Climate activists Ruby Montoya and Jessica Renzicek are pleading guilty in federal court in the legal action against their sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
On July 24th, Ruby Montoya and Jessica Renzicek released a press release admitting that they had carried out multiple acts of sabotage against the then-under-construction Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in Spring 2017. The two activists set fire to heavy machinery and used blow torches to damage the oil pipeline and valves in an effort to decisively halt the project. While the DAPL was ultimately finished, their actions singlehandedly delayed construction for weeks or months. Their eco-sabotage resulted in millions of dollars of damage.
In September 2019, Jessica, 39, and Ruby, 30, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage to an energy facility, malicious use of fire, and other felonies. Montoya and Reznicek are now set to plead guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to damage an energy facility. The other charges will be dismissed, with sentencing due in May 2021. Pleading guilty may result in up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Both Montoya and Reznicek were seasoned activists and knew sabotage may carry consequences. However, they were clear that direct action was a must, if we are to protect the planet and future of life. They asserted they were in support of indigenous sovereignty and were resisting corporate power.
“Our conclusion is that the system is broken and it is up to us as individuals to take peaceful action and remedy it, and this we did, out of necessity,” Montoya said.
Although the direct action undertaken by Montoya and Reznicek may have been controversial, Deep Green Resistance stands in support of Ruby and Jessica and remains opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and any development that destroys the natural world.
Please listen to Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek talking with Jennifer Murnan and Max Wilbert during this 2017 interview, or read the transcript here. Their understanding and commitment is inspiring. We salute Ruby and Jessica and will keep readers up-to-date on their sentencing and where people can send support.
On 11th October, 2020, Indigenous peoples called a Day of Rage Against Colonialism. Main actions organized were against the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples and for an alternative to Columbus Day. Colonial statues were felled across the United States.
In Arizona, O’odham Anti-Border Collective protested the construction of a border wall. Customs and Border Protection Agencies assaulted the Indigenous protestors with tear gas, rubber bullets, and arrests.
Joyce Echaquan, a 37 year old Indigenous woman, died in a hospital in Quebec. From her deathbed, she had live-streamed the racist and misogynist comments of her nurses. Vigils, rallies, and demonstrations were organized after the video went viral.
Disputes over fishing rights between Indigenous peoples and commercial fishers in Nova Scotia led to mob violence. The commercial fishers have threatened, abused, sabotaged against the Sipekne’katik First Nation group. Indigenous peoples across the nation are organizing solidarity actions.
Secwepemc people in Canada have demanded a halt in the construction of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The pipeline threatens salmon population, on which both neighboring human and nonhuman communities depend upon. The protestors were assaulted by arrests.
Wet’suwet’en people have been protesting the Coastal Gas Link pipeline for over a decade. On February, the Wet’suwet’en launched a series of rail, port and highway blockades. More recently, calls for solidarity actions have begun to circulate as the Coastal GasLink pipeline is preparing to drill under the Morris river.
Check out the Facebook page of the Wet’suwet’en Access Point on Gidimt’en Territory.
In July, members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy occupied a proposed development site in Ontario. Community mobilization and highway blockades were organized as a response to the militarized raid on August 5th by the Ontario Provincial Police. The Ontario government has tried to isolate the encampment by criminalizing and arresting supporters. Resistance has been going strong since then.
Arson attacks and other forms of sabotage against cell phone towers (mobile masts) have accelerated over past months. In this piece, Max Wilbert and Aimee Wild explore why people are burning cell phone towers.
Over the past few months, there have been dozens of arson attacks on cell phone towers across the world.
Why is this happening? Are these attacks justified? And what is the reasoning behind them?
The truth is, cell phone towers are not benign. In fact, cell towers (or “mobile masts”) harm the world in many different ways. In this article, we’ll lay out six reasons why we believe destroying cell phone towers is justified.
1. Cell Phones Are Anti-Democratic
The technology behind cell phones is anti-democratic. In other words, it both emerges from and strengthens a social, political, and economic system which concentrates power into the hands of a small number of extremely wealthy people. These people have control over the information and consumption of most of the rest of the population.
“Television not and cannot be a neutral technology, nor does it convey a neutral message. It has the power to influence large portions of the population using surreptitious psychology and inherent technology to achieve its owners’ purposes and to promote their agenda.
The medium by its very nature consolidates power and influence into the hands of a rich few. There is no democratic process by which voters and consumers may directly affect its content, or control its impact. The problems and the dangers of television are inherent in the technology itself. That means it cannot be reformed in its nature as a medium. And because the medium of television cannot be reformed, it needs to be eliminated.”
