by DGR News Service | Feb 14, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Movement Building & Support, Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization, Women & Radical Feminism
In the second part of this two part series Sarah summarizes insights into the harm caused to mother earth and offers the reader sharp analysis regarding the dominant culture and what we can do to resist.
Featured image by Elisabeth Robson
Listen, I know Trump fatigue is real and people need time to recover from it. Trump fatigue was largely manufactured by mainstream media obsession. If the media had covered all of Obama’s terrible shit we would have had Obama fatigue too. Yes, Trump was BAD. But a fascist dictator? C’mon. If Trump was a fascist dictator then what do you call the president before him who dropped more bombs on innocent civilians than Trump did, deported more human beings than Trump did, who started a fracking boom? What do you call that prior president’s vice president (who is now President) who helped George W. lead the charge in invading Iraq? The U.S. military is the biggest polluter in the world! Biden has said he will INCREASE the already bloated military budget. If only Elizabeth Warren was president, she had plans to “green” the Military, lol.
There is no way to “green” industrial civilization or Imperialism.
To suggest otherwise is delusional. It’s like saying it’s better to bludgeon someone with a solar powered chainsaw, handcrafted by women in a remote African Village paid a “fair wage” than to murder someone with a gas-powered chainsaw.
Murder is murder.
Rape is rape.
Presidents are presidents: They suck. They do whatever they need to do to hold down the fort of Imperialism, including lying. Yes, Trump was unique in the number of lies he told (an average of 22 a day). This sucks because now anyone who lies less than him, like Biden, is seen as somehow honest by comparison. If it were not for Trump, Biden would be one of the most dishonest presidents ever! He lies in a similar way to Trump. In a way that the rest of us don’t lie. If they get caught in a lie, they lie more, they never apologize for the lie or the damage created by the lie. Biden has claimed he was against the Iraq war from the beginning, but records demonstrates otherwise.
“But Trump incited a riot!” you say, “He’s just SO bad!”
Biden’s Justice Department uses that riot as an excuse to rush a new “domestic terrorism” law; 14 states have moved to enact new Anti-protest laws, laws that will largely hurt groups like BLM, Indigenous water protectors fighting pipelines, and will stop “terrorists” like Max and Will. You cannot call Trump a dictator and then have Biden’s inauguration look like something out of North Korea! Biden’s inauguration speech was written by no one.
To have Lady Ga Ga come out and sing the national anthem was totally done to legitimize this presidency and this “democracy” as cool because most Americans view Lady Ga Ga as a counter cultural, trailblazing hero. She is a faux rebel. A real rebel, a real revolutionary, a real anti-authoritarian committed to real change, would have agreed to sing but when they got up there on live TV would have pointed out that the national anthem was written by a racist, slave owning, war hungry dude. The last verse of the Star Spangled Banner is now left out because of its racist content.
In the documentary about Lady Ga Ga she talks about dealing with all these high-up super powerful dickhead men in the music business industry. She recounted meetings where she felt totally objectified, felt like they expected her to be their whore, to which she replied…
“That’s not why I’m here, I’m not a receptacle for your pain. I’m not just a place for you to put it.”
Nice speech.
Maybe try applying it to the MOST powerful men in the world that had you performing the Empire’s theme song like a trained circus monkey! It is easy to see Trump as one of those music moguls, but it is disappointing that Lady Ga Ga cannot see Biden as that kind of figure as well. Just ask Tara Reade. Or Anita Hill.
J-Lo, a person whose Puerto Rican bloodline no doubt had their land stolen by White Europeans, sang Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’. Currently 98% of U.S. land is owned by white people, mostly men, so to sing this song is the height of hypocrisy. Woody Guthrie wrote that song as a kind of parody, mocking the overtly patriotic song ‘God Bless America’, and as a response to all the poverty he had seen traveling around the country. It is not until you get to the last verses of his song, that you realize his affectionate patriotism was sarcastic:
“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. The sign was painted, said: ‘Private Property.’ But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing. This land was made for you and me.
