Editor’s note: Civilizations are defined by the growth of cities, vast acreages of agriculture, and hierarchical social systems—and after creating short term surpluses of energy and wealth at the expense of sustainability, they inevitably collapse.
Today, we live in the first global civilization. The harnessing of fossil fuels has brought unimaginable power, but also terrible destructiveness. No technological innovation or social organization will be a simple silver bullet to solve these issues.
Nevertheless, people around the world continue to experiment with alternative social arrangements. One is permaculture, which is often reduced to “gardening” but is actually a systems-thinking approach for deliberately designing human settlements, societies, and subsistence economies for sustainability and justice. In this era, systems-thinking around sustainability inevitably includes strategy and action to defend the planet, in addition to building alternative ways of living.
In this piece, Jennifer Murnan argues that permaculture practitioners, who often becomes insular “lifeboaters” or “survivalists,” should link their work to political resistance movements working to dismantle industrial civilization before it’s too late.
Currently, permaculture operates in the realm of bright green environmental activism and adherents seemingly believe that the current culture can be transformed. Why should permaculturalists choose to align themselves with the deep green environmentalists that support dismantling civilization?
It’s all about deep abiding love for the truth that requires brave resistance to untruth. It’s about following that love down the path of truth. That’s what resistance in the form of permaculture is. That’s what the allure of permaculture, a permanent, sustainable culture, is for me.
We are animals, terrestrial animals, whose primary needs are for clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, healthy food to eat, and the security of community and relationship with each other and our fellow living creatures. Life for us is totally dependent on the health of the earth and our kin, human and non human. All that we create must serve this fundamental truth.
The Permaculture movement has always run counter to the beliefs and principles of global civilization. It views nature as a partner, a teacher, and a guide whom we honor and are completely dependent on. This is completely contrary to the cultural view of western civilization; that the natural world is here to serve us, to be used and abused at will, and that this abuse is justifiable.
Permaculture practice, by definition, is an attempt to depart from the model of exploitation and importation of resources necessitated by civilization. To live permanently in one place is the antithesis of the pattern exhibited repeatedly by civilizations. Civilizations cannot live in place. They violently import and exploit human and natural resources, exhaust their ecosystems, experience population overshoot, and collapse leaving an impoverished land base in their wake. Western industrial civilization is currently playing this scenario out on a global scale. Permaculture not only cannot exist within the confines of civilization, it also cannot coexist with a civilization that is devouring the world. It is neither ethical nor practical on the part of permaculturalists to attempt to do so.
Another reason lies in the common visions of the primacy of the earth shared by deep green and permaculture activists. The first ethic in permaculture is ’Care for the Earth’. Without this basis, the second and third ethics, ’Care for people’, and ‘Redistribute surplus to one’s needs’, are impossible. Healthy organisms produce a surplus to feed and enrich the ecosystem in which they exist. Simply put, there is no health unless Earth is cared for first.
“The Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything.”
— Derrick Jensen Endgame
There are attitudes shared by Permaculture and the Deep Green movement. Permaculturalists believe in working with nature and not against it. Fostering a respect for all life is inherent in permaculture practice. Valuing people and their skills creates more diversity, creativity and productivity in permaculture and deep green communities. Alignment between Deep Green and the Permaculture movements is especially apparent in two permaculture design principles.
Seeking to preserve, regenerate and extend all natural and traditional permanent landscapes is a goal of both communities. Preserving and increasing biodiversity of all types is recognized as beingessential for survival by both Deep Greens and Permaculturalists.
A primary reason for permaculture to become part of a culture of resistance is that permaculture’s two guiding principles logically mandate dismantling civilization. The precautionary principle states that we should take seriously and act on any serious or destructive diagnosis unless it is proven erroneous.
Civilization has proven itself to be destructive to ecosystems since its inception. Western industrial civilization is causing the wholesale destruction of every ecosystem on Earth.
Practicing permaculture individually can be construed to be a revolutionary act, capable of saving the planet. But individual acts can’t possibly do the trick. Like any other liberal act, it fails to recognize the systems that are destroying the planet and confront them. The most elegant and nurturing permaculture garden will not stop the operation of a single coal fired plant or deep sea oil drilling or fracking or the destruction of a rain forest.
“The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eatingimplies a natural biological relationship; This culture doesn’t just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it’s long past time we recognize the pattern.”
— Aric McBay
A large scale and effective response to this destruction is necessary. The tactics of the environmental movement up to this point have been insufficient. We are losing. It is time to change our strategy. Therefore, the Deep Green movement is advocating for all tactics to be considered to stop the murder of the Earth.This includes, but is not limited to, practicing permaculture, legislation, legal action, civil-disobedience, and industrial sabotage.
There are problems with holding the permaculture movement as the sole solution to global destruction. While transitioning to sustainability in our personal lives is important, even more important is confronting and dismantling the oppressive systems of power that promote unsustainability, exploitation, and injustice on a global scale. In fact, if these systems are left in place, the gains made by the practice of permaculture will be washed away in civilization’s tidal wave of destruction.
“Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral and stupid. Sustainability, morality and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.”
— Derrick Jensen
One of the necessary steps to restoring our relationships with each other and our planet is dismantling the current destructive systems of power through organized political resistance. We are in global ecological crisis, and the love and resistance inherent in permaculture can and frequently does ally with the victims of oppression, support and increase the health of natural systems, work to support and reclaim indigenous knowledge and greater than human wisdom and teaching.
The second guiding principle of permaculture, ‘intergenerational equity’, also necessitates immediate action in response to the destructive force of civilization.This principle states that future generations have the same rights as we do to food, clean air, water, and resources. This statement applies to all humans and non-humans equally. Daily, entire species are being eliminated from this planet as result of the activities of industrial civilization. ‘Intergenerational equity’ for them has ceased to exist and every day this destruction continues more species go extinct. Allowing this to continue is unconscionable.
Permaculture is based on close observation of the natural world, and I believe it can only realize its full potential in a human community that acknowledges the natural laws of its land base as primary. Practicing permaculture in any context other than this necessitates subverting our principles and betraying everything that nurtures and sustains us, all that is sacred, our living earth. We can only truly belong in a culture of resistance, and in communities of resistance.
Both permaculturalists and deep greens know that the earth is everything, that there is no greater good than this planet, than life itself. We owe her everything and without her, we die.
“The earth is our mother. We all come from our mother and to her we shall return. We are of the earth and it is absurd to imagine that we can “own” it, even in small pieces.
And yet the earth has been divvied up as private property. Property is a legal concept, a cultural production and not an intrinsic quality of land. Notions of what can be privatized seem to be infinitely expansive: land is privatized; seeds and genes are privatized; and even water is privatized.”
— Sandor Ellix Katz The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved
It is insane to “own” the land, the water, the air, yet this culture’s laws support and enforce that delusion. We design systems within boundaries and fail to challenge those boundaries, so our designs never truly integrate with their ecosystem, are defenseless against the onslaught of subsurface mineral rights which supersede surface rights and the resultant mining operations, the privatization and theft of water from the natural watershed that nourish the land, and rigidly enforced illusion of individual ownership over the concept of collective responsibility.
One of the necessary steps to restoring our relationships with each other and our planet is dismantling the current destructive systems of power through organized political resistance. We are in global ecological crisis, and the love and resistance inherent in permaculture can and frequently does ally with the victims of oppression, support and increase the health of natural systems, work to support and reclaim indigenous knowledge and greater than human wisdom and teaching.
This is it; we need each other, everyone, every tactic we can muster in defense of the earth.We have never been able to afford civilization.
“The task of an activist is not to navigate around systems of oppression with as much personal integrity as possible. It’s to bring those systems down.”
Editor’s note: The ability to work with others who we may disagree is fundamental to organizing in a socially fractured, multi-polar world. But doing so is difficult, distasteful, and increasingly rare in our filter-bubble modern experience, where people we disagree with are purged in service of the creation of ideological echo chambers. Today’s essay speaks to the necessity and challenges of such coalition-building.
