Time is Short: Interview With An Eco-Saboteur, Part I

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.

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.

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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.

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

Open Letter to Reclaim Environmentalism

Open Letter to Reclaim Environmentalism

By Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen

Once, the environmental movement was about protecting the natural world from the insatiable demands of this extractive culture. Some of the movement still is: around the world grassroots activists and their organizations are fighting desperately to save this or that creature they love, this or that plant or fungi, this or that wild place.

Contrast this to what some activists are calling the conservation-industrial complex–­big green organizations, huge “environmental” foundations, neo-environmentalists, some academics–­which has co-opted too much of the movement into “sustainability,” with that word being devalued to mean “keeping this culture going as long as possible.” Instead of fighting to protect our one and only home, they are trying to “sustain” the very culture that is killing the planet. And they are often quite explicit about their priorities.

For example, the recent “An Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy,” signed by a number of academics, some conservation biologists, and other members of the conservation-industrial complex, labels nuclear energy as “sustainable” and argues that because of global warming, nuclear energy plays a “key role” in “global biodiversity conservation.” Their entire argument is based on the presumption that industrial energy usage is, like Dick Cheney said, not negotiable–­it is taken as a given. And for what will this energy be used? To continue extraction and drawdown­–to convert the last living creatures and their communities into the final dead commodities.

Their letter said we should let “objective evidence” be our guide. One sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns: let’s lay out a pattern and see if we can recognize it in less than 10,000 years. When you think of Iraq, do you think of cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of this culture. The Near East was a forest. North Africa was a forest. Greece was a forest. All pulled down to support this culture. Forests precede us, while deserts dog our heels. There were so many whales in the Atlantic they were a hazard to ships. There were so many bison on the Great Plains you could watch for four days as a herd thundered by. There were so many salmon in the Pacific Northwest you could hear them coming for hours before they arrived. The evidence is not just “objective,” it’s overwhelming: this culture exsanguinates the world of water, of soil, of species, and of the process of life itself, until all that is left is dust.

Fossil fuels have accelerated this destruction, but they didn’t cause it, and switching from fossil fuels to nuclear energy (or windmills) won’t stop it. Maybe three generations of humans will experience this level of consumption, but a culture based on drawdown has no future. Of all people, conservation biologists should understand that drawdown cannot last, and should not be taken as a given when designing public policy–­let alone a way of life.

It is long past time for those of us whose loyalties lie with wild plants and animals and places to take back our movement from those who use its rhetoric to foster accelerating ecocide. It is long past time we all faced the fact that an extractive way of life has never had a future, and can only end in biotic collapse. Every day this extractive culture continues, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. We have very little time left to stop the destruction and to start the repair. And the repair might yet be done: grasslands, for example, are so good at sequestering carbon that restoring 75 percent of the planet’s prairies could bring atmospheric CO2 to under 330 ppm in fifteen years or less. This would also restore habitat for a near infinite number of creatures. We can make similar arguments about reforestation. Or consider that out of the more than 450 dead zones in the oceans, precisely one has repaired itself. How? The collapse of the Soviet Empire made agriculture unfeasible in the region near the Black Sea: with the destructive activity taken away, the dead zone disappeared, and life returned. It really is that simple.

You’d think that those who claim to care about biodiversity would cherish “objective evidence” like this. But instead the conservation-industrial complex promotes nuclear energy (or windmills). Why? Because restoring prairies and forests and ending empires doesn’t fit with the extractive agenda of the global overlords.

This and other attempts to rationalize increasingly desperate means to fuel this destructive culture are frankly insane. The fundamental problem we face as environmentalists and as human beings isn’t to try to find a way to power the destruction just a little bit longer: it’s to stop the destruction. The scale of this emergency defies meaning. Mountains are falling. The oceans are dying. The climate itself is bleeding out and it’s our children who will find out if it’s beyond hope. The only certainty is that our one and only home, once lush with life and the promise of more, will soon be a bare rock if we do nothing.

We the undersigned are not part of the conservation-industrial complex. Many of us are long-term environmental activists. Some of us are Indigenous people whose cultures have been living truly sustainably and respectfully with all our relations from long before the dominant culture began exploiting the planet. But all of us are human beings who recognize we are animals who like all others need livable habitat on a living earth. And we love salmon and prairie dogs and black terns and wild nature more than we love this way of life.