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple, By the relief office I saw my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me?”
The original sentiment Woody intended does not go nearly far enough: “this land” was made for WHITE men, this land was stolen, and this country was built with the stolen bodies of Africans. The oppression of poor whites that the song speaks to was on top of the enslavement of blacks, which was on top of the attempting erasure of Natives.
The belief that land can belong to anyone is part of our colonized thinking.
We are meant to live as PART of Her, not own or use Her. The fact that ‘Lithium America’ owns the rights to the lithium there is insane. Bolivia is home to the largest lithium deposits in the world. Evo Morales, the democratically elected president was outed in a coup with the help of the U.S. Morales refused to cooperate with international corporations wanting access to that lithium. Morales wanted the profits made from the mining to go back to the people, so he had to go. (He is back in now).
Of course it would be better for the impoverished people of Bolivia to benefit from the selling of that lithium instead of further enriching large corporations. This argument keeps us from focusing on the bigger issue of stopping the extraction. Obama said Fracking is an essential “transition” fuel. The big corporation ‘Rio Tinto Group’ told Native Tribes in Oak Flat, AZ that the copper mine they want to start there will be fine. They have damaged Aboriginal land and communities in Australia with a huge copper mining project.
We are so deprived, neglected, separated from Mother Earth.
The violence and dominance over Her has been normalized, made to seem necessary for our survival when the opposite is true. We have been bottle fed the teat of Industrial Civilization, never given the chance to bond with Her, to know a nurturing like no other. It may be too late to fully bond with Her like our ancestors did. She and we are perhaps too damaged, we should still try. We can start by asking the most difficult questions. Can we bring ourselves back from the brink of extreme distraction? Can we at least have the courtesy of being present with Her as she nurses the wounds we inflicted on Her?
As Arundhati Roy asks in her essay
“Can We Leave the Bauxite in the Mountain?”
The Lithium at Thacker Pass will allow us to continue a lifestyle that prevents us from consciously feeling the pain of what is happening to Her and to our own bodies. We must FEEL it to heal it. Mining that lithium is not about “saving the planet”, it’s about saving ourselves from feeling the outrageous pain of what we are doing. It enables us to bypass guilt and grief, so we get to feel like we are doing something good. We want to be rewarded without the work, while our Mother is being mindlessly sacrificed.
It was not until I did my walk to the Gulf that I started to understand how much car culture has shaped modern industrial humans.
It has reduced and simplified our existence in ways that disconnects us from the complexity of life. Our immersion in this complexity means it is hard to see the consequences of our actions. When you walk along highways for months as I did, you can see the devastation much more clearly. You feel the exhaust building up on your skin. You see so much small roadkill that you do not see from a car: insects, birds, snakes, toads, lizards, mice, voles.
We feel bad when we hit a larger animal, but when the little guys bite the dust we do not notice. We do not want to see or feel this shit. Our avoidance causes even more pain. I read about one study where a rubber turtle was put on the side of the road and a significant number of vehicles swerved to hit it. We have a sense that there is so much stacked pain that needs grieving, we fear it. The irony is, refusing to feel the grief will destroy us, if we do not go there TOGETHER. Recreating a culture that FEELS together is crucial. I can count on one hand, the people who feel as I do and I don’t live near any of them.
Being alone when facing complex grief and trauma can take a toll on us, and since we have no intact culture of dealing properly with our emotions many of us do not start. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus, is a mess. His wife is sick of him (as many I’m sure are sick of me). He has no cultural collective to hold him, or me in this time. I have had long-covid for 10 months now, the symptoms are debilitating. Covid is an illness caused by industrial civilization’s attack on Her, as a byproduct of ecocide. I have spent significant time involved in environmental activism and grieving the loss of Nature. What was happening OUT THERE, is now happening inside of me. We have been trained by this sick culture to think that individuals are self-contained, like The Great Basin being a self-contained endorheic *watershed (*an ancient Greek word meaning “to flow within”). We live without the knowledge that our actions have far reaching impacts. It is beyond dangerous.