Before we begin, we would like to share with you some actionable advice for coalitions. Building principled alliances depends on a series of steps that must be undertaken with intelligence and great care:
1. Movement Building. You cannot build an alliance as an individual. Alliances are built between organizations. We will assume here you have already done the work of identifying the core issues you are trying to address, articulating your core values, and bringing together a team/organization to take action.
2. Objectives. Alliances depend on you clearly understanding what you are trying to achieve. Determine your objectives. Ensure they are SMART and practical. You may also wish to sequence objectives along a timeline towards your broader strategic goals.
3. Understand the Political Context. Conduct a spectrum of allies exercise. Identify communities, individuals, and organizations who are involved in the situation or may be swayed to take part, and how sympathetic they are to your perspective.
4. Determine Potential Allies. Determine which organizations you will focus on for alliance building. Usually, this is not the “easy allies” who will work with you regardless of what you do. Instead, pivotal allies are often found among the ranks of those who are ambivalent or opposed to your organization in some way. Focus on key individuals, usually either formal or informal leaders. Research these people and identify areas of overlap, shared values, and how to effectively communicate with them.
5. Build Relationships and Negotiate. Talk with potential allies. Begin to build a relationship. Do not gloss over disagreements, but focus on areas of mutual benefit and overlapping values. Propose specific ways work together towards shared goals. Keep in mind that collaboration can fall along a spectrum from public to private, that political considerations may prevent certain approaches, and that building trust takes time.
The hottest temperatures ever recorded in the US Pacific Northwest and far southwest Canada appeared in the summer of 2021 with the force of an invisible, slow-motion siege. Meteorologists tracking the silently rising tidal wave of heat broadcasted maps painted in shades of crimson, alerting a sleeping public to a summer gone blazing red. The headlines said it all: “This Summer Could Change Our Understanding of Extreme Heat,” “Sweltering Temperatures Expected Across U.S. Due to Heat Dome,” and “Western Canada Burns and Deaths Mount After World’s Most Extreme Heat Wave in Modern History.”
Created through a high pressure system that causes the atmosphere to trap very warm air — and precipitated, in part, through heat emerging from increasingly warming oceans — a heat dome produces extreme temperatures at ground level that can persist for days or even weeks. In British Columbia, Canada, thermometers were registering the air at an alarming 49.6 degrees Celsius, with similar highs in the states of Washington and Oregon, immediately south of the border, exposing US and Canadian residents to the type of extreme weather events countries in the Global South have been experiencing for years. But this kind of heat does not just live in the air that we breathe — it envelopes everything it touches, leaving a trail of death, destruction, and urgent questions about the future.
For climate scientists who have been studying the intensification of heat wavesover the last decade, the results of the heat dome were predictably devastating. The British Columbia Coroners Service identified 569 heat related deaths between June 20 to July 29, and 445 of them occurred during the heat dome. A human body exposed to severe and relentless heat is a body under duress, a body working overtime: when subjected to an elevation in air temperatures, our bodies draw additional blood to the skin to dissipate heat — a natural cooling system designed to maintain optimal body temperature. This process becomes more strained when the temperature continues to rise, without the reprieve of cooling; oxygen consumption and metabolism both escalate, leading to a faster heart rate and rapid breathing. Above 42 degrees Celsius, enzyme and energy production fail and the body is in danger of developing a systemic inflammatory response. Eventually, multi-system failure can occur.
And humans were not the only beings impacted. According to an article published inThe Atlantic in July 2021, billions of mussels, clams, oysters, barnacles, sea stars and other intertidal species also died. A number of land-based species also fared badly, buckling in the sweltering and suffocating air, creating a dystopic tale of “desperate and dying wildlife.”
To put it plainly: the physiological stress of extreme heat on living organisms is life threatening — in particular for human beings: baking to death is a real possibility if you do not have access to cooling systems, or if you are one of the millions of people who live in parts of the world where climate change has increased your chances of exposure to extreme heat and comprehensive adaptation strategies have yet to be developed.
Our bodies are not meant to work this hard under these kinds of conditions — and neither is the planet.
A Profound Imbalance of Power
So how did we arrive here? A rapid attribution analysis of the heat dome conducted by a global team of scientists revealed that the occurrence of this kind of heat wave was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. Their results came with a strong warning: “our rapidly warming climate is bringing us into uncharted territory that has significant consequences for health, well-being and livelihoods. Adaptation and mitigation are urgently needed to prepare societies for a very different future.” The situation is only expected to get more dire — three billion people could live in places as hot as the Sahara by 2070 unless we address climate change with radical action and address it now.
The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in August 2021, mirrors a similarly grave picture of our current climate reality and forecast of what lies ahead. In a bold, oppositional move against national governments who have edited the findings of such assessments in the past, a group of scientists leaked the third part of the report which reveals, in unequivocal terms, how fossil fuel industries propped up by state governments are some of the largest contributors to our current environmental condition and what needs to be done to shift course.
The report reminds us that human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years with a near-linear relationship between cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions and the global warming they cause. This means that we are no longer waiting for the arrival of climate change — it is here. It lives in the stifling hot air we breathe during unanticipated heat waves. It is the reason droughts are becoming more severe and at the same time flooding is driving millions of peoples’ lives into chaos, precariousness, and displacement. It explains why Arctic ice has reached its lowest levels since at least 1850. Ocean acidification exists because of it. And it is the driver behind environmental conditions that are expected to produce 200 million climate migrants over the next 30 years. We do not need more evidence. The science could not be more clear.
Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years.
The answer to how we ended up here, however, cannot be collapsed into a homogenized “all of us are to blame” scenario that does little to differentiate how countries like the United States and other western nations have produced the vast majority of the carbon emissions that have led to this point of immense and disastrous planetary change. The US has contributed more to the problem of excess carbon dioxide than any other country on the planet, with the largest carbon footprints made by wealthy communities — the higher the household income, the greater the emissions. In fact, a Scientific American article explains that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the global population, uses about a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel resources — burning up nearly 23 percent of the coal, 25 percent of the oil, 27 percent of the aluminum and 19 percent of the copper.
A recent Oxfam report, Confronting Carbon Inequality, provides staggering revelations about the way correlations between wealth and carbon emissions extend out to the global context: the richest 1 percent on the planet are responsible for more than double the emissions of the poorest half of humanity, and the richest 10 percent in the world are accountable for over half of all emissions. Wealthy individuals and communities, though, are not the only source of dangerous and excessive carbon emissions — global corporations dedicated to the ongoing development and flourishing of fossil fuel energy infrastructure are also a major, if not the largest, part of the problem.
If we zoom in even further, it becomes apparent that the relationship among racial capitalism, colonialism and climate change lies at the center of a critical understanding of the Anthropocene given that colonialism and capitalism together laid the groundwork for the development of carbon intensive economies that have prioritized capitalist accumulation — in all of its destructive forms — at the expense of everything else. As Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Whyte explains, with respect to the specific experiences of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, “the colonial invasion that began centuries ago caused anthropogenic environmental changes that rapidly disrupted many Indigenous peoples, including deforestation, pollution, modification of hydrological cycles, and the amplification of soil-use and terraforming for particular types of farming, grazing, transportation, and residential, commercial and government infrastructure.”
These critiques are not new: Indigenous leaders throughout the world have been sounding the alarm about impending ecocide derived from the never-ending cycle of extraction and consumption for as long as settler colonies like the United States have been in existence. They have also reminded us that other kinds of worlds are possible, worlds that are built on care, reciprocity, interdependence and co-existence as opposed to structural violence, dispossession and domination.
Not surprisingly, then, a social, political and economic arrangement of our world that is anchored to colonialism and imperialism has resulted in massive disparities in terms of disproportionate impact — race, class and gender are deeply woven into the experience and violence of climate catastrophe. In the Global South, the crisis has been producing perilous and deadly climate-related events in numerous countries for over a decade, well preceding the notable arrival of the heat dome in the United States and Canada in the summer of 2021.
