around this, though, and that’s disastrous for a person choosing underground resistance. You naturally want others to know and appreciate your feelings and accomplishments, especially when you’re young, but the dilemma underground fighters face is that they must present another, blander identity to the world. That’s hard to do.
TS: You were fairly isolated in your actions, and you’ve emphasized the importance of a larger context. Do you see those two ideas connecting? Do you think saboteurs should be acting in a larger movement?
MC: I think saving the planet relies completely on the coordinated actions of underground cells coupled with an aboveground political movement that isn’t directly involved in underground actions. When I was underground, I had no hope of building a network, mostly because of a lack of emotional and political maturity. I also didn’t have the technological or strategic savvy, or a means of communicating with others. The actions themselves were mostly symbolic, and symbolic actions are a huge waste of risk. They’re a waste of political capital too. Most everyone is going to disagree with underground activism and it’s not going to change anyone’s mind about the policy issue—hardly anything will—so it has to count in the material realm. If people are ready and willing to risk their lives and their freedom then they should fight to win, not just to make some sort of abstract point.
TS: After you were arrested, what support—if any—did you receive from folks on the outside, and what support would you have wanted to receive?
MC: The most important support was financial, but there wasn’t a lot of it. Our plea bargain didn’t guarantee we wouldn’t go to prison. We were also worried that the feds would indict us for racketeering, an anti-Mafia charge with serious minimum sentencing. If we’d had more legal defense financing we’d of course have felt a lot more secure, but twenty years of reflection tells me we didn’t really deserve it considering how poorly we executed the actions, what little effect they caused.
That sounds like I’m being awfully hard on myself, and hindsight is always 20/20, but the point is that a legal crisis is exhausting and expensive. Your community will question whether your actions are worthy of the price they’ll have to pay if you’re caught. My actions were not.
Even so, I appreciated any sort of support. Hearing from the outside in jail is better than you’d believe. A lot of Earth First! Journal readers sent me anonymous letters. I wrote back and forth with one of the women who was jailed for noncooperation with a federal grand jury investigating the Animal Liberation Front in Washington. Seeing approving letters to the editor in the papers was also great. Just knowing that the whole world isn’t your enemy, that someone is thinking about you and appreciates what you did, is priceless.
Artwork by Stephanie McMillan
TS: Do you still think militant and illegal forms of direct action and sabotage are justified? Why?
MC: I do, yes. In an ideal world I don’t think violence is the best way to accomplish anything, but obviously this isn’t an ideal world. Our circumstances are getting worse and worse—overpopulation, pollution, oceanic dead zones, you name it—and any options for a decent and dignified future for humanity are dwindling day by day, so what choice does that leave us? Individual attempts at sustainable living won’t work so long as the industrial system is running. The dismantling of infrastructure is the most important missing piece right now. It’s where the system is most vulnerable, so it should be employed right away. It can be effective, but it has to be responsible, careful, and extraordinarily smart.
One of the reasons underground political actions are so unpopular is that they’re always presented as attacks on individuals, rather than on a system. I think it’s important to reframe sabotage as strikes on an unjust, destructive system, and that civilization is not us, and not the highest expression of human endeavor, but only an idea. Civilization is masquerading as humanity, but that’s not what it is. Civilization is only one sort of cultural plan, a way of creating unsustainably large human settlements, based entirely on agriculture which itself is completely unsustainable.
The argument that militant actions are counterproductive has a little bit of merit because the scale they’ve happened on hasn’t been large enough to have any impact. For example, the Earth Liberation Front burning SUV’s. You’re left with the political fallout, the mainstream activists distancing themselves and all the other bad stuff that comes with it, but you don’t have any measurable gain, in reducing carbon emissions, say. Sabotage needs to happen on a larger scale, against more expensive targets, to be impactful. Fighters need to think big. That’s how militaries accomplish their goals—by acting against systems. They blow up bridges, they take out buildings, they disable the enemy arsenal, they kill the enemy—that’s how they function. I agree activists don’t want to identify with militarism, but it’s foolhardy to not consider what’s actually going to get the job done, and militaries know how to do that. No moral code will matter if the biosphere collapses. Doctrinal non-violence isn’t going to have any relevance in a world that’s 20 degrees hotter than it is now.
