In December of 2019, my best friend Kit took me and my partner to the place where she grew up, in the remote Thora Valley, in the pristine forested foothills of Eastern Australia’s Great Dividing Range. As we drove down Darkwood, the single road into the Thora, Kit told us stories of floods and mouldy houses, of Christmases spent at swimming-holes and mushroom picking in the rain. She pointed to where you’d usually be able to see the dramatic ridgelines of the Dorrigo escarpment, one of Australia’s last strongholds of primordial Gondwanan rainforest.
But in December 2019, the Dorrigo escarpment, along with the rest of the country’s south-east, was shrouded in the thick smoke of Australia’s worst bushfire season on record. Rainforests were burning that had never known flames before. ‘Megafires’ was suddenly a household term.
Never mind – we were in one of the wettest parts of the entire continent, adamant that there were still swims to be had, beauty to be enjoyed and peace to be felt.
In the red-tinted afternoon light, we pulled over to ask an old farmer the way to a campsite. He opened the gate to his riverside cow paddock and invited us to pitch our tent there. I was touched that this kind of generosity and trust between strangers still persists – once you get away from the big cities, at least.
Despite the blackened leaves and long strips of charred bark that rained down on us from the oppressive, bruise-yellow cloud of smoke that filled the sky, we had a sweet time in that paddock – making dinner, looking for platypus in the river and telling stories in the tent at dusk.
Then, our hearts skipped a beat. We watched through the flyscreen as the faint orange glow on the horizon suddenly combusted, sending a plume of magenta flames into the sky. We could hear the roar as the blaze consumed the entire mountainside to the south-west in a matter of seconds. Left with little choice, we hurriedly packed up our tents and drove oceanward. I will not forget the overwhelming sense of hopelessness and utter inadequacy I felt as we said goodbye to the generous old farmer, who chose to stay and defend his home.
As a nature-lover and lifelong birdwatcher, that feeling echoed a greater despair. This planet and her kaleidoscope of species have given me so much – provided me so generously with food for the body, mind and spirit. And yet, in the face of anthropogenic climate change, can I do nothing but panic and watch her go up in flames in my rear-view mirror?
Unfortunately, this story does not pertain only to Australia. In 2020, Siberia, Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina all experienced their worst wildfires in decades, and the Western USA is currently in the throes of an unprecedented inferno. My heart goes out to all those countless humans and non-humans who have lost their homes and their lives.
It also goes out to all the young people in the world who justifiably fear for their future. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change informed us that we have no more than twelve years left to limit climate change to avoid untold catastrophe. As young people, how can we possibly open ourselves up to this suggestion, while retaining enough hope to work for change? The new megafire reality now incites me and my partner to question our dreams of moving to the bush and building a little house – is it now a reckless decision to leave the concrete insulation the city affords, and live a life in Nature? For others, like the Thora Valley farmer (and the rest of the rural half of humanity), is it a reckless decision to stay in their homelands and maintain land-based ways of living? Should we all accept a destiny of total urbanisation, turning our backs on a burning world in favour of the climate-controlled “smart city”?
Most global business-leaders would not hesitate to answer an emphatic ‘yes’ to that question. After all, many of them expressly believe that our species is destined to dwell in the realm of robots, internet, spaceships and ultra-modern megapolises, and not in the realm of forests, small farms, koalas and riverine swimming holes. In the fantasies of Google’s Ray Kurzweil, our food will come from “AI-controlled vertical buildings” and include “in-vitro cloned meat”. In the not-so-humble opinion of Tesla’s Elon Musk, building a city on Mars is “the critical thing for maximizing the life of humanity”, even as Earth’s cities will soon require “30 layers of tunnels” to relieve congestion.
And it’s not just the tech bros who paint this kind of future-vision. Much of the environmental movement is on board with it, too. In the crude belief that humanity needs to consume ever more energy, they are pushing “Green” policy packages and Corporate Social Responsibility programs that will plaster fertile soil with solar panels and pave mountaintops to accommodate wind turbines. Our governments are investing in huge, power-hungry technologies to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, while geo-engineers propose bleaching the stratosphere with sulphur dioxide to reflect infrared sunlight away from the Earth. Environmental spokespeople are promoting lab-grown food as a solution to the nightmare of industrial agriculture. So-called ‘progressive’ think-tanks envision a climate-deranged world in which humanity has “adapted” by moving into polar latitudes and building megacities with populations 2.5 times denser than Manila (today’s densest metropolis), while importing energy and raw materials from the abandoned tropics and subtropics.