We are all car sick.
The Earth Herself is car sick. The answer is not developing new and better motion sickness drugs. The answer is to STOP driving. The real Road Rage should be focused on the development of roads themselves, the veins of the industrial beast. The Mother’s veins, rivers, roots, mycelium, are sucked dry. We will never be able to extract enough, buy enough, or consume enough to ever “meet our energy needs”, that’s just code for “pain aversion”. There are not enough resources in the world to ever fill the bottomless pit that has been excavated in our souls by industrial culture. Our values mean nothing if we do not act on them. Those delusional boneheads that stormed the capitol may be misguided but at least they were acting on their values.
Meanwhile, many of the people who say they care the most are sharing Bernie Mitten Memes. We cannot meme our way out of this. That insurrection on the capitol could be used as a model for actual real movements. What would happen if thousands of Mothers stormed the capitol in the name of their children’s fucked future. The 1963 Children’s march in Birmingham resulted in thousands of children being arrested and sprayed with firehoses. It causes a public outcry. It pushed JFK to pass basic civil rights laws. Some call this “political theatre” – creating a scene so terrible and shocking that the public says ENOUGH and the leaders are forced to do something.
I am scared.
We have become jaded, numb, with such a strong aversion to pain! The pictures of dead animals may not be enough to reach us. Nor was seeing children in cages at the border. Or seeing children in Flint, poisoned. Seeing Indigenous people at Standing Rock terrorized. Seeing the devastation caused by American Imperialism in Yemen, or Syria, or Palestine, or Venezuela.
We must help one another find the courage, strength and tenderness to ‘be with’ what is happening. We must figure out TOGETHER how to respond, work out together how to find the tools. Preserving and conserving is not enough. These terms have the word SERVE in them, as if Nature is here to serve us. This language promotes separation culture and a human supremacist mindset.
Activism needs to evolve.
We need to remember. Derrick Jensen reminds us of the etymology of the word remember: to become a member once again. Everything we do in this perilous moment must be about returning to our roots, about re-establishing broken relationships, about remembering…as in becoming members of the Earth Community once again. Her community is incredibly resilient but there are limits. Some of those limits have been reached. We must ask how can we become responsible community members once again? We must sentence ourselves to a lifetime community service. We could start by listening.
Deep listening used to be a common occurrence for our ancestors and for those who still live with and rest in Her (fading) bosom. I worked for many years at a Garden Center. It got to the point that when I was in there with all those potted plants (most of them refugees ripped from their original ecosystems from around the world, or frankenflora bred and hybridized to serve our aesthetics and needs instead of Hers), I could literally hear them screaming! It was a chaotic cacophony, like a symphony orchestra warming up before they start to play. I knew these domesticated plants would never get to play in Her beautiful melodic orchestra. To escape the noise, I would often go out to the woods behind the greenhouse and imagine being small enough to sit under the canopy of the lilypad-like Mayapples while taking in the concert being put on by a nearby band of white Shooting Stars (a spring wildflower), bobbing their heads to a rhythm we no longer keep time to.
The voices of the dominant culture are repeating themselves non-stop. I too repeat myself as I challenge the dominant narrative. My dear friends, there will come a time where the only thing that “helps” isn’t donating money, or sharing posts, but physically putting YOUR body between HER body and the warheads of Empire, as Max and Will are doing at Thacker Pass. Do not be fooled by the certified “green” stamps of approval plastered all over the missiles. Industrial Civilization does not use “friendly fire”, it is a warship that has every intention of going out with a BANG, taking as many victims down with it as possible.
The proposed “transition of the energy sector” is a lie, the real transition is happening outside the artificial life support systems. It is happening inside us.