Environmentalism is not about insulating this culture from the effects of its world-destroying activities. Nor is it about trying to perpetuate these world-destroying activities. We are reclaiming environmentalism to mean protecting the natural world from this culture.

And more importantly, we are reclaiming this earth that is our only home, reclaiming it from this extractive culture. We love this earth, and we will defend our beloved.

You can sign on to this letter at: Open Letter to Reclaim Environmentalism

Time is Short: Revolution or Devolution?

Time is Short: Revolution or Devolution?

By Anonymous / Deep Green Resistance UK

In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.
—Michael McFaul, U.S. National Security Council

When I talk to people about the Deep Green Resistance (DGR) Decisive Ecological Warfare (DEW) strategy to end the destructive culture we know as industrial civilisation, I get comments like “So you want a revolution.” Some include the word “armed” or “violent” before “revolution.” I explain that DGR is advocating for militant resistance to industrial civilisation that will involves sabotage of infrastructure.  We we are not advocating for the harming of any human or non-human living beings.

There are a number of ways that groups can challenge those who rule: revolutions, coup d’etats, rebellions, terrorism, non-violent resistance, insurgency, guerrilla warfare and civil war. This article will explore what causes revolutions, the stages of revolutions, communist revolutions, anarchist revolutions, the automatic revolution theory, and if a revolution is likely now. In future articles, we will explore what we can learn from studying past and present insurgency, guerrilla warfare, and non-violent resistance.

Methods for Challenging Those Who Rule

In Coup d’etat: A Practical Handbook, Edward Luttwak describes a coup d’etats (coup) as a method that: “Operates in that area outside the government but within the state which is formed by the permanent and professional civil service, the armed forces and the police. The aim is to detach the permanent employees of the state from the political leadership, and this can not usually take place if the two are linked by political, ethnic or traditional loyalties.” [1] So it’s about separating the permanent bureaucrat machinery of the state from the political leadership. The top decision-making offices are seized without changing the system of their predecessors.

Luttwak makes a distinction between revolutions, civil wars, pronunciamiento (a form of military rebellion particular to Spain, Portugal and Latin America in the nineteenth century), putsch (led by high ranking military officers), and a war of national liberation/insurgency. He explains that coups use some elements of all of these, but unlike them may not necessarily be assisted by the masses or a military or armed force. Those attempting a coup will not be in charge of the armed forces at the start of the coup and will hope to win their support if the coup is going to be successful. They will also not initially control any tools of propaganda so can’t count on the support of the people. Luttwak is clear that coups are politically neutral, so the policies of the new government can’t be predicted to be “right”or “left.”

The political scientist Samuel P. Huntington identifies three classes of coup d’etat:
1. Breakthrough coup d’etat—a revolutionary army overthrows a traditional government and creates a new bureaucratic elite.
2. Guardian coup d’etat—The stated aim of such a coup is usually improving public order and efficiency, and ending corruption.
3. Veto coup d’etat—occurs when the army vetoes the people’s mass participation and social mobilisation in governing themselves.

A list of Coup d’etats from the present going back to BC 876 are listed here. Well known examples are the Nazis in Germany in 1933 and the Iranian Revolution, 1978-‘79.

A rebellion, uprising, or insurrection is any act by group that refuses to recognise, or seeks to overthrow, the authority of the existing government. They can use violent or non-violent methods. Any attempts that fails to change a regime are called rebellions. Uprisings are usually unarmed or minimally armed popular rebellions. Insurrections generally involve some degree of military training and organisation, and the use of military weapons and tactics by the rebels. [2]

DGR members would never consider carrying out or advocating for terrorism. Most governments conduct state terrorism on a daily basis via the police, army, and the prison system, and DGR members are working against this in our aboveground organising. In Insurgency & Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse, Bard E. O’Neill defines terrorism as “the threat or use of physical coercion, primarily against noncombatants, especially civilians, to create fear in order to achieve various political objectives.” [3]

In Insurgency & Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse, O’Neill defines Insurgency as a “struggle between a nonruling group and the ruling authorities in which the nonruling group consciously uses political resources (e.g. organisational expertise, propaganda, and demonstrations) and violence to destroy, reformulate, or sustain the basis of legitimacy of one or more aspects of politics.” Recent examples are in Iraq and Palestine. [4]

And guerrilla warfare is described by O’Neill as “highly mobile hit-and-run attacks by lightly to moderately armed groups that seek to harass the enemy and gradually erode his will and capability. Guerrillas place a premium on flexibility, speed and deception.” Examples include Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, and the Zapatistas in Mexico. [5]