In Sudan, for example, temperatures are consistently rising, water is becoming more scarce and severe droughts are commonplace, producing major problems with soil fertility and agriculture. Southern Africa is warming at twice the global rate: 2019 alone saw 1200 climate related deaths. Bangladesh, often referred to as “ground zero for climate change” despite having contributed as little as 0.09 percent to global cumulative CO2 emissions, has experienced a major surge in flooding which has resulted in the destruction of millions of homes, created numerous obstacles in crop production, and caused an alarming escalation in food insecurity.
People all over the globe are living on the front lines of a planet-wide crisis that has been produced far outside the boundaries of their own communities. To make matters worse, climate researchers from the Global South face multiple challenges obtaining funding for their projects and getting their research in front of the global community of scientists — largely from Western states — who are driving the agenda of adaptation. COP26 was illustrative of this problem of access — given the uneven distribution of vaccines, many climate organizers and scientists from the Global South, as well as Indigenous leaders, were unable to attend the conference that had been heralded as the “last chance to save humanity.” Perhaps this was one of the reasons that COP26 was such a catastrophic failure. There is a profound power imbalance within the context of the climate crisis which sits alongside vital questions about social inequality and shared responsibility.
A Framework of Internationalism
In the face of such grim and devastating projections, sidestepping into the hopelessness trap seems like the easiest place to land, but millions of people across the globe do not have the luxury of retreat or denial — and if we consider the long game, none of us do. How do those of us who are determined to act on climate change think about what it means to actualize global solidarity and mass mobilization within the context of this historical moment where everything is at stake? What are some of the political guideposts that should lie at the heart of what it means to be a climate organizer?
One thing that immediately comes to mind is that our mobilizations around climate change and environmental justice must be guided by an internationalist framework that is both anti-colonial and anti-capitalist. A consistent focus on the ways that “here is deeply connected to there and there is deeply connected to here” necessitates that we never lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of people in the world who are staring down the devastation of climate change at this moment have not had a hand in producing it.
We can take our cue from youth climate organizers in this regard. In Philadelphia, as a case in point, activists with Youth Climate Strike have been mobilizing protests in the streets while operating with a direct line to internationalism — linking struggles for environmental justice in the neighborhoods in which they live with the devastation of the climate crisis in the Global South. Their organizing transcends geographical boundaries, demanding that those of us in the Global North open our eyes and act on our responsibility to communities locally and to the rest of the world for a climate catastrophe that is, in large part, made in the United States.
A framework of internationalism, however, must also include foregrounding a critical analysis of the ways that racial capitalism continues to wreak havoc on the planet. Indeed, countries like the US function as part of a much larger constellation of imperial projects that produce great suffering, initiate catastrophic death, and remake ecologies and modes of relationship in order to facilitate the movement of capital. The Zapatistas knew this in 1994 when they made their “First Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle.” The Standing Rock Sioux stood in opposition to this when they launched their epic battle against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. And communities in Guyana are pushing back against this as they organize in response to the expansion of Exxon’s oil extraction which expects to send more than two billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
A framework of internationalism must also include a critical analysis of the ways that racial capitalism continues to wreak havoc on the planet.
A related reason that an internationalist and anti-colonial framework is so vital in this moment of climate organizing is that imperialism goes hand in hand with environmental destruction. That is to say, imperial projects such as the United States’ 20-year colonial occupation of Afghanistan has not only left countless Afghan citizens in a situation of immense danger and precariousness since the reinstatement of the Taliban, but has also left the country in a state of environmental wreckage. This destruction is evident in rampant deforestation, which proliferated during the turbulence of such a long war, and a rise in toxic air pollutants that were released by US armed forces through trash burning — and other military activities — and are making Afghani people chronically ill because they increase the risk of cancer and other diseases. Defunct military bases also require environmental remediation before the land can be used for life giving instead of life taking purposes.
A recent report from Brown University’s The Cost of War Project confirms that the United States spends more on the military than any other country in the world — substantially more than the combined military spending of Russia and China. The use of military force requires a great deal of energy, and most of it in the form of fossil fuels. As a result of this monstrous commitment to militarization, the US war machine is one of the largest polluters on the planet with this cataclysmic damage extending out to the other colonial projects supported through US tax dollars.
The war-finance nexus ties the United States and Canada to Africa, to the Middle East, to South America, to Asia; in short, to all places where international finance capital moves. The billions of dollars that have gone to support the Israeli military, for example, has enabled immense environmental ruination in Palestine. Bombs and related lethal weaponry are intended to destroy, not to build. And the afterlife of such destruction continues to impact the air, land, water, plants, animals and people who have lived under conditions of war for years, even after a war ostensibly comes to an end or an occupying force ostensibly “withdraws.” This means that a robust climate justice movement must necessarily include demilitarization in order for an internationalist agenda of ecological justice and sustainability to be realized.
Multi-Racial and Anti-Colonial Feminist Coalition Building
In order to make internationalism happen in the spaces and places of climate organizing, however, coalitions must also be part of the answer. Those of us who are the most privileged have a responsibility to do the hard work of building multi-racial and anti-colonial feminist coalitions between different social movements collaborating across political and geographical borders — multi-issue coalitions that foster self-reflexivity and allow us to understand one another better, to decipher the ways that our worlds have become co-constituted through a series of lived experiences and historical material relations.
Racial capitalism, as it is fueled by colonial and imperial projects, works through all of us, it becomes entrenched in even the most seemingly benign social practices and ways of being, it shapes our collective and individual memories about who we are. In essence, it plays with what it means to be human — how we develop relationships to one another and the world around us, how we eat, breath and love — part of the labor we have to commit to doing has to do with understanding how this happens in order to identify the things that bind us together and determine how best to unify in a collective struggle to save the planet.
In this regard, a crucial aspect of the climate justice movement should involve creating platforms where people can engage in debates and dialogues about power and history in their everyday mobilizing efforts. Through these interactions, people can knit together their social positions and experiences of oppression, marginalization and resistance while being attentive to the specificities of particular struggles. This resonates with Afro-Caribbean scholar and activist Jacqui Alexander’s call for feminists of color to become “fluent in each other’s histories” and Black radical feminist Angela Davis’s plea to foster “unlikely coalitions.”
Multi-racial and anti-colonial feminist coalition building of this sort has the ability to speak loudly to a politics of interdependence; to become a powerful counter to political echo chambers. It allows us to set forth a challenge to (re)educate ourselves and confront, head on, blind spots about history and present and to explore how nationality and citizenship status, class, race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability, among other factors, produce social realities and lived experiences that are tied to one another but also very unequal. We can start to see linkages between social issues and communities all over the world that are often positioned as separate and removed from each other and prompt those in the Global North to adjust their organizing efforts, networking, and platform building in a manner that addresses these inequalities in practical ways to begin to shift power dynamics.
Wherever these coalitions come into being, Indigenous leaders must play a fundamental role given global histories of land dispossession and ongoing colonial occupations, and because they offer critical guidance and anti-colonial blueprints for how we can actively shape a decolonizing path moving forward.
Multi-racial and anti-colonial feminist coalition building has the ability to speak loudly to a politics of interdependence.
Put simply: in order to push our politics of solidarity further, we have to refuse the desire to isolate as well as the messiness and limitations of identity politics that will always seek to divide us instead of bringing us together. We need people who are pushing the boundaries of environmental movements to speak across divergent but shared colonial histories, contemporary forms of racial state violence and the ongoing devastation of settler colonialism, colonial gender violence and anti-Black racism in places like the United States. And we also need people who can identify the ways these forms of colonial violence exist as part of a larger imperial web that reaches far beyond national borders. African American composer and activist Bernice Reagan’s oft cited speech, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century” offers counsel here about why this matters so much: we need coalitions because movements that exist in relation to one another are stronger for it. We need them to ensure survival.
Perhaps what we will gain from multi-racial and anti-colonial feminist coalitions, then, is an emerging architecture of decolonization and practice of solidarity that produces new political ecologies reflective of this historical moment. In turn, this holds the potential to illustrate points of alignment and intersection, thus enabling the identification of common political goals and paving the way for global unification across distinct social and historical geographies. States do their best to carry out projects of colonialism and imperialism, but the people are never conquered. As such, those of us persevering for a better world must also conduct our political organizing around climate change in a way that actively works to bring people together, addressing colonialism at home and abroad.