I wish an effective movement could be nonviolent, but we just don’t have enough social cohesion to orchestrate that kind of thing. There’s so few of us who give a shit, and we’re scattered, isolated, and disenfranchised. We don’t have adequate numbers, influence, or power, and I don’t see that changing. Everywhere we look we’re losing, because we don’t have a movement that can say, “No. You’re not going to do that. We will stop this, whatever it takes,” and back that up. Aboveground activists need to advocate a lesser evil, to continually pose the question of what is worse: that some property was destroyed, or that sea shells are dissolving in acid oceans? Underground activists need to act that out. It’s not a rhetorical question.
We need to remember, too, that small numbers of people can engineer profound changes when their actions are wisely leveraged. Very few took part in the resistance movements of World War II, but they made all the difference to ultimately defeating the Axis.
Interview continues here.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 28, 2015 | Indigenous Autonomy, Obstruction & Occupation
By teleSUR
Indigenous communities in Peru occupied 14 oil wells, paralyzing South American energy firm Pluspetrol’s production, in a protest to demand better compensation for the use of their land.
Some 380 members of the Achuar community took control of the facilities in Peru’s northern Amazon region of Loreto Monday, halting the production of some 3,100 barrels of crude oil. Pluspetrol said in a statement that the protesters also seized eight boats on the Tigre River, including two that provided supplies for the company.
Pluspetrol has been operating in Loreto in block 1-AB since 2001 and has been the target of many indigenous protests in the last few years, demanding both compensation for land exploitation and the cleanup of contamination from spilled crude oil.
Carlos Sandi, president of local indigenous and environmentalist group Feconaco, said the community was demanding better compensation for the exploitation of their land, including the installation of an industrial sawmill and the development of a community-run enterprise to help create jobs for the locals in the area.
“They have taken their measures of protest and are waiting for dialogue to resolve this as soon as possible,” Sandi told Reuters.
However, there seems little chance of a dialogue since, according to Pluspetrol, the community should not receive compensation because it is not within the area of direct influence of oil operations.
Its contract on the lot expires in August, while the government has not announced a new bid date for the rights to continue developing on the block.
From teleSUR: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/contenidos/2015/01/28/noticia_0024.html
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Jan 18, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Lobbying, Obstruction & Occupation, Strategy & Analysis
Featured image by Sierra Forests Legacy
By Michael Carter / Deep Green Resistance Colorado Plateau
Read Part 1 of this series here
Law enforcement has been so ineffective in preventing illegal ORV use that citizens are usually left to face the problem on their own. Stopping ORVs isn’t easy, but short of an end to gasoline—which we can’t wait for—impacts will continue to worsen if there’s no intervention. In remote areas like the Mojave Desert and Colorado Plateau, where would-be activists are scattered and overwhelmed and the police are essentially powerless and blasé, all strategies for stopping ORVs involve active and sustained effort. Here are a few:
Pressure law enforcement to do their jobs. Carry a camera with you always, and photograph illegal activity, if at all possible getting clear images of license plates. Document the time, place, and circumstances. Bring it to the attention of both the local and federal police, if on federal land. Be polite but persistent.
Physically close illegal trails. This can be surprisingly effective. Adopt an area and close off illegal trails with rocks, logs, whatever is handy and doesn’t further disturb the land. ORVers will keep trying to use the trail, but continued discouragement might eventually work.
Physically close legal trails. Similar to the last category, people may choose to carry out underground actions that close legal routes. [1] There must be a strict firewall between aboveground and underground activists: people or groups choosing to use underground tactics should not engage in aboveground actions, and vice versa. [2]
Close and reclaim established, authorized routes through administrative and legal channels. It’s the open roads that draw ORVs deeper into land they can then illegally violate, so every closed road is particularly helpful. This, too, takes a long and sustained effort. One helpful organization is Wildlands CPR (Now Wild Earth Guardians), [3] but don’t expect any non-profit group to have the resources to do the job for you. If you love the land you live in, be prepared to fight for it—a simple solution of hard, dedicated effort. Organize with those who agree with you, and fight.
Coyote Canyon Revisited
Private landowners neighboring Coyote Canyon in southeast Utah fought the originally illegal ORV use of the canyon, and tried to stop the BLM from sanctioning it. They pleaded with the public via every venue they could think of to write letters to the BLM opposing the move, yet ORV interests grossly outnumbered the effort. Fewer than ten opponents to the trail even bothered writing letters, and when the decision to open the canyon to ORVs was made the BLM didn’t even bother notifying the respondents, a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
Otherwise, however, the agency had prepared its documents thoroughly and neighbors were advised that a legal challenge probably wouldn’t have been effective. Although the BLM offered a number of concessions—the trail is only open Friday and Saturday to registered users, from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., among other restrictions—the agency legitimized crime, rewarding criminals with the sacrifice of another dwindling scrap of feral public land.