In War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare, Robert Taber describes a guerrilla fighter:

When we speak of the guerrilla fighter, we are speaking of the political partisan, an armed civilian whose principle weapon is not his rifle or his machete, but his relationship to the community, the nation in and for which he fights. Insurgency, or guerrilla war, is the agency of radical social or political change, it is the face and the right arm of the revolution. [6]

In The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp defines nonviolent action as “the belief that the exercise of power depends on the consent of the ruled who, by withdrawing that consent, can control and even destroy the power of their opponent. In other words, nonviolent action is a technique used to control, combat and destroy the opponent’s power by nonviolent means of wielding power.” [7] Well known nonviolent campaigns include the Gandhi’s Salt March campaign in 1930 and the US Civil Rights Movement of 1954–68.

A civil war is a conventional war between organised groups in the same state, which can include conflict between elements in the national armed forces. Both sides aim to take control of the country or region.

What Causes Revolutions?

Each of these methods or a combination of all may lead to a revolution. I find the word “revolution” a tired and overused concept. Everyone has a slightly different understanding of what a revolution is. The online Oxford dictionary defines a revolution as: “A forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favor of a new system,” a complete change to the existing political system.

In Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, Jack A. Goldstone defines a revolution “in terms of both observed mass mobilization and the institutional change, and a driving ideology carrying a vision of social justice. Revolution is the forcible overthrow of a government through mass mobilization (whether military or civilian or both) in the name of social justice, to create new political institutions.”  Goldstone describes two great visions of revolutions, the heroic uprising of the downtrodden masses guided by leaders to overthrow unjust rulers. The second vision is eruptions of popular anger that produce violence and chaos. He observes that the history of revolutions shows both visions are present and they are vary widely. [8]

Professor Crane Brinton’s 1938 book The Anatomy of Revolution compares the English Revolution/Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution of 1917. He identified a number of conditions that are present as causes for major revolutions. Many of the conditions are present now, including: general discontent; hopeful people accepting less than they hoped for; growing bitterness between social classes; governments not responding to the needs of society, and not managing their finances effectively.

Goldstone identifies five elements that result in a stable society becoming unstable, where the conditions for revolution are then favorable. These are:
1. poor management of finances;
2. alienation and opposition among the elites;
3. revolutionary mobilisation builds around some form of popular anger at injustice;
4. an ideology develops that mobalises diverse groups and presents a shared narrative of resistance;
5. a revolution requires favorable international relations.
In industrialised countries governments are clearly mismanaging their finances. This is combined with a general feeling of inequality in our society and the need for social change.

There still needs to be an event or events to lead to a revolution. Goldstone describes structural and transient causes. Structural causes are long-term and large-scale trends that erode social structures and relationships. Transient causes are chance events, by individuals or groups, which highlight the impact of longer term trends and encourage further resistance.

Structural Causes

1. Demographic change is a common structural change. Rapid population growth can produce large numbers of youth cohorts, who struggle to find work and are easily attracted to new ideologies for social change.
2. A shift in the pattern of international relations. War and international economic competition can weaken governments and empower new groups. Both of these causes can result in a number of states in a regional becoming unstable. Then if an event in one state results in a revolution, it can result in revolutionary outbreaks in others. These are known as revolutionary waves.
3. Uneven economic development. If the poor and middles classes fall noticeably far behind the elite, this may create popular grievances.
4. A new pattern of exclusion or discrimination against particular groups develops. For example if up-and-coming groups are excluded from joining the elite, they may look at other options.
5. The evolution of “personalist regimes” where the rulers hang onto power, relying on a small circle of corrupt family members and cronies. This will weaken or alienate the professional military and business elites.

Transient Causes

Transient causes are sudden events that push a society to become unstable. These can include: spikes in inflation, especially in food prices; defeat in war; and riots and demonstrations that challenge state authority. If the state is then seen to be repressing ordinary members of society with just grievances, it can lead to popular perceptions of the regime as dangerous, illegitimate, and unjust.

Transient events occur regularly in many countries and do not result in revolutions. Structural causes are needed to create the underlying instability, which allows the transient event to cause people to turn against the state more openly and in large numbers. [9]

The Stages of Revolutions

Brinton identifies revolutions having four stages: the Old Order, the Rule of the Moderates, then the Reign of Terror, and finally the Thermidorian Reaction (return of stability).