A longtime environmental activist, Sarah lives in Ohio US, she loves writing and refusing to mow her lawn. You can read her article published in the Washington Post here.
Please check out Max and Will’s website https://www.protectthackerpass.org/ for writings, interviews, videos, updates and ways to help them stop this wretched Lithium Mine.
by DGR News Service | Jan 18, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Direct Action, Mining & Drilling, The Problem: Civilization
Lithium is the miracle element powering your smartphone and under the hood of every electric car. Will batteries save the planet or cause more harm? The controversy is heating up in Nevada.
RENO, Nevada
Activists aiming to stop an open-pit lithium mine launched a permanent protest encampment last Friday. They invite supporters to join them.
Despite winter conditions at Thacker Pass, the site of the proposed $1.3 billion Lithium Americas mine, protestors have erected tents, a wood stove, and protest signs. Lawyer Will Falk, who is on site, says they mean to stay for as long as it takes to protect this old-growth sagebrush mountainside.
“Environmentalists might be confused about why we want to interfere with the production of electric car batteries, but, it’s wrong to destroy a mountain for any reason – whether the reason is fossil fuels or lithium.” Says Falk
Activists are prepared to remain in place and block all construction, mining, and road-building activities until Lithium Americas abandons their plan to destroy Thacker Pass. They are demanding:
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- The establishment of a protected area at Thacker Pass preserved for the enjoyment of future generations, for wildlife including the Kings River pyrg, and for water quality.
- An immediate abandonment of the Thacker Pass lithium mine project by Lithium Americas corporation.
- A sincere apology from Lithium Americas Corporation for claiming that Thacker Pass is a “green” project.
The Mine Proposal
The Thacker Pass mine proposal, located roughly 130 miles northeast of Reno, is one of a handful of large mining and energy projects fast-tracked by the outgoing Trump administration in what a December article in the New York Times called an “intense push” to “find ways to increase domestic energy and mining production.”
Though Lithium Americas claims they “strive to build a business where the well-being of the local community is essential to its success,” this fast-tracking comes despite objections from local residents, ranchers, and environmental groups, who are concerned about project impacts on wildlife and rural quality of life.
Project documents detail potential harm to many species.
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- The threatened Greater sage grouse, whose populations have been reduced by between 97% and 99% from historic levels, and for whom the Thacker Pass area represents the best remaining habitat in Nevada. Thacker Pass is located in the Lone Willow population management unit, which is home to between 5 and 8% of the entire global population. This project would sever a key connectivity corridor between portions of the habitat;
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- Lahontan cutthroat trout, a federally “threatened” species under the Endangered Species Act which exists in only a small fraction of its historic range, including the Quinn River basin downstream of Thacker Pass;
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- Pronghorn antelope, whose migration routes would be severed by the mine; and
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- A critically imperiled endemic snail species known as the Kings River pyrg that is known to reside in only 13 isolated springs. According to one group of scientists, “the Thacker Pass Project area might contain the entire known population of Kings River pyrg, thereby putting the species at risk of extinction.
Other species who will be harmed by the project include Burrowing owls, Golden eagles, several bat species, native bees and other pollinators, Crosby’s Buckwheat, and rare old-growth big sagebrush. Impacts on the community include increases in heavy truck traffic, noise and light pollution, air quality issues, and reductions in the water table.
Lithium Americas has already built roads, drilled boreholes, constructed a weather station, and dug a 2-acre test pit. They plan to build large tailing ponds for toxic mine waste, drill new wells, build a sulfuric acid processing plant, import more than 170 semi-loads of sulfur (a byproduct from oil refineries) per day, and dig an open pit of more than 2 square miles into the pristine Thacker Pass mountainside.
The encampment went into place on Friday, the same day the Bureau of Land Management handed down the permit for the mine. For now it is home to only a few people. But Max Wilbert, another organizer of the protest and author of Bright Green Lies, a book looking at the environmental harms of renewable energy projects, expects that more people will come as the weather improves.