I implore all my fellow young nature-lovers and activists to consciously reject – wholesale – the corporate-led, techno-globalist future we are being sold. Such suggestions represent yet another extension of the reductionist thinking and scientific hubris that originally justified exploitation of the biosphere – it’s what got us into this mess in the first place. Tech-based “solutions” are still failing to curb emissions and unsustainable consumption, even as they guzzle more resources and damage more ecosystems in order to operate. Moreover, they are fundamentally about enabling the continuation of a gargantuan global economy that can’t even serve our own wellbeing, let alone that of the animals and ecosystems we love.
We’ve already seen how economic globalisation undermines livelihoods and drives competition for ever-scarcer jobs, while exploiting workers and resources. We’ve felt the depression and stress it causes, as it rips apart community fabric and pressures us to compete at school and in the workplace. We’re angry at the way it creates enormous wealth for the few at the expense of the many, and perpetuates the deep racial, cultural and economic injustices that are embedded in the colonial roots of the global economy. We’ve felt the emptiness of the consumer culture, suffered the serious health effects of the addictions in which it entraps us, and experienced the isolation and competitive rat-race of life in big cities.
We need to overcome the serious delusion that industrial modernity is the only way. The toxic cocktail of corporate globalisation, high-tech development and urbanisation is not inevitable, and it cannot offer any meaningful solution to the crises it has created.
What to do then?
Move onto the land, fight fire and pray that we too don’t go up in flames?
Well, not quite. We have to go beyond the “fighting” response: the kind of response that saw Australian authorities bomb forests with thousands of tonnes of toxic fire-retardants and thousands of gallons of seawater last summer. This added insult to injury, poisoning the already-vulnerable waterways, ecologies and human communities. No – we cannot simply invest in more machines, technologies and large-scale infrastructure to fight Nature.
A very different response is needed – one that is holistic, systemic, creative and actually works alongside natural processes, rather than against them. We are called to wake up to humanity’s potential to heal the Earth: to restore her ecosystems, rebuild her soils, retain freshwater and draw down carbon.
This means getting over the myopic idea that humanity can only leave a destructive footprint on the Earth – an idea that depressed and paralysed me when I was a teenager, and continues to torment too many nature-lovers. Let’s open our eyes to the majority of human cultures – including and especially indigenous Australian ones – that have consistently enriched the biosphere. As ground-breaking books like Dark Emu and Fire Country reveal, indigenous people have been improving ecological health and abundance for millennia, by observing and listening to the ecosystems they inhabit, and altering them with small-scale agriculture and locally-sensitive resource-management.
Fundamental to the deep ecological wisdom of indigenous cultures are localised, land-based economies, in which human flourishing is directly tied to local ecological abundance. Similarly, by localising our economies in the modern world, we can re-embed economy in ecology. We can set our resources (including our technological genius) to the task of maximising ecological regeneration while simultaneously meeting all the needs of local communities. Homo sapiens can once again become Earth-healers.
Systemic localisation = widespread regeneration
For as long as I can remember, I have been searching for informed hope in light of the ecological crisis. My journey has been guided by author, environmentalist and alternative economist Helena Norberg-Hodge and her organisation Local Futures, whose 2011 documentary ‘The Economics of Happiness’ relieved me of the crippling idea that human flourishing and ecological wellbeing are separate, mutually-exclusive goals. It explained how localisation is a “solution-multiplier” that rebuilds intimate, reciprocal relations between people, and between people and ecosystems.
Localising our food systems, in particular, is the single most meaningful solution to climate breakdown. Sound like a big claim? Hear me out.
Most environmentalists are familiar with the fact that current agricultural practices are destructive on many levels. In the globalised food system, enormous quantities of uniform commodities are grown on vast, resource- and chemical-intensive monocultures and managed by fossil fuel-hungry agricultural machinery. Animals are raised in highly toxic and polluting factory farms. Harvests are flown around the world and back again just to be processed, packaged and sold. Soils are left bare and deadened, vulnerable to erosion by wind and rain. Farmers and farm workers are subjected to conditions constituting modern-day slavery. All told, this food system is currently responsible for up to half of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, as well as an immeasurable amount of deforestation, soil degradation, water consumption and biodiversity loss.