The Coyote Canyon example highlights several reasons why so few are willing to protect the land, and why they’re losing so badly. One is fear of reprisals from enemies (such as intentional trespass and vandalism of property, already an issue for neighbors of Coyote Canyon). Another is a reasonable assumption that their efforts will be ineffective—though of course making no effort will certainly be ineffective. Yet people tend to accept whatever situation they’re given. It’s uncommon to question an established arrangement, whatever it may be, and if one continues to question it life gets more uncomfortable. A resister will always face ridicule, accusations of poor mental, emotional and social adjustment, eventual ostracizing and occasionally murder. Yet social changes demand challenges to established practice.
When the BLM announced their decision to open Coyote Canyon to oil spills, noise, litter, piles of shit and soiled rags of toilet paper, almost everyone who was asked to help offered only a passing moment of sympathy. Not “what can I do,” not “what are our options,” but “that’s too bad.” It’s no wonder fights like this are frequently lost, when reactions are so feeble.
Industry and recreation groups, by contrast, are well organized and ready to rush to their own common cause. The right wing tends to be more accepting of orders; the boss says jump, they ask how high. They have something tangible they’re working for, a thing they like doing, a righteous maintenance of their privilege—such as driving anywhere they want. They stand to gain something where resistance stands only to prevent something—at least in situations like Coyote Canyon, where no comparable force opposes them.
Fighting Back
Resistance is tough. It means making one’s self unpopular, a hard thing to do among those who’ve been taught their whole lives that popularity is everything. Organizing can provide the possibility of overcoming our fear of reprisal, of ridicule, and of failure; it’s the only chance at effectively confronting injustices. Those who wish to prevent agency actions like the Coyote Canyon trail, or to promote re-localization of food production—any defensive or restorative action—can become an effective force if they work together, consistently and reliably supporting one another. Many progressives have been bled off by dogmas of non-confrontation, by intoxicating feel-good-ness, and by the idea that individualism is of primary importance. They’ve become lazy, fatalistic, and cynical; committed, organized struggle seems to be the sorry lot of desperately poor people in faraway places.
The examples that we have of committed resistance movements often are of desperately poor people, immediately threatened by the activities of rich and powerful enemies. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta is one good example, and so are the more than 130 First Nations governments in western Canada that have gathered against the tar-sands Enbridge Northern Gateway Project and the Kinder Morgan pipeline and tanker projects. [4] We who are in a position to protect the land mostly lack the ability to respond, to turn our empathy for places like Coyote Canyon into action.
The situation at the frontiers of wild land is desperate, too. Wealth and privilege let us pretend it isn’t, because we get food from supermarket shelves and water from a tap. We see little or no connection between the health of the land and our own well-being. Public land use is an issue that can be influenced relatively easily—unlike, say, racism—because land managers so routinely ignore or violate laws and effective tactics usually have to do with citizen enforcement. But environmentalists continue to lose, partly because exploiters have miscast conflict as user-group obstruction—framing the terms of the debate to ridicule love of the wild world, separating its fate from human fate. By allowing this, would-be activists surrender the land and leave the future to sadists and imbeciles.
The destruction of the planet, however easy it is to ignore, will catch up with us all. The civilized economies that steal from the poor to give to the rich will eventually end. They need to consume limited resources to exist and those resources—fossil fuels, topsoil—will not last forever. When this happens, we will again depend upon the land to sustain us. If that land is stripped of its capacity to sustain life by industry, agriculture, and recreation, then there will be nowhere else to go, and nothing to do but wage war and starve.
Abuse of the land is now normalized by faith in nonexistent frontiers (of renewable energy and electric cars, for example) and by misguided tolerance. Naming abuse—the destruction of the land in the name of fun or individualistic pursuits and the destruction of our selves by abusive people and systems—is often portrayed as abusive in itself. This is outrageous and infuriating, but should be expected.
Though it is far less damaging than industry and agriculture, the evidence for ORV destruction is well documented and easy to come by. It’s not even really contested by ORVers themselves. Those of us determined to stop this behavior face the same problem law enforcement does: the damage is so widespread and difficult to regulate that there’s little anyone can do. But there’s also a serious lack of activists with effective tactics and a coherent strategy to follow through on. This doesn’t mean, though, that we should back down.
Identifying with the Real World
Once on Cedar Mesa, in Southeast Utah, I watched an ORV intentionally veer to crush a dozing snake. The reptile churned and writhed in the machine’s track, dead or near dead as its nerves popped and struggled and ran down. I went to it, to witness its pointless death. A thick and handsome bull snake, it spent its last moments bleeding out in the dust. Why? Why do this? What drives this sick, stupid behavior? Why does our culture hate every living thing?