Wilbert states,
“Many see Nevada as a wasteland, but in truth it’s one of the last wild places left. Where else can you find silence, clean air, starry nights, and solitude? As soon as people spend time in these wild lands, they fall in love with them, and want to protect them.”
Join the Occupation
For more information, to support the campaign, or to join the occupation, visit www.ProtectThackerPass.org. Feel free to reproduce this press release in your publication.
Contact: Max Wilbert and Will Falk
contact@protectthackerpass.org
by DGR News Service | Jan 8, 2021 | Human Supremacy
Children no longer grow up in relationship with wild beings. Big machines are filling that void.
by Max Wilbert
My nephew is two-and-a-half years old. His language capabilities are exploding, and he is growing fast. Like most toddlers, he is a wellspring of boundless energy and pure love. On our walks through Pacific Northwest forests, I’ve been teaching him which trees are cedar and which are maple. He loves birds, particularly crows. The first word I ever remember him saying was “caw!”
And like most kids — including me, when I was his age — he is fascinated with trucks, as well as with cranes, trains, ships, with all things mechanical and moving. The other night, I read him the old Mike Mulligan and his Steamshovel book with worn corners and fading colors — the same copy my own aunts and uncles read to me 30 years ago.
Today, my sleepy little nephew, preparing for a nap, asked me to read him another story. He handed me a book all about construction equipment: bulldozers, excavators, cement trucks. I sat next to him, singing the words of the book to lull him to sleep as he sucked his thumb and blinked his tired eyes.
I flipped from page to page. Each one was covered in beautifully drawn, anthropomorphized machines, finishing their work at the construction site and falling asleep one after another. Soon he fell asleep, and I quietly crept out of the room, thinking about toddlers and machines.
Why are trucks so exciting to a kid? Perhaps it is obvious: they are loud, big, fast, complex, powerful. There is the element of danger. Adaptively, there must be a survival advantage for children who are curious about loud, large, fast beings and objects.
There is a tragedy in this. The fascination that my nephew today directs towards trucks, in the past would have been focused on native megafauna — herds of bison, wolf packs, grizzly bears, whales, eagles — and on their habitat: raging rivers and waterfalls, towering old growth forests, slow grinding glaciers.
These were the big, powerful, mobile beings of previous generations. And they are gone now, or confined to small mountain fastnesses. We no longer grow up in relationship with wild beings, and this fascination with trucks could well be a misappropriation of the adoration our animist ancestors would have directed towards our animal kin
What better way is there to learn to be human than to relate to others who are both profoundly similar to you, and at the same time profoundly different?
Today, most children only see megafauna caged in the prison conditions of zoos, or on the same screen that brings them cartoons and special effects. The megafauna of human habitat has been replaced by mecha-fauna.
This breaks my heart.
Well-known Native American rights advocate and author Vine Deloria Jr. once said that most westerners experience nature as “an aesthetic experience,” in contrast to most Indigenous people who develop relationships with the natural world, including with specific wild places, species, and individuals.
Our ancestors made seasonal rounds and daily journeys to gather berries and edible plants, to hunt and fish and preserve food, to trade and meet with distant friends and family. As they traveled, they would have passed megafauna regularly — perhaps on a daily basis. Some of these kin would be prey, others potential predator, and still others simply neighbors whose boundaries should be respected. These interactions are the foundation of relationship with place, and when paired with an ideology that values balance with the non-human world, can result in societies that persist for tens of thousands of years without significantly harming the local ecology.
Today, my nephew relates to construction cranes and skyscrapers, not to lions and jackals; to garbage trucks and girders, not kudu and camels; to city buses and cement mixers, not Siberian tigers and endless herds of reindeer.
This makes me very sad.