Localisation flips this madness on its head. By localising, we prioritise the production of a diversity of foods, fibres and medicines for local markets, stimulating a seismic increase inagricultural biodiversity. Farms come to act like natural ecosystems, returning organic matter to the soil and thereby boosting its carbon sequestration potential. Preliminary studies suggest that, if instituted on all the world’s cultivated and pasture land, such agricultural systems could sequester over 100% of current global carbon emissions, while producing many more times (some studies show as much as 20 times) the amount of food per acre.
And the benefits go far beyond just carbon drawdown. Agroecological farming techniques bring the land back to life. Watch Allan Savory’s talk to see how regenerative grazing of cows, goats and sheep has greened vast swathes of desertifying lands in Africa, or this video of how it has brought back endangered species in the UK. Or investigate the story of Ernst Götsch in Brazil, who was able to revive fourteen dry springs, reforest hundreds of hectares, and bring about more rainfall and cooler temperatures in his microregion by mimicking the ecological succession of the surrounding forest, all while producing abundant food and lumber.
How can farming possibly affect rainfall? The increased tree cover in diversified farms can seed the formation of clouds and reinforce wind patterns that bring the rain. And rebuilding soil turns it into a sponge for water, allowing rain to penetrate and refill aquifers, and soak into vegetation. Many small-scale farming systems also integrate water-retention landscapes, like community-managed percolation ponds, swales and wetland areas, which recharge groundwater and sustain rivers and springs. We should not underestimate the importance of these effects, especially since dried up lands and depleted aquifers (thanks again in large part to industrial, globalised agriculture) was a central condition for both Australia and the USA’s unprecedented fire seasons.
There are still other forms of restoration and resilience that human beings can gift to their landscapes. As traditional fire practitioner Victor Steffensen details in Fire Country, indigenous custodians on this continent have worked with fire for many thousands of years, both to protect against wildfires and to actively enhance ecosystems. (Again, this parallels the situation in North America, where First Nations people also work with fire to both of these ends.) They burn off dry shrubs, weeds, dead grasses and leaf litter in order to make way for new shoots to emerge and seeds to germinate. They burn slowly, coolly and in a piecemeal fashion (allowing animals to escape), making sure not to damage the canopy. They draw upon deep, intergenerational knowing of the land to choose the right times and places to burn, avoiding nesting seasons for ground-dwelling birds and fruiting seasons of key food sources. This is a hands-on approach, which aims not only to protect human beings, but to increase the biodiversity and life-giving capacity of entire ecosystems.
Let me stress why the broader framework of economic localisation is so important for the needed revolution in agriculture and resource-management: all such methods need to be small in scale, slow in pace, and managed carefully by human hands. Diversified farms cannot be sowed or harvested by blind, standardising machinery – they require the intimate care and sensitive cultivation that only human hands can offer. Similarly, practices like traditional fire management require more time – more hands and eyes per acre. Economic localisation is a structural way to incentivise and revive this kind of small-scale, hands-on, job-rich, community-centred activity.
The cohesive fabric of local communities is, in and of itself, a form of social and ecological resilience – a force that can be mobilised to protect against natural disaster. In the Nimbin area of north-east New South Wales (a hotspot for intentional local communities), the Mt. Nardi bushfire threatened many homes and burnt through swathes of World Heritage protected Gondwanan rainforest. But the fire was contained thanks to a self-organised group of local eco-villagers, cooperative members and farmers called ‘the Community Defenders’.
“Without the [Community Defenders’] work we would not have contained this fire” stated one fire brigade driver. “Man oh man, they stepped up in such a way that all of us in uniform were just completely blown away,” praised the Captain, noting: “these communities are already intentional communities; there’s already that fabric that exists there. I’m not too sure how that might work in a different area, where there are private leaseholds and people don’t know their neighbours as well.”
The Key Piece of the Puzzle
‘Mitigation’, ‘adaptation’, ‘resilience’ and ‘regeneration’ – these have become buzzwords in the environmental movement, and are increasingly present in policy discussions. But the key piece of the puzzle is left out far too often: any genuine climate solution requires more hands on the land.
