by Ben Warner / Deep Green Resistance UK
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the new word of the year is “post-truth.” It means “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In other words, so many people are burying their heads in the sand that we need to have a new word for it. If you do not think we are in great danger of wiping out most of the life on this planet, feel free to remain, albeit for a short while, in the post truth age. But if you want to live in a flourishing, abundant and diverse living community, I invite you to continue reading to find one way this might be reached.
The environmental movement has failed. Since the publication of Silent Spring we have not even been able to slow down the rate at which human produced CO2 levels increase each year. If you wanted to stop your bath from overflowing, but each second the tap was turned more and each turn was bigger than the last, when would you realise your attempt to prevent overflow was failing? We have not slowed down the destruction of the forests, the jungles, the grasslands, the coral reef or any other non-human community. The dominant culture is poised to wipe out most life on Earth. If we do nothing it will certainly succeed. We can only stop it if we act.
The quickest, surest and most effective method of stopping a group of people from murdering other beings is to permanently remove the means, the devices, the machines they use to achieve their goal. The means this culture uses is industrial infrastructure. We need to permanently impede this infrastructure before it kills us and the communities of life we rely on. This can be achieved by small groups of unconnected people who work secretly to dismantle, disrupt and sabotage any device that is a threat to life. They will have to be dedicated, educated and skilled. They will have to plan their actions with precision and accuracy. They will have to work undetected, underground and unthanked. If life is to have a future we need this underground to start immediately.
Aboveground activists should work to normalise this kind of resistance. We can support them emotionally, morally and politically. In order to maintain security we must do this without making any direct contact with the underground. Our work is complementary but must be separate.
Modern humans (homo sapiens) have existed on this planet for about 200,000 years. Despite humans’ spread across the globe, fossil records show us coexisting with the rest of the earth’s species for the first 97% of our time here. (There is some debate as to whether indigenous humans drove some species extinct, but if it occurred, it wasn’t anything like the mass extinction that industrial humanity is currently causing.) We must protect the life that still remains using all effective means. An underground has to form, and those of us who are unwilling or unable to join it must support it in any way we can.
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Rather than first destroy the “Oil Based” Infrastructure why not firstly build an alternative. Build a working, practical and repeatable replacement for today’s technology – THEN dismantle the Old Tech. We have the technology NOW to replace the oil; based energy model – So Build it before you begin sabotage and nihilism.
Technology is based on infrastructure. There is no such thing as “green technology”. Do you want technology or the planet? You can’t have both.
“fossil records show that while it is POSSIBLE SOME species MIGHT have been driven extinct by indigenous humans”? Really? It’s widely accepted and been shown that where ever hunter gather/prehistoric/indigenous or whichever name people use humans spread they wiped out numerous species, especially big herbivores and predators, for obvious reasons. There’s actually some evidence that the abundance in North America when Europeans arrived was an ecosystem still in recovery. Agreed obviously that it’s no where near the scale we are talking about but let’s not pussy foot around the facts because these people lived with the seasons and close to nature, hunting and getting by (very well) with stone tools. This suicidal trajectory we are on started long before industrialisation, long before white Europeans set foot in the Americas, and before people started planted seeds and saying this is food, that is a weed. Rest of the article spot on.
So far as we’re aware–please offer some conclusive evidence if we’re wrong–the question of indigenous-caused extinction is an ongoing argument of paleoanthropology. For example, from a 2003 study, reported in Science Daily: “Now researchers from the University of Washington and Southern Methodist University who examined evidence from all suggested Clovis-age killing sites conclude that there is no proof that people played a significant role in causing the extinction of Pleistocene mammals in the New World. Climate change, not humans, was the culprit.” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/02/030225070212.htm Of course it’s possible this appraisal is wrong, but the far more important point of the article is we DO know what’s causing the current mass extinction event, and we think that it can be stopped. What is certain is that civilized humans will never voluntarily do this, so the “suicidal trajectory” must be interrupted by some other means. Citing a disputed hypothesis concerning something that happened thousands of years ago for some obscure, inescapable human flaw only shifts the focus away from today’s tangible crises.