Goldstone also identifies four similar different stages: state breakdown, post revolution power struggle, new government consolidation, and a second radical phase some years after.  He observes that strong and skillful leaders are needed to take advantage of the structural and transient causes if a revolution is to be successful. He identifies visionary and organisational leaders. Visionary leaders are prolific writers and generally brilliant public speakers, who articulate the faults of the old society and make a powerful case for change. Organisational leaders are great organisers of revolutionary armies and/or bureaucracies. They work out how to put the visionary leaders’ idea into practice. In some cases individuals act as both the visionary and organisational leader. [10]

Communist Revolutions

Revolutionary socialism is a view that revolution is necessary to transition from capitalism to socialism. This is not necessarily a violent event, but instead it is the seizure of political power by mass movements of the working class so they control the state. Social/Proletarian revolutions are generally advocated by socialists, communists, and some anarchists. Revolutionary socialism includes a number of social and political movements that may define “revolution” differently from one another.

A communist revolution is a proletarian revolution, generally inspired by the ideas of Marxism  to replace capitalism with communism, with socialism as an intermediate stage. Marx believed that proletarian revolutions will inevitably happen in all capitalist countries.

Chapters 22 and 23 of Robert B Asprey’s War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History give a very useful summary of the Russian Revolution from 1825 to the October Revolution in 1917, then up to the end of the Russian Civil War in 1922. The Russian people had suffered many years of terrible conditions resulting in protests, uprisings and then harsh repression by a number of Russian Czars. Following Russia’s disastrous involvement in World War One, a St. Petersburg army garrison mutinied, leading to February Revolution and the end of the monarchy. A Provisional Government formed that continued Russia’s involvement in the war. The people had no desire to keep fighting but the new government did not seem to understand this. The October Revolution followed when the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, took over the government. A civil war followed until 1922, with Lenin’s Red Army fighting to regain control of Russia against the Imperialist White armies and regional guerrilla dissidents, who were supported with troops from Britain, America, France and Italy. By 1922 the allied forces had left Russia and the White armies had been defeated. Lenin was left with a devastated Russia, industry at a standstill, inflation, agriculture at an all-time low and large peasant revolts in 1920-‘21. Droughts caused widespread famine in 1921-‘22, and it’s estimated that five million people died from starvation. [11]

There is a clear pattern of communist revolutions resulting in authoritarian, repressive governments. And most communist states have eventually had to give into Capitalism. The World Revolution that Marx dreamed of looks very unlikely.

Anarchist Revolutions

Anarchism is a political philosophy that aims to create stateless societies often defined as self-governed voluntary institutions. The International Anarchist Federation (IFA) fights for “the abolition of all forms of authority whether economic, political, social, religious, cultural or sexual. The construction of a free society, without classes or States or frontiers, founded on anarchist federalism and mutual aid. The action of the IAF—IFA shall always be based on direct action, against parliamentarism and reformism, both on a theoretical and practical point of view.”

Insurrectionary Anarchism is based on belief that the state will not wither away: “Attack is the refusal of mediation, pacification, sacrifice, accommodation and compromise in struggle. It is through acting and learning to act, not propaganda, that we will open the path to insurrection—although obviously analysis and discussion have a role in clarifying how to act. Waiting only teaches waiting; in acting one learns to act. Yet it is important to note that the force of an insurrection is social, not military.” [12]

Michael Schmidt’s recent book The Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism describes five waves of Anarchism. [13] He describes a number of Anarchist Revolutions: the Mexican Revolution 1910-‘20, the Anarchist uprising against the Bolsheviks 1917-‘21, Ukrainian Revolution and Free Territory/Makhnovia 1917-‘21, Manchurian Revolution in Northeast Asia 1929-‘31, Spanish Revolution 1936-‘39, and the Chiapas conflict/Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico 1994.

In 2007 a group calling itself the Invisible Committee released The Coming Insurrection. It describes the decline of capitalism and civilisation through seven circles of alienation: self, social relations, work, the economy, urbanity, the environment, and civilisation. It then goes on to describe how a revolutionary struggle may evolve through “communes” – a general term to mean any group of people coming together to take on a task – to form into an underground network out of sight and then carry out acts of sabotage and confrontation with the state.

Automatic Revolution Theory

Ted Trainer’s recent article [14] encourages the Transition movement to think more radically and describes the “automatic revolution” theory: “If more and more people join in gradually building up alternative systems, then eventually it will all somehow have added up to revolution and the existence of the new society we want to see.”