This doesn’t mean that you and I must quit our jobs, leave our social circles and move out to some rural backwater to start planting trees and growing our own food. While there are indeed countless brave young people doing that kind of pioneering work, we really need policy frameworks that facilitate localisation so that it’s not a constant uphill battle. This means policies that:
make local food, clothing and building materials cheaper and more accessible than produce from the other side of the world,
revitalise life in smaller cities and towns by providing good quality jobs, exciting education and cultural opportunities,
shorten the distances between producer and consumer wherever possible, to allow more transparent, more accountable and more democratic economies,
encourage small-scale, diversified production for local markets, rather than large-scale commodity production for export.
We could support the reconstruction of local, diversified economies in rural areas, while linking cities up with regional producers of basic needs. We could stop supporting globalised systems of production run by unaccountable corporations, and start investing in smaller businesses that are structurally able to adapt to local conditions, to participate in circular economies and to respect community relationships. This would mean redirecting economic subsidies, taxes and regulations away from supporting energy and technology, and towards favouring employment. For example:
Instead of spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on leasing enormous water-bombing aircraft from foreign companies, we could employ people to carry out traditional burns, under the supervision of indigenous experts.
With half the amount of money that currently subsidises Big Ag, we could support farmers to transition to regenerative practices, and fund the establishment of many more small farms.
Instead of pouring money into infrastructure for ever more global trade, we could strengthen local supply chains and rebuild the much lighter infrastructure needed for local markets and small businesses – think railways, post offices, public market spaces.
Instead of signing “free trade” treaties that give multinationals still more freedom to do whatever they please, we could start reregulating them, while cutting the red tape and bureaucracy that too often strangles smaller players and community projects.
Just a couple of years ago, the very idea of policy change would have put off a lot of people (especially younger people). Back then, mainstream environmental and social justice messaging still focused on changing individual behaviours. But I am encouraged to see, on social media and in conversation with my peers, that there has been a marked shift. We are increasingly using our imaginations to reach beyond the depressing confines of neoliberal capitalism and industrial modernity, and we are realising we have a collective democratic muscle to exercise. More than ever, we are up for the challenge of taking on systems change.
I therefore propose that our most urgent task is to envision land-based futures, and to demand that political steps be taken to realise them. Imagine: empowered and responsive communities and more small businesses meet water-retentive and flood-resilient landscapes, informed land-management, biodiverse farms and enlivening ecosystems. These elements can intersect to form the fabric of our future; a fabric that can hold us in safety and profound optimism, even as the spectre of climate change looms.
This goes far beyond transitioning the current global economy to renewables; if we’re honest with ourselves, we know our love for Nature goes much deeper than that. It envisions human societies reintegrated into the natural world, sustained by food forests and holistically managed ecosystems, powered by small-scale, community-owned renewables. It blurs the line between the wild and the cultivated, between the human and the non-human, between the individual and the universe.
A latent capacity for healing
Over the months since the rains finally came and extinguished the fires, one of my greatest joys has been to witness the incredible regenerative capacity of burnt forests. With water at their roots, the blackened bodies of eucalypt and banksia, paperbark and bloodwood burst into bright pink and green leafy shoots. Grasstrees and ferns sprang from the ashy ground. Forests turned from sombre graveyards to vibrant palaces of chlorophyll, and lyrebirds could still be found scratching through the slowly regenerating soil.
My solace is that we humans – even the scientists among us – cannot fully understand the incredible regenerative capacity of our planet. Therefore, we can hold out hope that the dire scientific models and predictions of the future are not the full picture. I believe, if we shift our global economic system towards a plurality of systems that support the hands-on cultivation and renewal of ecosystems, and if we shift our cultures towards Earth-reverence rather than Earth-oppression, we can have faith that Mother Earth may move in surprising ways to rebalance the global climate and support life. Dare I say, she actually wants to do so.
If that sounds naïve, remember that scientific hubris has always been ecological enemy number one – we thought Nature was mechanical and predictable, able to be dissected, predicted and manipulated. But now, even science is moving in a more holistic direction. We are learning that things as tiny as atoms are fundamentally unpredictable – in the words of Rupert Sheldrake, they have an innate freedom. Surely then, so do ecosystems, ocean currents and weather systems.
Indigenous people the world over tell of conscious powers embedded in mountains, rivers, forests and seas. What if moving beyond the dire scientific predictions of out-of-control ecological death-spirals and climate timebombs, and collectively dedicating ourselves to a more beautiful future, could incite these powers to reawaken? We have never understood the true complexity of the living world. By stepping into that humility, and by embodying faith in the untold power and intentionality of Mother Earth to support life, we may just release a cascade of regenerative power that we scarcely dare to imagine.