A Revolutionary Plan of Action
Finally, because organizing against climate change is a future-oriented project, it is one that demands and requires durable and deep relationships. This means that we need to commit to resurrecting the idea and practice of solidarity by pulling it back from the clutches of oversimplification and empty overuse. In the parlance of Palestinian writer Steven Salaita, solidarity requires ethical commitments to function and does not involve appropriation. It is performed in the interest of better human relationships and for a world that allows societies to be organized around justice rather than profit. This is the kind of solidarity we must seek to bring into existence.
We have to ask ourselves, then, to identify the processes and practices that will allow us to build real understanding while centering a common interest of survival that is informed by notions of reciprocity, empathy and humility, reminiscent of the Zapatista’s idea of “caminar preguntando” — asking questions while walking. We have to be able to see one another and to recognize the individual and collective struggles that taken together are threatening the continuation of life itself. We have to be willing to listen and receive a rigorous education and simultaneously be eager to teach, to share, to trust and to invest ourselves in a future that elevates mutual validation and recovers a sense of dignity through resistance. Philosopher Esme Murdock reminds of this (re)alignment so powerfully when she says, “[t]here is a whole, messy, and beautiful place waiting for us where we fuck up and make it right and fuck up and make it right by holding each other responsible in the strength and terror of becoming and making kin.”
A relationality of this type has the power to activate, it moves us towards political organizing and praxis because it reminds us that we are, in fact, capable of crafting relationships with our relatives, human and other-than-human, that are built on mutual respect and interconnection. But to do this, we have to be honest with ourselves about the culpabilities and responsibilities we carry and be open to altering our comprehension of the problems we are facing and in turn, be ready to shift our ideas of “solutions” that will be most effective in the context of a rapidly shrinking timeline. We have to both harness and give up some of our power.
Science alone will not save us, and neither will government policy, UN meetings or climate summits where we expect “world leaders” to stand up and unify around the changes that we so desperately need. We cannot ameliorate this problem by promoting better consumer choices that privilege individual behavioral change or by supporting corporations pedaling “sustainable products.” There is no magical technology that is going to allow things to return to “normal,” the green billionaires do not have the answers, and there is no fantasy island that we can swim to that will offer a climate reset.
We require a revolutionary plan of action that is generated by a global peoples’ movement and guided by a set of shared political commitments and ways of relating to one another that can withstand the immense uncertainty of this moment, a plan that is grounded in the dynamics of the here and now and committed to a just future liberated from the shackles of climate apocalypse. The road forward is not easy, but making the decision to step onto it is perhaps the thing that matters most in this moment because it signals an attachment to the idea that something else is possible, that we have not conceded or given up, that we are willing to keep trying. And in the end, our ability to stand together is one of the greatest weapons of hope and resistance we have.
A version of this article will be included in Jaskiran Dhillon’s latest book Notes on Becoming a Comrade: Solidarity, Relationality, and Future-Making, forthcoming in 2022 with Common Notions Press.
Biocentrism (from Greek βίος bios, “life” and κέντρον kentron, “center”) is an ethical point of view that extends inherent value to all living things. It is an understanding of how the earth works, particularly as it relates to its biosphere or biodiversity, that stands in contrast to anthropocentrism, which centers on the value of humans.
The term biocentrism encompasses all environmental ethics that “extend the status of moral object from human beings to all living things in nature”. Biocentric ethics calls for a rethinking of the relationship between humans and nature. It states that nature does not exist simply to be used or consumed by humans, but that humans are simply one species amongst many, and that because we are part of an ecosystem, any actions which negatively affect the living systems of which we are a part adversely affect us as well, whether or not we maintain a biocentric worldview.
Biocentrists observe that all species have inherent value, and that humans are not “superior” to other species in a moral or ethical sense.
The four main pillars of a biocentric outlook are:
Humans and all other species are members of Earth’s community.
All species are part of a system of interdependence.
All living organisms pursue their own “good” in their own ways.
Human beings are not inherently superior to other living things.<
Three Perspectives on Biocentrism
Excerpted from the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. This segment was written by Lierre Keith.
Moment to moment, the world is kept alive only by the bacteria doing the basic work of life, which no one else can do, and by maintaining relationships more complex than any we could ever understand. We are all here only because of other beings. Biologist Robert Rosen argues that the mechanistic paradigm of Western science cannot explain living communities, which are always built from relationship “between the part and the whole.” The word he uses to define living communities: nonfractionability.
The mechanistic mind is also wrong across geologic time. Scientists and lay people alike have tried to draw a line between life and inanimate matter. Chemists, for instance, divide their field into the organic and inorganic. Organic matter is that which is produced by the “vital chemistry” of living creatures. Inorganic refers to “forms of matter which exist independently of the operation of living beings.”11 Rocks, metals, minerals, and water, for instance, are considered inorganic. But given a few billion years, rock will become living creatures who will eventually get pressed back into rock. And with a few plate shifts, the sediment of the ocean floor, built from the bodies of sea creatures, will become dry land. That land—comprised of those compressed dead bodies—is once more taken up by living creatures. Hence Russian scientist V. I. Vernadsky called life on earth “a disperse of rock.” Writes evolutionary biologist and futurist Elizabet Sahtouris, “This view of living matter as continuous with, and as a chemical transformation of, nonliving planetary matter is very different from the view of life developing on the surface of a nonliving planet and adapting to it.” In Sahtouris’s words, it’s the difference between “a living planet” and a “planet with life on it.”
This is not just clever semantics. In one view the planet is inanimate habitat for humans and maybe a few other creatures. According to another, everything on earth is part of a process called life. As Sahtouris writes, “Planetary life is not something that happens here and there on a planet—it happens to the planet as a whole.” Life is not a kind of matter, but a process.
Derrick Jensen: “Pretend You Are a River”
Excerpted from the book Endgame: The Problem of Civilization.
Pretend you are a river. Pretend you are the mist who falls so fine—so gentle—that nothing separates water and air. You are the rain who falls in sheets, explodes onto the ground to leave pocks and puddles. You are the ground who receives this water, soaking it up, taking it in, carrying it deep inside. You are the cracks and fissures where the waters accumulate, flow, fall to join more water, and more, in pools and rivers who move slowly through cavities, crevices, pores. You are the sounds and silence of water seeping or staying still. You are the meeting of wet and dry, the union of liquid and solid, where solids dissolve and liquids solidify. You are the pressure who pushes water through seams. You are the rushing water who bubbles from the earth.
You are a tiny pool between rocks. You overflow, find your way to join others who like you are moving, moving. You are the air at the surface of the water, the joining of substantial and insubstantial, the union of under and over, weight and not-weight. You are the riffle, the rapid, the tiny waterfall who turns water to air and air to water. You are the mist who settles on the soil. You are the plants who drink the mist, and you are the sun who warms and feeds them.
You are the fish who feed on insects who feed on plants who feed on soils who feed on fish. You are the fish who become soils who become plants who become insects who become fish who flow down the river.
You are the river who joins other rivers to become a new river who is all of the rivers and something else.
You are the river. You do not stop at the banks, where liquid turns to solid. You reach into the sky and into the soil. Water moves through rocks, comes up to form pools far from the fast flow where the rivers move together, seeps down to join still waters deep below the surface, waters who sleep and wake and sleep and mingle with the stones who are the river, too.
You are the river, who is married to the mountains you have known since they were young, who have given themselves to you as you have given yourself to them. You are the canyons you nestle into, each year deeper than the year before. You are the forests who give you their fallen trees, and the meadows you flood and feed and who feed you back their fruits and fine insects who fly to your surface to be taken in by the fish who with their own bodies again feed the meadows.
You are the river who feeds the ocean, who feels the tides pushing and pulling against your mouth, the waves mixing fresh and salt. You are that intermingling. That is who you are. That is who you have always been.
You are the river. You have lived with volcanoes and glaciers. You have been dammed by lava and ice. You have carried log jams so large and so old they grow their own forests, with you running beneath. You have lived through droughts and floods.