2. Cell Phones Facilitate Global Capitalism and Harm Workers
Cell phones also destroy the planet by facilitating capitalism. The global mobile phone industry is worth roughly $1 trillion per year. The modern CEO in the early 2000’s was characterized by the Blackberry. Now, business wouldn’t run nearly as efficiently without cell phones. The smartphone enables a constantly connected, always-on lifestyle that is Taylorism run wild.
Now you can be on a meeting at home, in the car, from a rest stop on the side of the road in the bath, even in designated wilderness. It’s ideal for business, but destroys the undisturbed leisure that we need as human beings. When humans work too hard, prolonged stress causes our immunity to fall, and we become more susceptible to illness. It should surprise no one that increasing addiction to cell phones makes us sick.
3. Cell Phones Enable and Reinforce a Culture of Mass Surveillance
The third major problem with cell towers and cell phones is that they are perfect tools for mass surveillance. Each cell phone is a tracking device that logs your location every minute with nearby cell towers. Quite literally, as long as your phone is turned on, with you, and has service, it can practically retrace every one of your steps. And this isn’t to speak of the surveillance facilitated by apps, advertising and cookies, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi tracking, malicious downloads, hijacking sensor data, and so on. States and corporations have shown themselves only too willing to use cell phone data to track and monetize every users and surveil and harass dissidents.
4. Cell Phones and Service Networks are Based on Polluting, Destructive Resource Extraction
The fourth reason that destroying cell towers is justified is the harm done to the natural world. Delivering cellular connectivity requires a sophisticated system of cell phone towers, routers, and networking. A 2014 estimate put the total number of cell towers globally at about 4 million. That number has exploded in the years since. As of 2019, China alone had nearly 2 million towers, and as of 2018, the United States had 349,344 towers.
These towers are connected to power lines, diesel backup generators, transformers, routers, switches, and servers. And they serve cell phones. All of these are made out of materials—steel, plastic, rare earth metals, aluminum, silicon, copper—which are produced by strip mining and destructive extractive methods. The creation, maintenance and repair of mobile phone masts, bases, and the phones themselves are part of a wider culture of consumption. And as network technology escalates, demands for raw materials will increase as well. The shorter range of 5G technology, for example, requires many more access points to provide equivalent network coverage.
Don’t believe me? Spend 10 minutes searching for “How steel is produced” and “iron ore mining pollution.” The human rights implications and devastation of the natural world caused by these industrial processes cannot be overstated. Modern cell phones cannot even be recycled—although even if they could, that would not mitigate the problem, since the number of phones produced keeps rising and recycling is itself an extremely polluting, human-rights-violating industry.
Keep in mind that corporations chronically fail to report “accidents,” and that most pollution is fully permitted and perfectly legal. Stopping those companies from polluting? Now that is illegal.
5. Cell Phones Harm Our Minds, Bodies, and Spirits
The average smartphone user spends 3 hours and 15 minutes per day on their phone. In the United States, the number is nearly 5 and a half hours. The rise in cell phone use in young people has corresponded to plummeting mental health as social media, pornography, gaming, and toxic mass media are piped to young people 24/7. Unfortunately, probably everyone reading this knows how addictive these technologies can be.
The days of TV addiction seem almost quaint.
6. Cell Phone Towers Kill Massive Numbers of Birds
Cell towers also kill birds. Back in 2013, a study was published estimating that telecommunications towers of all types kill 7 million birds annually—with especially serious impacts to bird species that are already rare and struggling.
Keep in mind, the number of cell towers has possibly doubled or tripled since that time and is climbing steeply. The same cannot be said for bird populations, which have declined by 2.9 billion in the U.S. and Canada alone over the last 50 years.
Is Radiation From Cell Phones Harmful?
Cell phones and cell towers transmit information using radiofrequency (RF) radiation, a low frequency form of electromagnetic radiation. In the U.S., legal radiation levels from cell phones are set by the FCC at 1.6 watts per kilogram averaged over 1 gram of tissue.
Independent tests have shown that cell phones regularly exceed these legal limits by 2-5 times. National health institutes and cancer research organizations have researched exposure to radiation from cell phones, but have not found any conclusive evidence of increased cancer risk. But risk factors for cancer are complex and varied, and cancer is not the only potential harm. More chronic, low level health issues could be associated with increasing levels of RF radiation generated by industrial civilization. Is radiation from cell phones increasing anxiety levels? Linked to hormonal problems? Hurting our immune systems?
There is little research and less incentive—or funding—to conduct it. Regulatory bodies like the FCC are staffed by telecommunications industry veterans in a mutually beneficial “revolving door” that means policies are almost always designed to prioritize profits, not human health.
Nonetheless, even if radiation from cell phones is harmless, destroying cell phone towers is justified given the other harms listed above.