This sums up the majority of the liberal environmental movement very well; a sort of blind faith that if enough positive stuff is done and the movement gets enough people on board, it will lead to a sustainable society. It doesn’t seem to consider the ongoing, wholesale destruction happening to the natural world or that we are fast approaching—or may have passed—the point of no return for runaway climate change. Most liberal environmentalists want a new sustainable society with all the comforts and conveniences that they currently have. So, by default, they want to reform the current system, which is nonrevolutionary. Reformists aim to change policies that determine how economic, psychological, and political benefits of a society are distributed. That’s not going to work for the environmental crisis.

To have a truly sustainable society, industrial civilisation needs to end.  Otherwise, it will consume all resources that can be extracted from the earth and result in a devastated world that can not support life. The wars, death and suffering in the medium term will be horrific. Also it’s not that it’s just going to get hot—and it is going to get hot, even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases now—but climate change is going to cause the seasons to become erratic, and that’s a serious problem for growing food.

Revolution now?

A number of writers, journalists and celebrities are now calling for revolt or revolution in response to the environmental crisis. Of course each has their own interpretation of what “revolution” means. Naomi Klein recently observed that how climate science is telling us all to revolt. Chris Hedges argues that the system is unreformable and our only choice is mass civil disobedience. Comedian Russell Brand is now talking about the need for a revolution.

Robert Steele, former Marine and ex-CIA case officer, believes that the preconditions for revolution exist in most western countries: “What revolution means in practical terms is that balance has been lost and the status quo ante is unsustainable. There are two ‘stops’ on greed to the nth degree: the first is the carrying capacity of Earth, and the second is human sensibility. We are now at a point where both stops are activating.”

DGR Strategy—Decisive Ecological Warfare (DEW)

Where does DGR’s Strategy Decisive Ecological Warfare fit into all this? First, are the preconditions for revolution present? Well it depends where you look. If we focus on the industrialised world and work from Brinton and Goldstone’s criteria, and Steele’s analysis, then yes, that’s where we’re heading. What form might it take—violent or nonviolent, mass movement or guerrilla warfare?

Noam Chomsky believes that if a revolution is going to be possible then “it has to have dedicated support by a large majority of the population. People who have come to realize that the just goals that they are trying to attain cannot be attained within the existing institutional structure because they will be beaten back by force. If a lot of people come to that realization then they might say well we’ll go beyond,  what’s called reformism, the effort to introduce changes within the institutions that exist. At that point the questions at least arise. But we are so remote from that point that I don’t even see any point speculating about it and we may never get there.”

We in DGR would agree with Chomsky that in the West, we are far away from a large majority of people calling for a just, truly sustainable world and accepting the radical consequences of this. The environmental movement has been trying to tackle the issues using a range of nonviolent methods for decades and is failing. So we urgently need to look at what other methods could work.

Militant Resistance—Sabotage

In 1960 Nelson Mandela was tasked by the ANC in setting up its military wing called Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK). I find his thoughts on the direction MK could take very useful:

In planning the direction and form that MK would take, we considered four types of violent activities: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and open revolution. For a small and fledgling army, open revolution was inconceivable. Terrorism inevitably reflected poorly on those who used it, undermining any public support it might otherwise garner. Guerrilla warfare was a possibility, but since the ANC had been reluctant to embrace violence at all, it made sense to start with the form of violence that inflicted the least harm against individuals: sabotage.

Because Sabotage did not involve loss of life, it offered the best hope for reconciliation among the races afterwards… Sabotage had the added virtue of requiring the least manpower.
[15]

If we look at today’s situation in industrialised countries, guerrilla warfare and open revolution are not possible and terrorism is not acceptable, which leaves sabotage. The DEW strategy is made up of four phases, with an aboveground movement and underground network working in tandem. The aboveground groups indirectly support the underground network, although there is no direct contact between the two. The aboveground movement is made up from many groups working on land restoration, ending oppression, legally working to stop environmental destruction, community resilience including meeting basic needs and alternative institutions. An underground network would be made up of a variety of autonomous cells to carry out acts of sabotage against destructive infrastructure. The fossil fuels need to be left in the ground and the destruction of the natural world needs to stop. (include stuff about veterans saying DEW could work).