After the fires, I was humbled to see how some trees exploded into new shoots after a week or two, while others of the same species and in the same areas took months. The complexity and uniqueness of all the life around us denies reductionist categorisation – we simply cannot fully understand the nature of Nature.
What we can do, however, is to raise the call for an economics of humility; an economics that respects the diversity and dynamic flows of the natural world; an economics of localisation. We can work to deconstruct the “invisible hand” of the global techno-economic juggernaut, and make it release its death grip from Nature’s throat. In the humbled understanding that the Earth has what it takes to flourish, we can put our own hands to work in bringing her back to life.
If we do these things, we can believe in a future of expanding rainforests, flowing rivers, diverse species and a stable climate. We can believe in a world without famine or drought, without systemic violence or economic injustice. In the words of Charles Eisenstein, we can believe in the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
Henry connected with the work of Local Futures at age 15, and is now a Project Coordinator for the organization, working in Ladakh, India and Australia. In 2017, he co-founded the NGO ‘Wildspace’.
Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is a co-founder of the group Deep Green Resistance and longtime board member of Fertile Ground, a small, grassroots environmental non-profit with no employees and no corporate funding. His first book, a collection of pro-feminist and environmental essays, was recently released. It’s called We Choose to Speak, and Other Essays.
He is also the co-author of the forthcoming book “Bright Green Lies” (with Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith) which looks at the problems with mainstream so-called “solutions” such as solar panels, electric cars, recycling, and green cities. The book makes the case that these approaches fail to protect the planet and aim at protecting empire from the effects of peak oil and ecological collapse.
I’m not a Leninist, but I think it’s worth reading Lenin and all those famous revolutionaries throughout history, I think it’s very worth studying and reading their work even if you disagree with large portions of it, even all of it depending on who you are, but Lenin talked about revolution as not being something that people make happen. Ultimately, revolution comes about more or less organically because of those interactions between people, and society, and environment, and that whole socio-political, ecological context gives rise to these revolutionary conditions, and whether or not there is a revolution that depends on people’s ability to harness and change the situation in some way. This whole conversation I’m always thinking of this quote of James Connolly who was an Irish Republican around the early 1900s, active around the 1900s in the independence movement in Ireland, and James Conolly said “revolution is never practical until the hour the revolution strikes, then it alone is practical and all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers become the most futile, unvisionary of human imaginings, and the whole idea of revolution to me is fascinating because in this context that we find ourselves in today, so many people have trouble imagining, you talked about this in your work Derrick, so many people have trouble imagining another way of life. People can imagine the end of the world, the collapse of the biosphere, the end of all human life and perhaps, most non-human life as well before they can actually imagine living a different way of life or living without the conveniences, and the consumption, and the high energy lifestyle of modern civilization. So, I think part of revolution, part of building towards revolution is how do we envision a future world that is better than the one we live now, and then how do we concretely begin to work for that world in here and now, and be prepared for those revolutionary moments that we know are coming, because that’s the truth as we know these revolutionary fractures in society are coming, and if you were in Paradise California when that fire came through, as the James Connolly quote talked about, all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers were the most futile, unvisionary of human imaginings in that moment when the inferno is sweeping through your town and the climate apocalypse is upon you, and that is just a small taste of what’s coming. This collapse has been an on-going process for a long time, but it’s getting so intense as the ecology of this planet really has taken such a hammering over the last hundreds and thousands of years, but specially in the last hundred years and the last decades as this culture’s hyper powered on so much fossil fuels, and so much energy that is destroying and extracting the last of all the resources of the planet, blowing up as many mountains as it can and exploiting everything, right? In that context we need to begin to build the seeds of the future and I think it has to combine that imagination, that ability to imagine a different future with like a very hard-headed, a very practical organizing mindset.
Browse all of my Resistance Radio interviews here.