You are the river. You miss the salmon. You miss the sturgeon. You miss the ocean. You miss the meadows. You miss the forests. You miss the beavers and otters and grizzly bears. You miss the human beings.
You are the river. You want them back. You want to feel the tickling of the sturgeon, the thrusting of the salmon. You want to carry food and soil to the ocean. You want to cover the meadows as you used to, and you want to give yourself to them and you want them to give themselves to you, as you have done forever, and as they have too.
Rachel Carson: “In Every Grain of Sand is The Story of the Earth”
Excerpted from the book Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson.
Along mile after mile of coastline, the land presents a changing face to the sea. Now it is a sheer rock cliff; now a smooth beach’ now the frayed edge of a mangrove swamp, dark and full of mystery. Each is the seacoast, yet each is itself, like no other in time or place. In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.
This coastline plays endless variations on the basic theme of sea and land. On the coastal rocks of northern New England the sea is an immediate presence, compelling, impossible to ignore. Its tides rise and fall on their appointed schedule, draining coves and refilling them, lifting boats or dropping away to leave them stranded. On the broad beaches of the South the feeling is different. As you stand at the edge of the dunes, when the tide is out, the ocean seems far away. Under the push of a rising tide it advances a little, reducing the width of the buffer strip of sand. Storms bring it still farther in. But compared with its overwhelming presence on Northern shores it seems remote, a shining immensity related to far horizons. The sound of the waves on such a day, when the heated air shimmers above the sand and the sky is without clouds, is a muted whisper. In this quiet there is a tentativeness that suggests that something is about to happen. And indeed we may be sure the present stand of the sea here is only temporary, for many times in the past million years or so it has risen and flowed across all of the coastal plain, paused for perhaps a few thousand years, and returned again to its basin.
For the shore is always changing, and today’s sand beach may become the sheer coast of a distant tomorrow. This is precisely what happened in northern New England, where, only a few thousands of years ago, the earth’s crust sank and the sea came in, covering the beaches and the plain, running up the river valleys and rising about the hills. So, on the young Maine coast today, evergreen forests meet the granite threshold of the sea.
Everywhere the wind and the sea have shaped the coast, sculpturing it into forms that are often beautiful, sometime bizarre. Along the Oregon coast the rocky cliffs and headlands speak of the age-long battle with the sea. Here and there a lonely tower of rock rises offshore, one of the formations known as stacks or needles. Each began as a narrow headland jutting out from the main body of coastal rock. Then a weak spot in its connection with the mainland was battered through.
Here and there the assaults of surf have blasted out caves in the sea cliffs. Anemone Cave in Acadia National Park is one. In the famous Sea Lion Caves on the central Oregon coast several hundred sea lions gather each autumn, living in the tumultuous surge of the surf, mingling their roars with the sound of the sea, still working to break through the roof of the cave.
Back from the surf line, the winds have piled up majestic dunes here and there. At Kitty Hawk in North Carolina perhaps the highest dunes of the American coast rise abruptly from the sea. I have stood on the summit of one of those dunes on a windy day when all the crest appears to be smoking, and the winds seemed bent on destroying the very dunes they had created. Clouds and streamers of sand grains were seized by the strong flow of air and carried away. Far below, in the surf line, I could see the source of the dune sand, where waves are forever cutting and grinding and polishing the fragments of rock and shell that compose the coastal sands.
Editor’s note: Fossil fuels are highly polluting, their extraction is linked to human rights abuses, and their continued use is killing the planet. However, renewable energy technologies also have massive unrecognized costs. Our conclusion is that resistance to both of these industries is a moral imperative.
In this article we highlight two scientific studies examining these harms. It is critical that we act proactively to defend threatened land before development plans are cemented and it becomes too late.
Renewable energy production will exacerbate mining threats to biodiversity
Researchers have warned that mining threats to biodiversity caused by renewable energy production could surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.
A University of Queensland study found protected areas, key biodiversity areas and the world’s remaining wilderness would be under growing pressure from mining the minerals required for a clean energy transition.
UQ’s Dr. Laura Sonter said renewable energy production was material-intensive—much more so than fossil fuels—and mining these materials would increase as fossil fuels were phased out.
“Our study shows that mining the materials needed for renewable energy such as lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and aluminum will create further pressure on the biodiversity located in mineral-rich landscapes,” Dr. Sonter said.
The research team mapped the world’s mining areas, according to an extensive database of 62,381 pre-operational, operational and closed mining properties, targeting 40 different commodities.
They found that areas with potential mining activity covered 50 million square kilometers of the planet—35 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface excluding Antarctica—and many of these areas coincided with places critical for biodiversity conservation.
“Almost 10 percent of all mining areas occur within currently protected sites, with plenty of other mining occurring within or nearby sites deemed a priority for future conservation of many species,” Dr. Sonter said.
“In terms of mining areas targeting materials needed specifically for renewable energy production, the story is not much better. We found that 82 percent of mining areas target materials needed for renewable energy production, of which, 12 percent coincide with protected areas, 7 percent with key biodiversity areas and 14 percent with wilderness. And, of the mining areas that overlapped protected areas and wilderness, those that targeted materials for renewable energy contained a greater density of mines than the mining areas that targeted other materials.”
Professor James Watson, from UQ’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science and the Wildlife Conservation Society, said the impacts of a green energy future on biodiversity were not considered in international climate policies.
“New mining threats aren’t seriously addressed in current global discussions about the post-2020 United Nation’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity,” Professor Watson said.
The research team said careful strategic planning was urgently needed.
“Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production,” Dr. Sonter said.
“Combine this risk with the extensive spatial footprint of renewable energy infrastructure, and the risks become even more concerning.”
More information
Laura J. Sonter et al. Renewable energy production will exacerbate mining threats to biodiversity, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17928-5
A University of Queensland study found protected areas, key biodiversity areas and the world’s remaining wilderness would be under growing pressure from mining the minerals required for a clean energy transition.
UQ’s Dr. Laura Sonter said renewable energy production was material-intensive—much more so than fossil fuels—and mining these materials would increase as fossil fuels were phased out.
“Our study shows that mining the materials needed for renewable energy such as lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel and aluminum will create further pressure on the biodiversity located in mineral-rich landscapes,” Dr. Sonter said.
The research team mapped the world’s mining areas, according to an extensive database of 62,381 pre-operational, operational and closed mining properties, targeting 40 different commodities.
They found that areas with potential mining activity covered 50 million square kilometers of the planet—35 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface excluding Antarctica—and many of these areas coincided with places critical for biodiversity conservation.
“Almost 10 percent of all mining areas occur within currently protected sites, with plenty of other mining occurring within or nearby sites deemed a priority for future conservation of many species,” Dr. Sonter said.
“In terms of mining areas targeting materials needed specifically for renewable energy production, the story is not much better. We found that 82 percent of mining areas target materials needed for renewable energy production, of which, 12 percent coincide with protected areas, 7 percent with key biodiversity areas and 14 percent with wilderness. And, of the mining areas that overlapped protected areas and wilderness, those that targeted materials for renewable energy contained a greater density of mines than the mining areas that targeted other materials.”
Professor James Watson, from UQ’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Science and the Wildlife Conservation Society, said the impacts of a green energy future on biodiversity were not considered in international climate policies.
“New mining threats aren’t seriously addressed in current global discussions about the post-2020 United Nation’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity,” Professor Watson said.
The research team said careful strategic planning was urgently needed.
“Mining threats to biodiversity will increase as more mines target materials for renewable energy production,” Dr. Sonter said.
“Combine this risk with the extensive spatial footprint of renewable energy infrastructure, and the risks become even more concerning.”
The research is published in Nature Communications.