I will not deny him his books, of course, or his fun. One night early this winter, I carried him on my shoulders into the fringes of a construction zone, where we clambered over piled rebar and explored the cab of an excavator. It is not his fault that this is the world he inhabits. When I was a kid, my parents would take me to construction sites and sit with me to watch new skyscrapers and office buildings and houses rise from foundation to framing and beyond. It was fascinating. I do not blame them for being born into this world. And these experiences did not quash my inner animist. On the contrary, now I spend most of my waking hours either in nature or working on its behalf. These qualities, or their potential, exist in every child. They only need patient nurturing.
Richard Louv, in his book Last Child in the Woods, writes that “Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.”
So I take my nephew walking in the woods, and camping on wilderness beaches, and crawling through bushes in the backyard. I point out the birds and the plants to him, and teach them their names, and climb trees with him. In this way, I plant the seeds that may mature into an ecological consciousness when he is grown.
Perhaps these issues seem small. But we, of all people, should know that giants grow from small seeds. And perhaps if we don’t believe ourselves, we should believe our opponents.
A good friend of mine works for the Office of Recreation in Utah. A few years ago, she told me about how the far-right, typically anti-environmental state government had agreed to fund the office — but only if children’s outdoor programs were removed from the budget.
I have been thinking about this story ever since. The conclusions to be drawn from this are simple. In 2018, visitors to Utah spent nearly $10 billion and generated $1.3 billion in state and local tax revenue. Grand County alone, home to Arches National Park, hosted more than 2 million tourists. That’s 200 tourists for every resident of the county.
Tourism is big business. Taking children into nature, on the other hand, is not so profitable. Children do not buy trinkets, do not stay in hotel rooms, do not generate tax revenue. And children, unlike wealthy tourists, tend to go beyond aesthetic experiences when they are in nature. The child in nature hints at something subversive.
What are the ramifications when we take a developing child full of paleolithic genes and place them in a twenty-first century city? We don’t have to guess. We can see these consequences play out all around us. The boredom, alienation, and disconnection in childhood manifest later as selfishness and harm to self and others. Numerous studies have shown that on average, our ability to feel empathy is in a serious decline. This is one of the great tragedies of our time.
But perhaps we can reverse this trend. Perhaps, in time, we can go from mecha-fauna to megafauna once again. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment — in which volunteers were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards in a mock prison — is often invoked to demonstrate how humans will follow authority to the point of committing atrocities. But the results of that experiment — particularly the behavior of a few “guards” who showed compassion towards “prisoners” — can also be understood to demonstrate the opposite: that no matter how strongly we are coerced, how firmly we are pressured, how totally we are indoctrinated, some people will always see the truth. Some people will always resist empire.
Children in nature will not, by themselves, save the world. But if our children are totally cut off from Earth, we are surely damned. A child in nature is a beginning, a seed spreading tiny roots that one day may become the buttresses of a formidable trunk, inexorably levering up the concrete entombing our planet.
Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists. He is the editor-in-chief of the Deep Green Resistance News Service. His latest book is the forthcoming Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It. He lives in Oregon.
This piece was first published in Earth Island Journal.
by DGR News Service | Jan 2, 2021 | Movement Building & Support
Max Wilbert responds to the statement “we are all doomed.”
by Max Wilbert
Anyone who is honest about the present state of affairs on this planet knows that things are very bad.
The oceans are dying. Coral reefs are collapsing. We’re living through a 6th mass extinction event; around 200 species are driven extinct every single day. And things are getting worse, fast. Emissions are rising, not falling. Pollution is increasing. Population is exploding. Energy consumption is skyrocketing. The permafrost is thawing and life as we know it—perhaps life itself—is under serious threat.
Meanwhile, economic inequality is at it’s highest level ever. The rich grow ever richer as the poor work to the bone, grow sick, and die. Meanwhile, popular culture glorifies technology, fast cars, and pornographic images. We live in a culture of adolescents ruled by sociopaths. The Amazon is falling, the forests burn, and millions of tons of plastic churn through the seas.