PLAYLIST
0:11 – Introduction 1:22 – The Need for Change in Large-Scale Social and Environmental Movement Approaches 6:59 – Reform Can Be Very Helpful but Doesn’t Address the Fundamental Problem 12:26 – Revolution as a Consequence of Ecological Collapse 18:26 – Deep Green Resistance: Luck is Where Preparation Meets Opportunity 24:34 – We Can’t Out-muscle the Empire, We Have to Be Able to Out-think It 29:19 – Strategy and Organization is How We Build Power 35:06 – Where Does the Power to Exploit Comes From? 41:01 – Dismantling is Scary and Difficult Yet We’re Not Alone 44:05 – Pre-revolutionary Phases and How to Reach Out
In this article, Salonika and Max expose how the Covid-19 pandemic has enforced suppression of political dissent in the Philippines due to a bill known as the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 which places resistance movements in a pinch. You can also read this piece on the increased surveillance during the CoVid crisis.
Deep Green Resistance condemns draconian laws that stifle the political rights of citizens. We stand in solidarity with the resistance against this law.
In an event unprecedented in the history of industrial civilization, most humans have been confined, for the past few months, to their homes battling their fear and desperation. Meanwhile, states have used this unexpected opportunity to move closer to their dream of authoritarianism. Victor Orban has usurped power to suspend and decree laws under the pretext of the pandemic. Narendra Modi has used a time when courts are suspended to persecute peaceful protesters under terrorism charges. We have, in an earlier article, highlighted the increase in surveillance during the last few months.
Repression under Duterte.
The government of the Philippines has been hellbent on repressing any and all opposition for many years. President Rodrigo Duterte announced a “War on Drugs” months after his election. This ‘war’ gave authorization to the police to kill any person involved in the drug trade without due process. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the span of four years, with near total impunity for the killers.
Irrespective of one’s loathing of the drug trade, an inherent flaw in this plan must be visible to anyone. Any law along these lines can and will be used to stifle any form of political dissent. This is precisely what has happened in Philippines.
Philippines Government Response to the Pandemic.
The government’s response to the pandemic has continuously reinforced the economic and political hierarchy in the country. A controversy arose in the first months of the pandemic: Duterte and his cronies were tested for the corona-virus in violation of the criteria set by Department of Health, while actual patients were not receiving access to the testing kits. Local Government Units have taken actions to ease the suffering of general people, some of which have been stunted by the central government.
The situation in the Philippines has been accompanied by a rising suppression of journalism. On June 15th, 2020, a Manila court convicted Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and former researcher Reynaldo Santos Jr. of cyber libel in a case widely decried as a political witch hunt. The persecution of journalists has always been a tool used by authoritarian regimes for repressing the democratic voices of dissent. Since this case is considered “the most high-profile case” against individual journalists, it is bound to set a precedence for similar persecutions in the future.
Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020
Now, Duterte is set to take another leap towards authoritarianism using the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020 also known as Republic Act No. 11479. The bill cleared the Senate in February, passed the House of Representatives in June, and was signed by the president in early July.
The most contentious provisions include the warrant-less arrest and 14-day detentions of suspected “terrorists”, and the creation of an anti-terror council that would determine what is terrorism and order arrests without a warrant – a function usually reserved for the courts. –Al Jazeera report
The Act has broadened the definition of terrorism. Among other things, it includes any act intended to “destabilize or destroy the fundamental political, economic and social structures of the country.” The power lies with the anti-terrorism council to label any person inside or outside the Philippines a terrorist and arrest citizens at random.
The Act allows the Duterte regime to subject suspects to surveillance, warrant-less arrest and detention for up to 24 days. The Human Security Act of 2007 used to have a safeguard against wrongful detention in order to maintain accountability among the state actors. It monetarily compensated anyone who was imprisoned but later proven to be innocent. This protection has now been completely removed.
In short, the new law allows the state to target, pursue, anyone who poses a threat to the autocratic regime and to unfettered capitalist exploitation. The implications are clear; as one human rights activist commented, “even the mildest government critics can be labelled terrorists.” It is expected that government officials will use this law to chill free speech by suppressing speeches, proclamations, banners, and writings.
A member of House of Representatives has remarked that the act would not include activists and that safeguards prevent abuse of the act. Nonetheless, judging by the history of draconian laws (including the War on Drugs), it would be reasonable to estimate that the law will be used to suppress any form of political dissent, not only ‘terrorism’. Even the vice-president has remarked that the act gives the state the power to call anyone a terrorist.
Nationwide, protesters had moved to the streets to raise their voice against the bill. Duterte’s government has used the restrictive laws of the pandemic as an excuse to deploy armed police in the areas of protests. Opposition activists are disappearing. They are being thrown in jail. The violent crackdowns on resistance have already begun to escalate. Laws like this leave resistance movements with little choice but to become more clandestine.