More information: Laura J. Sonter et al. Renewable energy production will exacerbate mining threats to biodiversity, Nature Communications(2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17928-5
A growing and more affluent human population is expected to increase the demand for resources and to accelerate habitat modification, but by how much and where remains unknown. Here we project and aggregate global spatial patterns of expected urban and agricultural expansion, conventional and unconventional oil and gas, coal, solar, wind, biofuels and mining development. Cumulatively, these threats place at risk 20% of the remaining global natural lands (19.68 million km2) and could result in half of the world’s biomes becoming >50% converted while doubling and tripling the extent of land converted in South America and Africa, respectively. Regionally, substantial shifts in land conversion could occur in Southern and Western South America, Central and Eastern Africa, and the Central Rocky Mountains of North America. With only 5% of the Earth’s at-risk natural lands under strict legal protection, estimating and proactively mitigating multi-sector development risk is critical for curtailing the further substantial loss of nature.
More information
Oakleaf JR, Kennedy CM, Baruch-Mordo S, West PC, Gerber JS, Jarvis L, et al. (2015) A World at Risk: Aggregating Development Trends to Forecast Global Habitat Conversion. PLoS ONE 10(10): e0138334. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0138334
Florence Nightingale, the English pioneer of modern nursing is quoted as saying, “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.”
Editors note: Never give up your agency. If your goal is to save life on the planet, sometimes you have to sink your own boat.
Derrick Jensen This is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Diane Wilson. She’s a mother of five, a fourth generation shrimp boat captain and an environmental activist. She’s been fighting to save the bays on the Texas gulf coast from chemical and oil development for the last 30 years. I also have to say that you have for at least 15-18 years been one of my heroes so thank you for that.
Diane Wilson Thank you Derrick, I appreciate that.
Derrick Jensen Thank you in general for your work in the world and thank you for being on the program. My first two questions are – can you introduce yourself and can you also then introduce the region where you live, the region you love
Diane Wilson First of all I’m a fourth generation fisherwoman, shrimp boat captain. My family has been around this area on the mid-Texas gulf coast for about 130 years so you might say I’ve got a real sense of place, where I was born and raised. I’ve been in the same town for my whole life. I’m 72 years old so I always call myself a late bloomer. Anybody out there who thinks they’re too old to start – that is not true. As a matter of fact, it just gets better as you get older. You get a little bit more free every year.
Basically, all of my family – my brothers, my brothers-in-law, my cousins, my uncles, everybody in the early days they were just gill netters, fin fishermen and they caught black drum and red drum. They had little wooden boats and they oared out. Where I’m from is a little fishing town. It’s probably the most authentic fishing village on the whole Texas gulf coast – Seadrift. We were all fishermen and your whole life was centered around the fish house, the bays, the nets the boats and that was your life. As a matter of fact, like most kids around my age, you spent your whole life outside. I was always on a boat I was always out on the water laying in.
I remember I was a real introvert even though people have accused me of being a real troublemaker, I’m by nature a real introvert. I can remember going to the fish house where my dad was coming in in the evenings and I would go to the bay and there was this old woman down there and she really liked me and when you’re one of seven kids and you’re getting attention from somebody and somebody likes you. I mean I liked going down there because of that old woman and she felt like she was my grandmother and the only thing I realized when I got older is that woman was the bay and she was as real to me as any other member of my family. I have never forgotten her and I have never forgotten what it feels like for something, what people call a resource or a commodity or an ecosystem, to me it was real and it had an aliveness and it had an energy.
When you’re small and your dad is just a small-town fisherman and you’ve got a small boat – I imagine his boat was good – and you would go out there because fishermen were poor people and they really couldn’t afford deck hands. So they would generally take the kids along. I had three sisters and me. My three sisters we decked for my dad and I really, really liked being out there and I was really good at it. When you had to take your turn at a wheel; when you’re dragging a net and you’re kind of holding the wheel and you gotta hold the wheel just so because you got to keep the net and the wheel wash in the shrimp all at the same time. My sisters would start crying because when you start turning a boat into the wind with the waves it will almost feel like you’re flipping over so my sisters did not like did not like handling the wheel but I loved it. I loved going out in the mornings and it was still dark and there was nothing but that salt air in that wind and you’re just barreling out in the dead of night. You see nothing. it’s almost like your instinct and there are very few beacons. It’s just years and years of doing it. I can remember and I suppose it’s because I had a real sense of the energy of that old woman. It’s like you literally could feel like your skin would separate – the wind in the water would just kind of move in there and it actually made me a bit of a mystic.
I’m a little bit of a mystic and I hate to tell you, I was raised Pentecostal and that’s holy rolling – speaking in tongues. My grandmother was a faith healer and I think she tried to raise my uncle from the dead and all kinds of stuff like that. I’m not that but I am a mystic and I have a real sense of what’s alive out there. People think it’s only what you see and it’s only yourself and it’s only the boundaries and the borders within your skin – that’s not true. As a matter of fact, that’s why I like your books so much because you seem to have a real sense of the connectedness and how valuable everything was. I could sense that, and I think it was because I spent all my life on the bay and I was a little bit of a loner so I didn’t have that peer pressure – sometimes at a certain age you get peer pressure and you get pulled away from that naturalness. I don’t think I was pulled away from it, so I’ve always had it my whole life and I still have it. It’s like a lot of the stuff that I do. It’s gut instinct and I don’t believe I’ve ever had a plan. I feel like I leave myself open for the energy because I truly believe there is energy out from nature and it’s got an intelligence, if you just work with it.
My location down here is mid-Texas gulf coast. We’re around Matagorda Bay, Lavaca Bay, Spirit Center Bay, San Antonio Bay, Mesquite Bay, Guadalupe Bay. Our county is a tiny county. When I was growing up there’s probably like 12 000 people in the whole county. The town where I was raised, Seadrift, was a thousand people. It’s been through so many hurricanes I can’t even tell you. It’s had so many hotels and railroads and restaurants and lumber yards destroyed in hurricanes. It always remains a very small town – a thousand people – and it’s always been this fishing town. We’re close to what they used to call Blackjack Island and now it’s known for the Aransas wildlife refuge. That’s where the endangered whooping cranes come every winter. They count every single last whooping crane that is left and they all come down and they nest in what they call Aransas wildlife refuge. Where my folks were from, they were fishermen there, and one of my uncles was in a hailstorm that killed a hundred cattle they had hail so big. He drowned out on the bay. I had another uncle, they had bonfires in those days and they did a lot of cooking on bonfires He was just a toddler and fell in the fire. I’ve got kin folks that are buried out there on that island. I’ve got a real sense of ancestries around here.
I know this whole area around here was where the Karankawa were. Those very tall, good looking, native American indigenous people and they lived around the water. We went across to where they were. They had all these arrow heads and all their camps and places and I believe I’m not too far from where there was literally a battle between some Irish settlers that came in. The Karankawas must have taken one of their calves and so they raided them and killed most of them and it was over a calf. It’s a sad part of the history down here. I think a lot of the Karankawas went to Mexico. That’s the history of this area. Even the Karankawas were early fishermen, and they laid the shrimp out to dry. I remember someone was telling me they would have a burning stake and stick it out in the shallow water and shrimp will come to the light and that’s where they would get a lot of their shrimp. They would have little catch nets or whatever and they would get the shrimp and then they’d dry them. That was one of their one of their ways they got nourishment around here. But like I said the Karankawa is no more although they’ve named bays and towns after them, but it’s a tragedy.
A lot of this area is where a lot of Irish settlers came in and a lot of German boats came in. There used to be a town called Indianola and now it’s a ghost town because that was where these big ships came in. All these German settlers came in and I think there was even a big civil war battle right there in Indianola and it was right on Matagorda bay. Two hurricanes hit it, one right behind another; then a fire hit it and then I believe smallpox wiped everybody out so now all you got is a beach. People say they can see that train out there when the tide’s real low although I have not seen that train.
Derrick Jensen Can you talk about what has happened and what caused you to become an activist? What has happened to the region in terms of industry and its effects on the bay and also its effects on fishing including shrimping?
Diane Wilson Well in the beginning there was no law; there was no verdict from Congress that industry had to say anything to anybody. So for a very long time these industries like, for instance. Alcoa and Union Carbide – very big plants – came in around 1950. They didn’t say nothing to nobody. They just did what they did. Sometimes the shrimpers, if it was a bad winter, might get a job for two or three months during the winter months and drive a truck or something like that. But basically, this industry did not have to report to anybody at all and the only thing that fishermen would get is when the times that they would work. They would say “they told me to take these barrels down to Stinky Ditch and I dumped them down there and I nearly passed out from smell and I remember and everybody in my unit is dead” or stuff like that. But it was just anecdotal because industry did not have to report or say anything to anybody.