Despite how bad things are, there are multiple issues with the mentality of “we are doomed.”
First, it presupposes failure. That is not something we can afford at this point. If we have already failed in our minds—if we are already convinced of our defeat—that is a problem.
It is a victory for the dominant culture when we have lost our will to fight. One of the main objectives in any war is to destroy the opponents will to continue fighting. The dominant culture is always trying to destroy our will to fight, in many different ways, through all kinds of different propaganda. This is something that we need to overcome. When we become apathetic, when we say “there is nothing that can be done,” we are surrendering. And I, for one, do not mean to surrender until ever last tree, every last fish, and every last human being is dead.
As long as there is wildness and beauty in this world, there is something worth fighting for—and there is no time to waste wallowing in self-pity.
In some senses the doomer mentality is a parallel to the consumer mentality that says “everything is okay, go on with your shopping.” These two mindsets (doomer and consumer) coexist together very well. Both allow the status quo to continue.
A truly oppositional mindset looks at the dominant culture that is destroying life on this planet, sets itself in conscious political opposition, and organizes from this mentality, not from a sense of doom.
We need to organize with an understanding of reality. Things are very bad. We are deep in a hole. It’s not hyperbole to say that humans could even be driven extinct due to runaway global warming, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, and the collapse of the soils. These are serious trends, but it is not too late for life on this planet.
Action now can make a difference.
I have interviewed some of the top climate scientists in the world, and without exception, they all told me “it is not too late.” Everything we can do now to reduce the destruction of the natural world will create a better future.
Does this mean we have a great future? That everything is going to be fine? That there will be no problems? That we will live in utopia in no time?
Not at all. We are in for some dire times ahead. It is possible that in years to come we will look back at years like 2020 and, despite coronavirus, we may say “that was an easy year.” It’s likely that things will get worse.
It is ironic to me that many doomers, like me, actually have a roof over their head, food, and clean water. Many people around the world are already living in a state of collapse. In the short term, the future is grim.
So what can we do instead of simply saying “we are doomed” and then walking away? The more mature response is based on love for the planet, the beings on it, our family and friends, both human and non-human. The mature perspective works to protect and enhance the future no matter how much hope there is.
If you love then you keep fighting.
Sometimes you win. Sometimes you will change the situation and improve outcomes. There is no magic formula to make things better, but we can make fundamental changes. We can. We must.
If we defeat ourselves in our minds by believing that we are doomed, without taking action and fighting for what we love, then our souls have already been defeated.
If you would like to hear more about this subject, you can listen to an interview Max did with Michael Dowd on his “Post Doom” podcast.
Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists in post-WTO Seattle. He is the editor-in-chief of the Deep Green Resistance News Service. His latest book is the forthcoming Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About Itco-authored with Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith. His first book, an essay collection called We Choose to Speak, was released in 2018. He lives in Oregon.
by DGR News Service | Nov 21, 2020 | Movement Building & Support
This article examines a few things we all can do to enhance our leadership skills.
By Max Wilbert
A friend of mine defines leadership as taking responsibility not just for yourself, but for a larger group or community. As she explains it, a leader tries to ensure things go well.
In general, activists are not very concerned with leadership. We tend to have an understandable mistrust of leaders. This is no surprise, as most leaders in the dominant culture abuse their power for profit and exploitation. But there is another type of leadership that is wise and moral and just. Leadership is extremely important, and we should learn basic principles from those who study leadership most seriously—often businesses and military. We can learn principles from these organizations, even if we disagree with their entire foundation.
This article shares 18 tips for leadership.
1. Learn From Others
Study those who came before, as well as present leaders you admire. Learn from their mistakes, as well as their successes – their weaknesses, as well as their strengths. Be a student of the past.