We do not believe there is any way to reform this insane culture. DGR is calling for revolutionary, systemic change. We would prefer a nonviolent transition to a truly sustainable society, but because this looks unlikely industrial civilisation needs to end and the most effective way to do this is through the sabotage of infrastructure by an underground network. If successful, DGR’s devolutionary strategy will indirectly result in a complete change to the existing political system, a reset. It is indirect because we are not advocating for armed militancy to overthrow any governments like past revolutions or for a strategy of attrition. But instead for underground cells to strategically target infrastructure weak points to cause system disruption and cascading system failures, resulting in the collapse of industrial activity and civilisation. It’s time for all environmentalists to decide if they want systemic change or to keep trying to reform the unreformable.

Finally, I’d like to quote Frank Coughlin’s description of the Zapatistas idea of revolution:

It is based in the “radical” idea that the poor of the world should be allowed to live, and to live in a way that fits their needs. They fight for their right to healthy food, clean water, and a life in commune with their land. It is an ideal filled with love, but a specific love of their land, of themselves, and of their larger community. They fight for their land not based in some abstract rejection of destruction of beautiful places, but from a sense of connectedness. They are part of the land they live on, and to allow its destruction is to concede their destruction. They have shown that they are willing to sacrifice, be it the little comforts of life they have, their liberty, or their life itself.

Endnotes

1.  P19 – Luttwak, Edward. (1988) Coup d’etat: A Practical Handbook. Cambridge, USA. Harvard University Press.
2. P8 – Goldstone, Jack A. (2014) Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, New York, Oxford University Press
3.  P33 – O’Neill, Bard E. (2005) Insurgency & Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse. 2nd Ed. Washington, D.C. Potomac Books.
4.  P15 – O’Neill, Bard E. (2005) Insurgency & Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse. 2nd Ed. Washington, D.C. Potomac Books.
5.  P35 – O’Neill, Bard E. (2005) Insurgency & Terrorism: From Revolution to Apocalypse. 2nd Ed. Washington, D.C. Potomac Books.
6. P10 – Taber, Robert. (2002) War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare. Washington, D.C. Potomac Books.
7. P4 – Sharp, Gene. (1973) The Politics of Nonviolent Action. Boston. Porter Sargent Publisher.
8. P1 – Goldstone, Jack A. (2014) Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, New York, Oxford University Press
9. P20 – Goldstone, Jack A. (2014) Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, New York, Oxford University Press
10. P26 – Goldstone, Jack A. (2014) Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction, New York, Oxford University Press
11. P284 Asprey, Robert B. (1975) War in the Shadows: The Guerrilla in History. New York. Doubledday & Company, Inc.
12. From Do or Die Issue 10. http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no10/anarchy.htm. Also read more about Insurrectionary Anarchism here: http://www.ainfos.ca/06/jul/ainfos00232.html).
13. Schmidt, Michael. (2013) Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism. Oakland. AK Press. Anarchist Revolutionary Waves. The First Wave 1868-1894, Second Wave 1895-1923, Third Wave 1924-1949, Fourth Wave 1950-1989 and the Fifth Wave 1989 to the Present
14. Ted Trainer article – Transition Townspeople, We Need To Think About Transition: Just Doing Stuff Is Far From Enough! http://blog.postwachstum.de/transition-townspeople-we-need-to-think-about-transition-just-doing-stuff-is-far-from-enough-20140801
15. Mandela, Nelson. (1995) Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. London. Abacus.

Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly 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

Book Review: This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

Book Review: This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

By Kim Hill / Deep Green Resistance Australia

Naomi Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything, is based on the premise that capitalism is the cause of the climate crisis, and to avert catastrophe, capitalism must go. The proposed solution is a mass movement that will win with arguments that undermine the capitalist system by making it morally unacceptable.

This premise has many flaws. It fails to acknowledge the roots of capitalism and climate change, seeing them as independent issues that can be transformed without taking action to address the underlying causes. Climate change cannot be avoided by building more infrastructure and reforming the economy, as is suggested in the book. The climate crisis is merely a symptom of a deeper crisis, and superficial solutions that act on the symptoms will only make the situation worse. Human-induced climate change started thousands of years ago with the advent of land clearing and agriculture, long before capitalism came into being. The root cause—a culture that values domination of people and land, and the social and physical structures created by this culture—needs to be addressed for any action on capitalism or climate to be effective.