It is Justified to Burn Cell Towers
Industry never “self regulates.” Destruction and exploitation only stops when people rise up and stop it themselves. So it should come as no surprise when people attack cell phone towers or other infrastructure of industrial civilization. This way of life is not good for people and it is not good for the planet. We need a new path. And that will require dismantling the old.
Escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass left us with some of the most important words ever written: “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” Douglass said. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
The people who are attacking cell phones towers and burning mobile masts are more than justified. They are making a moral choice to resist the expansion of cellular networks and of industrial civilization in general. They are a strategic movement taking action against the communications network. Their attacks slow growth of the telecommunications industry by increasing cost and risk of expansions.
The activists involved are taking genuine risks in the interests of protecting their communities —human and non-human. The mainstream media reports portray these arsonists as conspiracy theorists who are ignorant or perhaps mentally unwell. It is interesting that they choose this angle rather than using the words criminals and terrorists. They are being ridiculed in order to downplay and devalue the reasons for these actions. Meanwhile, technological escalation and destruction of the planet is normalized. How could anyone resist this progress?
Industrial capitalism will never be stopped by destroying cell towers alone. Nonetheless, these types of underground action can be an important part of resistance movements. We hope that with proper target selection, the same passion can be directed towards infrastructure that is even more destructive and central to the industrial system.
Saboteurs: we salute you.
We Need Your Help
Right now, Deep Green Resistance organizers are at work building a political resistance resistance movement to defend the living planet and rebuild just, sustainable human communities.
In Manila, Kathmandu, Auckland, Denver, Paris—all over the world—we are building resistance and working towards revolution. We need your help.
Not all of us can work from the front lines, but we can all contribute. Our radical, uncompromising stance comes at a price. Foundations and corporations won’t fund us because we are too radical. We operate on a shoestring budget (all our funding comes from small, grassroots donations averaging less than $50) and have only one paid staff.
Monthly donors are the backbone of our fundraising because they provide us with reliable, steady income. This allows us to plan ahead. Becoming a monthly donor, or increasing your contribution amount, is the single most important thing we can do to boost our financial base.
Current funding levels aren’t sustainable for the long-term, even with our level of operations now. We need to expand our fundraising base significantly to build stronger resistance and grow our movement.
Editors note: this material is excerpted from a Deep Green Resistance database called “Resistance Profiles,” which explores various movements, their strategies and tactics, and their effectiveness. We encourage you to study all social movements to learn from their successes and failures.
Goal
Stop the exploitation and destruction of the environment.
Strategy
Stop environmentally destructive businesses through attrition: inflict more economic damage than they can absorb.
Tactics
Economic sabotage via attacks on property using arson, sabotage, and bombings.
Organization
Leaderless, non-hierarchical, small autonomous cells.
Above/Underground
Actions are carried out by underground cells. The North American Earth Liberation Front Press Office (NAELFPO), an aboveground support group, focused on outreach, prisoner support, and raising funds and awareness.
Security
When security culture is followed, its decentralized autonomous cells make the ELF difficult to infiltrate, and if a member is arrested they can give little information to authorities. The NAELFPO allowed underground cells to securely publicize actions.
Recruitment
Mostly indirect. Public outreach and press releases about underground actions inspire individuals and affinity groups to carry out actions of their own. A direct action can be considered an ELF action if it causes economic damage to those exploiting the environment, educates the public, and takes all reasonable precautions to avoid harming human or non-human life.
Effectiveness
The ELF’s strategy of attrition has not inflicted enough losses to offset the profits of extractive and destructive industries. Though activists have caused more than $100 million in damages in various attacks, and slowed or halted many projects, the impact has been negligible on industrial expansion as a whole.
Despite being named by the FBI as the leading domestic terrorism threat, relatively few arrests have been made and most cases remain unsolved.
We’ve listed the underground actions in the UK that are in the public domain, but what about those we don’t hear about? There’s a rich and continuous stream of resistance that never sees the light of day, never seeks the media feeds or the spotlight. A conversation with a friend recently highlighted this ongoing resistance; whilst transiting through a train station near London he overheard an interesting conversation between four rail engineers discussing ongoing targeting and sabotage of strategic signals in the area.
He followed them discreetly to hear more. It seemed that for a prolonged period of six months or more, specific signals along a freight route had been targeted and sabotaged. Trains on this route transport key resources such as minerals and coal. The nuclear waste train also uses this route.
The engineers said it was happening with such foresight, and so very well timed to disrupt the route on a regular basis, that it must be done by someone with inside or working knowledge. We can’t know or speak for these people but we in Deep Green Resistance support their work.
With foresight, planning, and research, it is possible to conduct effective actions without disrupting or harming the public. These actions have caused so little trouble to the public that no one is aware of them, and they’ve gone unreported. The establishment don’t want to report these (unless for disinformation or to discredit groups) so as not to encourage or alarm the general public to the fact that resistance is organised and ongoing. Please share this story as one example of the untold resistance.
Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) eco-saboteurs Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya have been arrested and charged with multiple felonies.
They face up to 100 years or more in prison. Their next hearing is currently scheduled for December 2, 2019, before U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger in Des Moines, Iowa.
Statement of Support from Deep Green Resistance
Deep Green Resistance officially stands in solidarity and full support of the actions taken by Jessica and Ruby.
We expect they will find no justice in the colonial courts of an imperialist state, in a city founded as a military fort to oversee the destruction of local indigenous inhabitants and facilitate the settler-colonial invasion project, but the struggle does not end with incarceration. Revolution is bigger than any individual, and we struggle in solidarity with comrades locked in cages.
In an era of mass extinction, climate chaos, and ecological collapse, an era in which mainstream environmentalism has failed to even partially reverse these problems, militant action against industrial infrastructure such as pipelines is, without any question, justified.
In fact, militant resistance is a moral and physical obligation—a matter of planetary self-defense.
How to Support Jessica and Ruby
We invite you to join us in pledging our full support to their legal defense and to work in solidarity outside the courtroom. We are currently gathering more information about their legal situation. Pending information, we are now taking donations for their legal defense and expenses.
To donate, click here and follow the instructions. Be sure to earmark your donation (using the “comment” field or memo of a check, etc.) for Jessica and Ruby legal defense.
For more updates on this case, visit this site regularly, or subscribe.
Their Actions: Eco-Sabotage Against the Dakota Access Pipeline
Between July 2016 and May 2017, Jessica and Ruby are believed to have committed at least 10 acts of eco-sabotage against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) using oxy-acetylene torches and improved incendiaries.
These attacks delayed pipeline construction by several months. In terms of material effectiveness vs. resources invested, their ecosabotage was roughly 1000 times as efficient as the aboveground fight at Standing Rock.
We say this not to disparage aboveground resistance, but to highlight the efficacy of militant underground struggle. Two people with a tiny budget were highly effective at fighting this project
Comparison of material effectiveness and efficiency of various pipeline resistance techniques. Image via “Pipeline Activism and Principles of Strategy.” Click the image for the source.
Interview with Jessica and Ruby
In July 2017, two days after Jessica and Ruby publicly admitted to carrying out the eco-sabotage campaign, Deep Green Resistance interviewed the two women. You can listen to that interview here:
The Charges They Are Facing
Press release from the U.S. Department of [In]Justice, Southern District of Iowa:
Wednesday, October 2nd, 2019
DES MOINES, Iowa – On September 19, 2019, a federal grand jury returned an Indictment charging defendants, Jessica Rae Reznicek and Ruby Katherine Montoya, with one count of conspiracy to damage an energy facility, four counts of use of fire in the commission of a felony, and four counts of malicious use of fire, announced United States Attorney Marc Krickbaum. Montoya was recently arrested in the District of Arizona and detained pending court proceedings to determine her appearance in the Southern District of Iowa. Reznicek appeared in Des Moines on October 1, 2019 and was conditionally released pending trial. Trial is currently scheduled for December 2, 2019, before United States District Court Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger.
According to Count 1 of the Indictment, from at least as early as 2016 and continuing in 2017, in the Southern District of Iowa and elsewhere, Reznicek and Montoya conspired to knowingly and willfully damage and attempt to damage the property of an energy facility involved in the transmission and distribution of fuel, or another form or source of energy, in an amount exceeding or which would have exceeded $100,000, and to cause a significant interruption and impairment of a function of an energy facility.
Counts 2 through 9 of the Indictment allege specific instances of damage or attempts to damage portions of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Southern District of Iowa by Reznicek and Montoya on various dates in 2017.
The public is reminded that an Indictment is merely an accusation, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless they are proven guilty.
If they are convicted of Count 1, conspiracy to damage an energy facility, Reznicek and Montoya face up to 20 years imprisonment, not more than a $250,000 fine, or both such fine and imprisonment.
If they are convicted of Counts 2, 4, 6 and/or 8, use of fire in the commission of a felony, Reznicek and Montoya face a mandatory minimum 10 years imprisonment to be served consecutive to the sentence imposed on Count 1. For each second or subsequent conviction of Counts 2, 4, 6 and/or 8, Reznicek and Montoya face a mandatory minimum 20 years imprisonment to be served consecutive to the sentence imposed on Count 1.
If they are convicted of Counts 3, 5, 7 and/or 9, malicious use of fire, Reznicek and Montoya face a mandatory minimum 5 years imprisonment and a maximum of 20 years imprisonment, not more than a $250,000 fine, or both such fine and
imprisonment.
The investigation is being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and is being prosecuted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa.