2. Build Skills
Writing, research, direct action, strategic thinking, fundraising, organizing, relationship building, outdoor skills, first aid, tactical skills—all these things can be learned. Study hard and apply your knowledge.
3. Work on Self-Confidence, Not Arrogance
You will never step up without self-believe. If you believe you are destined to never be a leader, you will not work to apply yourself and study. Step up with confidence, but not arrogance. Recognize your own weaknesses, as well as strengths, and build a team to shore up your weaknesses.
4. Take on Work
Leaders should not sit back and wait for others to do the work. Lead from the front, and be an example for others.
5. Share your Ideas
Even if you don’t know how to solve a given issue, use your intelligence to bring the group together, facilitate discussion, gathering insight, and so on. Learn to ask the right questions and share your thoughts when you have them. Speak up.
6. Listen to Others
Leaders need to listen to other people. Listen more than you speak. Learn from everyone.
7. Delegate
Build trust with your community and team, and delegate. One person has a limited capacity. Therefore, we have to build skills in other people to expand our capacity. This requires trust, and investing in people’s education and learning. People are the most valuable asset we have. Invest in people, even if it takes time for them to learn and adapt.
8. Respect Others
Leaders who abuse power are not and should not be respected. As a leader, you must earn respect, and one way to do so is by respecting others. People should be given respect as a default, unless they do something to lose your respect. Even then, you should be forgiving of those alongside you in the struggle.
9. There Are Many Types of Leaders
Some are loud, some are quiet. Some lead by planning and writing, others by action and speech. Some lead in private, others in public. Some lead while others rest. This is a strength. Cultivate all types of leaders.
10. Lead from the Front
People will not trust or follow a leader who is not willing to take the same risks as them, and get their hands dirty. Set an example for others with your action. Like the lead goose in a flying-V, the leader should do the most work, not the least (and when the time comes, the leader should cycle to the back, allow another to take the lead, and take a rest).
11. Moral Courage
Be prepared to do what is right. Understand consequences, and be prepared to accept them, if it is the right thing to do. When you act cowardly, reflect on why, and what you could do better next time. Commit to excellence and growth.
12. Physical Courage
Leaders should be prepared to take action in the physical world. Practice, prepare, and train in controlled situations to be ready for uncontrolled situations that will arise. Visualize yourself intervening in various scenarios. When opportunities arise, challenge your physical courage.
13. Foster Teamwork
A team is a fragile, unstable creation. Leaders must constantly work to stabilize the team, encourage people, and foster a shared strategic vision. Aligning people as individuals and the group as a whole pays major dividends.
14. Physical Fitness & Energy
As a leader you have a duty to be as physically and mentally fit as possible so that your decision making is as good as possible in stressful and challenging situations. Also, training yourself hard physically ensures you are familiar with the feeling of exhaustion and burnout, and know when you do need a break. Physical health and mental health are closely inter-related. The healthy person can think, act, and fight harder and most effectively.
15. Be Aggressive & Bold
Success in any endeavor entails risk taking. You can never control all factors. Seek to control and understand a situation as much as possible before acting—do not act rashly. But action is almost always better than inaction.
16. Be Decisive
Often, the wrong decision made quickly is better than the correct decision made too late. Rushing can be a path to failure, however, as well. Remember the saying: “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” Be methodical. Move as slowly as you have to in order to get the job done, and no slower. Move as quickly as you can, safely and intelligently.
17. Show Determination
Failures are inevitable. Prepare for them. Plan for them. Expect them. Then keep going. You will face setbacks, betrayals, losses and more. Organizing is not an easy path. Take care of your mind, spirit, and heart, so you can be in the fight for the long time.
18. Be Strong of Character
Self-discipline is the foundational skill. Be gentle with yourself, but allow yourself no excuses.
Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists in post-WTO Seattle. He is the author of two books, most recently Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (Monkfish, 2021 – co-authored with Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith). He has been part of grassroots political work for nearly 20 years.