I lifted the snake into the sage and blackbrush so it could at least die in its home. “If they can’t evolve to get out of the way,” someone once told me about road killed animals, “then that’s their problem.” Of course, not evolving to changing conditions is what causes extinction. There’s little doubt that our culture will not voluntarily evolve to halt the worsening conditions that industry and recreation are creating on the planet. So how does anyone fight activity like this? How do we stop deforestation, global warming, ocean acidification? And given those immense problems, is ORV land abuse something to focus limited energy and resources on?
In addition to the suggestions made in these articles, activists can develop tactics and strategies and their way forward will eventually become clear. With hard work and determination a chance of winning would almost certainly emerge. But in a world of Keystone XL pipelines and epidemic levels of fracking, is the effort worth it? If you caretake a few acres of land, blocking travel and pulling weeds, how much does it matter if you stop, or get distracted, or die? If those acres are again immediately vulnerable, is your effort a waste?
Few things anger me more that seeing wanton destruction for fun. I wonder, though, if this is an unhelpful distraction. It’s easy to get angry at something so obviously disrespecting of the land. In terms of permanent impacts, though, industry is much worse, and the scale of destruction is enormous. Of course what runs it is oil. Always this—the temporary, illusory power locked in a liquid hydrocarbon, driving ORVs, factory fishing trawlers, factory farms, and industrial agriculture. It’s warming the atmosphere and leading us to a horribly impoverished future, where most of us will be unable to afford the lifestyle we’ve been subjected and addicted to, let alone find enough to eat.
Remove the oil and the engines stop, and a besieged biosphere can begin to heal. This is part of the strategy that Deep Green Resistance has proposed. [5] But in the meanwhile…ORVs, just one part of the picture, continue to cut apart what little wild life remains, the last seed bank of evolution as we’ll ever know it. The momentum of established civilized practice is now enormous—seemingly unstoppable—and its terminal is in global destruction, the eradication of all complex life. Challenge to this system is so psychologically and practically difficult that most of us ignore it.
Fighting for the real, wild world can begin with the understanding that humans are not everything, and that the fate of the world is ultimately our fate. It is much different to fight for your own beloved family than for a rocky canyon you’ll never visit. We progressives like to talk about how hatred of “other” races cannot be tolerated (not that much is ever done about that). But we hardly ever extend this principle to the non-human world—constant victim of our culture’s violence—because we’ve been conditioned to believe that humans are all that matter. The loons, the snakes, the too-slow creatures smeared across the roads and ground under rubber tires into the dirt, they and the people yet to come who won’t be able to live as we have because the oil is gone—none of them will care about our abstract, self-indulgent moral wrestling. That is the wall that human supremacy has built around us; it must be torn down.
Imagine again that an occupying culture, whose every act is force and theft, was destroying the means of your survival. Imagine them extracting fuel to use the world as a playground. Of course, it is not enough to stop them from driving their toys in every possible place. To survive in the long term we must also stop the extraction, the root of the problem, and eliminate the fuel for destruction. We must reclaim our adult responsibilities and stand up to defend the land where we live, knowing that until oil extraction and consumption is ended, there will always be a new group of occupiers finding new ways to destroy the land.
Endnotes
[1] Foreman, Dave. Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. Tucson: Ned Ludd Books, 1987, 89-109.
[2] Security Culture: A Handbook for Activists (PDF)
[3] “Resources,” Wild Earth Guardians, accessed July 13, 2014, http://www.wildearthguardiansresources.org/
[4] Carrie Saxifrage, “How the Enbridge Pipeline Issue Unified Northern BC,” The Vancouver Observer, February 13, 2012, http://www.vancouverobserver.com/politics/2012/02/13/nation-building-how-enbridge-pipeline-issue-unified-northern-bc
“Interior First Nations Pipeline Ban,” Dogwood Initiative, You Tube, December 2, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G5KtqPSW8Q
Carrie Saxifrage, “No Oil Pipeline Here: Enbridge Northern Gateway Joint Review Panel in Smithers finds 100% opposition,” The Vancouver Observer, January 17, 2012, http://www.vancouverobserver.com/sustainability/2012/01/17/enbridge-northern-gateway-joint-review-panel-smithers-finds-100-opposition
[5] “Decisive Ecological Warfare,” Deep Green Resistance, accessed August 28, 2014