Around 1989 shrimping was starting to fall off and so I started running a fish house. A fish house is a tin building. It’s got open windows and it’s got double wide doors that open to the bay and it’s got this long dock and this is where shrimpers bring their boats in. They tie up, they unload their catch – usually shrimp – and you take it into the fish house, put it on ice. You put it in these ice vaults so you can ship them off on these trucks later. I ran a fish house probably for five years. If I happened to look out that window, I could see my shrimp boat which was SeaBee and she was she was tied right up to the docks. I had probably 14 shrimp boats that I took care of.
One day I had this shrimper and he had three different types of cancer and he had these huge lumps all over his body and he was the best looking. I mean he looked like a surfer from California. My mama thought he was about the nicest looking guy she had ever laid eyes on. Anyway, he had all this cancer and one day I was in the fish house and I was sitting with a cup of coffee and I had my rubber boots sitting up on the desk and he came in and pitched this newspaper article to me. He said I want you to read that and like I said I’m a real quiet person so anyway I looked at the newspaper article. It was 1989 and on that front page article, The Victoria Advocate, was an associated press story and it was talking about the first time the toxic release inventory ever came out. The toxic release inventory was a community “right to know” bill
that was passed in Congress after Bhopal. People mainly know Bhopal because of Union Carbide was doing this whole effort to make India green and they were doing a pesticide plant in Bhopal, india. It wasn’t working so they were cutting all the safety. Anything that had to do about the lowering the temperature, about alarms, about freezing; they were removing it and the unthinkable happened and there was a chain reaction. There was a debate over actually how many people died but probably around two or three thousand died that first night in Bhopal, India. It was the worst environmental disaster that has ever happened and I think it still is. I think at this point maybe 20 000 people died from that one incident by Union Carbide. Because of it Congress passed the community “right to know” law meaning that there would not be another time when anyone in the US woke up one morning and there was something like that happen because they didn’t know what the industry next to them was doing or what they were polluting with. So, for the first time ever, industry in the United States had to report their air emissions, their water emissions, their injection wells, their landfill, their trucking – all of it. They had to report the numbers for the first time ever and that’s what that article was about. Our little bitty county with 12 000 people in the whole county we were number one in the nation and it literally blew my mind. It’s like “how could you be the most polluted place in the United States probably if it was the United States it was probably ranking worldwide and never know it?” I had never heard the first word about it. So, I acted totally out of character because I don’t like talking, I don’t like having to deal with people. I’ve never had a meeting called in my entire life but I went to City Hall. I walked down to City Hall which wasn’t too far away. I had that newspaper article and I went to the City Secretary and I said I want to have a meeting. There was the City Hall and a little bitty room that sometimes they let people have birthday parties or whatever. I said I wanted to use that little room and I wanted to talk about that we were number one in the nation. So, they put it down and they put down my name and the next day I was at the fish house and here comes the City Secretary. Well, you never see anybody, all you see is fishermen down there and here was a City Secretary and I still remember she had the prettiest fulstar with flowers all over it and she said “Diane you’re just gonna have to get this meeting out of the city hall.” I was like “why?” and she said “oh red flags; it’s putting out red flags all over the place.” I’m like “well I’ll do it in an elementary school, you know, they got a cafeteria I’ll do it there.” and she’s like “no they want you to get it totally out of town. They actually don’t want you to do it at all.” I couldn’t get over the fact that I had just asked for it and they didn’t want me to do it. The next day I had the bank president come down to the fish house. I had never talked to that man in my life and here he was, three-piece suit, and he said he said “Diane, are you gonna start a vigilante group roasting industry alive?” I’m totally dumbfounded. I have no idea what they are talking about; why they’re so upset with me – I have not even had the meeting. Then a guy from economic development called my brothers who were fishermen and said you better calm your sister down. My brothers were not the type that would even talk to women and tell them anything. Anyway, one of my brothers said “what in the heck are you doing?” and I’m like “I’m not doing a thing.”
Eventually I did the meeting anyway because I really don’t like people telling me I can’t do something, even though I’m a real quiet person, so I went ahead and had it. I went to a different place and had it. Eventually what it came down to is 1) nobody had ever questioned industry, ever, and 2) it was Formosa plastics, a Taiwanese company who had been kicked out of Taiwan- the biggest chemical expansion in Texas history; the biggest in the United States in 10 years. They had the Governor, the Chamber of Commerce, the Attorney General, the Senators, Congressional and whatever had promised this chemical company. There will be no questions asked; you will get all the tax abatement you want; you will get all your permits expedited; there will be no environmental impact studies. It was pretty much a giveaway and they never once asked one question about this foreign company’s environmental record. They could just come in and we’ll give you everything and I just stumbled on it. It was a fluke. Actually, I went to the mailbox and I got an anonymous letter. I opened it up and it was a newspaper clipping. It was for no supply sticks and it was seven air permits and I didn’t even know what it was. I didn’t know what the company was. When I finally had my little my little meeting as I got a group and I said “we’ll ask for a permanent hearing on this plan.”
As it was, I walked into a hornet’s nest. They couldn’t figure out who I was. They figured I was an official woman – a woman- so I was not bright enough to be doing this on my own. So they figured I was a spy hired by Louisiana to get it kicked out of Texas so the chemical plant would go to Louisiana. That’s how it started, and it never got any better – it got rougher and rougher. I mean everything for the last 30 years has been a battle. It’s been a battle and you just have to be very, very persistent. I think the reason why I’m so persistent is I am connected to that bay.
I remember when I first started. All I got was high school education, I didn’t have any money and nobody supported me. A fishing woman speaking out! People thought I was kind of crazy and all I had was this good sense of the bay. That was what was keeping me going on it. I really kept thinking there’s bound to be someone way better than me; way better at speaking; probably has a biology degree, can understand all of this chemistry and what these chemical plants are and what these chemicals are. It took about five years before I realized I was actually the best person to be doing it because it was my passion. It has always been my passion for the bay that has kept me persistent. That’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years – I’ve been fighting these chemical companies. I fought Union Carbide, I fought Dupont, I fought Alcoa and probably be the longest and the hardest is I fought Formosa.
Derrick Jensen: Thank you for all that. The next two questions are going to be:
can you talk about some of your best victories or your best victory, either way? and
can you talk about current struggles?
Diane Wilson What was to me one of the most interesting things that ever happened and it probably was a psychological kind of a spiritual thing. I had been fighting the Formosa wastewater permit and I had an attorney who agreed to help me and he became a really good friend. People in the community were afraid of the retaliation from the chemical company, especially when a lot of the local officials have contracts with the company. Fishing is going down so you have workers that are being hired at the plant, so nobody wants to say anything and I was the main thing. I haven’t a lawyer who could help me file a suit or something like that. You know a thing about a chemical company. One thing they do is they sense who the allies are so they go after them. On this one they started just throwing them into a deep hole with documents so the money expenses really started hitting them hard and so eventually my lawyer quit and started working for the company. I literally had nobody at all. So, I started filing some papers trying to fight Formosa’s wastewater discharge. When you don’t have a lawyer and you and you don’t have a college education and you got to write briefs and do your own legal work and you don’t have any money. I was doing pretty much filing my own briefs on a Royal typewriter.
Sure enough, they didn’t give me status and they said I couldn’t fight the permit so I appealed it. I always considered you give a monkey a typewriter and after a while that monkey is gonna type a word and so eventually I managed. Believe you me I still don’t know how I did it. I managed to stall the permit with an appeal with a Washington judge, an appellate judge, and so Formosa could not discharge until there was all this ruling and all ofthis process with an appellate judge out of Washington DC.