I’ve long been baffled by the climate movement. When 200 species a day are being made extinct, oceans and rivers being drained of fish and all life, unpolluted drinking water being largely a thing of the past, and nutritious food being almost inaccessible, is climate really where we should focus our attention? It seems a distraction, a ‘look, what’s that in the sky?’ from those that seek to profit from taking away everything that sustains life on the only planet we have. By directing our thoughts, discussions and actions towards gases in the upper atmosphere and hotly debated theories, rather than immediate needs for basic survival of all living beings, those in power are leading us astray from forming a resistance movement that could ensure the continuation of life on Earth.

This book is a tangle of contradictions. An attempt to unravel the contradictions and understand the thinking behind these arguments is what drew me in to reading it, but in the end I was left confused, with a jumble of mismatched ideas, vague goals, and proposals to continue with the same disjointed tactics that have never worked in the past.

This Changes Everything advocates for socialism, then explores why socialism won’t stop fossil fuel extraction. It is against capitalism, yet insists ‘there is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy’. Renewable energy is promoted as an alternative, yet the objections of people whose land and livelihoods are destroyed by these developments is acknowledged and respected. The book promotes the rights of indigenous people to live on their land in traditional ways, and at the same time claims they need jobs and development. It sees the extraction and burning of fossil fuels as the main cause of the climate crisis, yet recommends solutions that require more of the same. It supports economic development while opposing economic growth. It says that ‘compromised, palatable-to-conservative solutions don’t work’ yet is selling exactly that.

One chapter is devoted to promoting divestment from fossil fuel companies, even though this is openly acknowledged to have no economic effect. Apparently it will ‘bankrupt their reputation’ rather than actually bankrupt them. This strategy is unlikely to work, as corporations spend millions on PR campaigns, and control the media, so anyone outside this system will struggle to have any real effect on their reputations. And corporations are powered by money, not morals, so moral campaigns on their own can’t shut down a company. And if they did, this targeting of specific companies, rather than the entire economic system, will only create space for others to take their place.

Another chapter explains why ‘green billionaires’ won’t save us, which seems unnecessary in a book arguing for dismantling capitalism—of course more capitalism won’t help. Strangely, Klein is disappointed that Virgin CEO Richard Branson, despite investing many millions of dollars to invent or discover a ‘miracle fuel’ to power his ever-expanding airline, did not achieve this impossible goal. What difference would it make if he had been successful? Whatever this fuel might be, it would still need to be extracted from somewhere, and burned. Unless money really can buy a genuine religious miracle, and even then, the airline industry requires massive amounts of land, mining and manufacturing, and a globalised economy. If fuel costs were not a limitation, these industrial processes would expand more quickly, destroying everyone and everything in their path. A miracle fuel still leaves us with a culture of travelling the world at jet speed, rather than a localised culture of dialogue and relationship with nature. This is the disconnected thinking that comes from engaging with climate as an isolated issue.

The book concludes with a call for a nonviolent mass movement, and ‘trillions [of dollars] to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready societal transformations.’ The requested transformations are a transition to renewable energy, and building more infrastructure. These won’t stop capitalism or climate change, and would make the situation worse. A mass movement would require a mass of people who both share these goals and believe that a mass movement is the way to reach them. Given the compromised and conflicted goals, and the corporate influence on the climate movement recently, this is unlikely to happen.

Mass movements using only moral arguments have never changed systems of power in the past. The global Occupy movement is a recent example. While a great deal was achieved, the capitalist system is still with us, and it will take more than peaceful demonstrations to take it down. The infrastructure of capitalism needs to be physically dismantled, using a diversity of tactics, and the culture of domination that legitimises extraction and exploitation must be confronted, and replaced with land-based cultures that value relationship with all living beings.

Image modified from original art by Mark Gould: http://theartofannihilation.com/this-changes-nothing-why-the-peoples-climate-march-guarantees-climate-catastrophe-2/

Achuar seize 14 oil wells in Peru, demanding compensation for exploitation

Achuar seize 14 oil wells in Peru, demanding compensation for exploitation

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

How to Stop Off Road Vehicles, Part 2

How to Stop Off Road Vehicles, Part 2

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.

Decades of unchecked off road vehicle use have led to severe erosion at Dove Springs. Photo by Jim Rose, Environment News Service

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.

 

At the Jawbone Canyon riding area, rain brings a slurry of mud off steep slopes denuded of vegetation, burying plants and animals below. Photo by Howard Wilshire, Environment News Service

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