So I pretty much had their waste water and they could not discharge; they could not begin their plant. So one day I called the EPA to check on the status of the of that discharge permit and I said my name was Diane and I was second on the status. They start talking about “how was that discharge going and I noticed you have some copper discharges but I’m sure we can try to figure out how to do it and you really kind of need to keep the flow in the right periodand now you know.” Then it hit me that she was talking about Formosa’s discharge and she thought I was Formosa’s lawyer whose name was Diane too but that was a different Diane. I said you’re talking to the wrong Diane and that’s when she realized she kind of screwed up there.
Basically, it doesn’t matter what the legal documents say, what the law says – if you have enough money you will get what you want. It was it was the first time I had really come home to the fact that the law doesn’t matter when you got money and when you got power; you really can do what you want, and the law is like a handkerchief in your back pocket. You pull it out when you want to. I was outraged. I was totally outraged about it. The unfairness of it, the injustice of it. It hit me like nothing had hit me before. I knew I had to do something to symbolize that type of injustice. When it appears that nobody cares, everybody overlooks it, it’s injustice going on so I knew I had to do something. l knew that I had to sink something; I had to sink something that I cared a lot about. That’s when I knew I had to sink my shrimp boat. I was going to take it out and sink it on top of Formosa’s illegal discharge. That boat was nowhere near the value of a bay.
Some people can get the little picture, or you can get the big picture. You can look at the little picture and it’s like “oh it’s my livelihood it’s my boat.” It’s “what am i gonna do?” and then you get the big picture and it’s like “this is the planet this is your home for all of us we’re all supposed to be here.” Are you gonna let them take it? I wasn’t gonna let them do it. I was gonna symbolize it by sinking my shrimp boat. So, I put the motor out and I convinced an old shrimper to pull me out in the dead of the night. There was this crazy norther came in at the same time. I can’t imagine how all of these elements came together at the same time – this weather and the black of night in this boat and just doing this covert of pulling a boat out to sink it on top of Formosa’s discharge. There happened to be a shrimper who had been bought back from us and they were paying sixty thousand dollars a year just to be a consultant. He was pretty much just watching me to see what I did and tell the company. Anyway, he pretty much told the company that I was towing a boat out so they called the coastguard. At one o’clock in the morning there were three boatloads of coastguard and they were out there in the middle of the rain and all that wind. They were like “Miss Wilson, Miss Wilson are you out there, Miss Wilson?” They said they’re gonna charge me with terrorism; that I was gonna go to jail for 19 years and it probably took an hour for every two yards because you’ve got a boat towing you; you got a boat with no rudder and you got three coastguards in the middle of the night; in the middle almost of the jetties and all this current. It was the wildest scene of all. These coastguards jumping all over the boats with ropes and all of this stuff. Eventually it took about an hour to happen, but they eventually pulled my boat to a harbor. They put seven or eight ropes and tied it down. They put me in the cabin, locked me in. The guys were so afraid I was gonna get out and somehow take that boat out there without a rudder. I was going to get it out there. They were sleeping on the back deck; they were sleeping in trucks on the wall. I was pretty much stuck there with all these coastguards and all the ropes on my boat. I hadn’t sunk the boat. The next morning when I woke up I heard the sounds of a boat. Then I heard more boats and I looked out the window and there were these shrimpers who never get involved – they don’t believe you can fight; they gave up hope. They think every nail is in their coffin. These guys did a blockade. They all went out in the middle of that rough water. It was so rough you could have sunk a boat out there. I promise you the coast guard does not like shrimp boats blocking anything and here all of these shrimp boats went out in this rough weather and they did a protest and in support of what I was trying to do. That was the most amazing experience to see how if you move sometime and you have no real plan – just have a real instinct – is that things have a way. Some of the most amazing things that you can never plan happen.
I remember after that – Formosa saw all of those fishermen out there protesting in the middle of the bay. I think they had a funny sense of a house built on sand. That’s when uh they asked me “what is it gonna take to shut you up?” and I said “zero discharge of your entire waste stream” and so that’s actually how I got zero discharge from Formosa of this waste stream back in 1994.
Derrick Jensen: I’m sorry that this is so short because i’m loving everything you’re saying and we only have like five minutes left. Can you talk briefly about the lawsuit that you won? Then can you talk about current issues?
Diane Wilson: I have a lot of connection with workers inside the plant. Over the years they’ve come to me with information. I had a worker that was in the utilities or the wastewater and he was a whistleblower. He wanted to give me information, so I met him in a beer joint 40 miles away. He was telling me about all of the pellets that were in the waste stream and how they were going into the bay; how they were in the storm water ditches. He was just real concerned about it because he liked to take his kids fishing and when he took his kids fishing there would be all these pellets all over their feet. So I started checking on the pellets that were coming out of Formosa plastics and the state agencies, EPA – nobody, nobody seemed to care at all. Eventually me and a couple of workers – probably it was three or four of us all together – in January 2016 we started collecting all of these pellets and this powder that was all over the bay, all over the creek. Within a year, and we were all going out almost every single day for over a year, we had a thousand samples and probably had two or three thousand photographs. Then we got a legal aid group – Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid – and they offered to be our lawyers to file a citizen suit under the Clean Water Act. For the next two and a half years until March 2019 we collected around 2500 samples of illegal discharges. We probably had 8 000 photos and videos and we took Formosa to federal court. Believe it or not we won. It was astounding and it was the first time a citizen brought their own evidence; it wasn’t the state’s information; it wasn’t the EPA’s information, it was our evidence. The federal judge said Formosa was a serial polluter and their violations were enormous.
After that Formosa wanted to settle. They wanted to sit down and negotiate. So we sat down and negotiated with one woman, Taiwanese American, and we said we wanted 50 million; we wanted zero discharge of plastics; we wanted a clean up; we wanted our own enforcement and we wanted to make sure their plant did not discharge any plastic and we got it. We got all of it. It was the biggest settlement of a citizen suit ever in the United States. From that 50 million dollars we put 20 million dollars into a sustainable, diverse co-op for the fishermen to try to bring back the fisheries. Right in the middle of it then you know you got this Max Midstream trying to do oil export, and to do oil export he needs the bay dredged so he can get big ships in. Unfortunately, it’s a mercury superfund site and so I did a 36 day hunger strike to try to stop the oil exports and to stop the dredging. After that I went to the corps of engineers and blocked their highway; got arrested, thrown in jail. Then we went to his headquarters, we went to his home and we’re doing every single thing that we can to stop that oil export and stop the dredging because we’re trying to bring back the fishermen who have been devastated and that’s pretty much where I am right now.
Derrick Jensen This whole this whole time you’ve been talking I’ve been thinking about this line by Florence Nightingale which was something to the effect of somebody asked her to what did she attribute her success and she said “I never gave nor took an excuse.”
Diane Wilson That’s right.
Derrick Jensen You know you did not take the excuse that I’m not a lawyer so I can’t do this; I’m not a somebody so I can’t do this – you just did it That’s one of the reasons you’ve been one of my heroes forever.
Diane Wilson Thank you very much, I really appreciate it. You know when that Taiwanese American lady, that negotiated, the only woman that came in, when I walked in, and looked at me and said “you are very persistent”. You do it and be persistent; just keep doing it.
Derrick Jensen So my last question for today, and I’d love to have you on again, my last question for today is one of the things I try to do with these series of interviews is to help people. I mean everybody knows something that is that is bad; everybody loves something that is being destroyed. What can you say to them to help move them from sitting around going “gosh things are really bad somebody should do something” to being the person who does something. Or to being one of the people that does something. Can you say something to them?
Diane Wilson Basically I believe everybody, and I truly mean everybody, has – it’s almost like a destiny – there is something we are meant to do. Somewhere in their life some little piece of information is going to come to them. What they do with that information will determine the rest of their lives. I am just so glad I acted totally out of character and stepped out. That’s what you gotta do and I think everybody gets a chance. It’s what decision they’re gonna make on it and it will change your whole life. I’ve lost a lot of stuff but for the first time I remember “I like myself” and for a woman from the south to say she likes herself that’s a big deal. It’s changed my whole life. I am 72 and I have never felt so free and happy in my life.
Derrick Jensen Thank you so much for all of that and thank you for your work in the world and i would like to thank listeners for listening. My guest today has been Diane Wilson. This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network.