Salonika is an organizer at DGR South Asia based in Nepal. She believes that the needs of the natural world should trump the needs of the industrial civilization.
Max Wilbert is an organizer, writer, and wilderness guide who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance. Max is the author of two books: the forthcoming Bright Green Lies, and We Choose to Speak, a collection of essays released in 2018.
The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth,fifth and sixth part of Will’s journey.
Red Oak Memories
On the banks of the Ohio River, in downtown Warren, PA, I stood under the long limbs of an ancient red oak wondering what this magnificent tree must have witnessed in her lifetime. Red oaks can live for 400 years or more and this one had a circumference of what looked like 25 or 30 feet. Even if she was only 300 years old, she would have witnessed the arrival of European settlers in the area.
I tried to imagine what the scene before me looked like when the red oak was young. The hulking asphalt bridge carrying traffic across the river vanished. When it did, the screeching brakes, honking car horns, and police sirens hushed. The multi-story buildings crowding the opposite shore, with their advertisements painted in loud colors, disappeared. The stone man dressed as a Union officer brashly observing the town’s movements from his perch on an obelisk dedicated to the area’s Civil War casualties disintegrated. From the brass crucifix on a steeple casting a shadow over the river, Jesus ascended to heaven. And, he took the church building with him.
Beyond my vision, the Kinzua Dam was inconceivable and the Allegheny Reservoir was unthinkable. The oil wells’ metal pumpjacks methodically sucking crude oil from the earth like mechanical vampires throughout the Allegheny National Forest were centuries away from invention. Warren’s United Refining Company was unnecessary because no one thought they needed the extravagant energy made possible by petroleum.
With all of the evidence of the town of Warren gone, I saw the red oak’s kin growing thick around me, showering the ground with acorns. I saw towering, straight white pines and thick-foliaged hemlocks. These trees had never heard the haunting sounds metal saws make as they slice their way through forests. I heard the songbird symphonies in their full glory. I watched the intense gaze of blue herons stalking crawdads. I delighted in the flamboyancy of the green herons displaying their plumage. Mergansers and mallards led their downy chicks in wobbly lines up and down the river. Black bear cubs wrestled and climbed trees while their mother eyed trout in the shallows.
I also saw humans. I saw the Senecas and their ancestors who had lived here for thousands of years. I saw adults working on a new canoe that would carry them and their trading goods as far as the MTississippi hundreds of miles away. I saw elders telling teenagers stories to live by. I saw parents let their children swim and splash in the river with no fear of untreated sewage spills, oil refinery pollution, toxic fertilizers, or radioactive fracking wastewater.
The red oak’s and my view of downtown Warren, PA.
There Must Be Something in the Water
These visions slowly drifted away until a blaring train horn brought me fully back to the present. It hurt to be back. I wished I could permanently transport to a time before asphalt bridges, oil refineries, and church steeples occupied the Ohio River basin. I wished I lived here before the town of Warren was built. I yearned for the time when traditional cultures governed these lands. I wished Europeans never found this land.
I began to feel sick to my stomach. I tried to recall if I had eaten something, but all I had eaten all day was an apple and a handful of cashews and almonds. This meal had never given me trouble before.
An acorn fell from the branches and bounced near my feet. The red oak’s branches caught my attention. I saw her leaves turning in the late afternoon sunshine. She glowed with a verdant light – one of the forest’s original colors. She glimmered with memories of times past. Then, a statement echoed in my mind: “There must be something in the water.”
My nausea intensified. It was a hot day and I was guzzling water. I had filled my water bottle up at several public fountains in town. Was something in the water? What was making me sick?
Above me, four flags snapped in the wind. One flag was a blue field with three gold fleur de lis. This was the old, royal French flag carried by French explorers in the area. One flag was the British Union Jack carried by British explorers. The third flag was the one carried by American forces during the Revolution. It showed 13 white stars arranged in a circle on a blue square with alternating red and white stripes. The last flag was the Seneca Nation’s. It was red and displayed the Seneca’s respect for nonhuman life with eight animals in a circle. They were deer, heron, hawk, snipe, bear, wolf, beaver, and turtle.
Below the flags, a plaque explained that originally this monument flew only the three imperial flags of the Europeans who claimed this land. Later, the Seneca Nation flag was added. That irony provoked in me a desire to learn the history of how indigenous peoples were pushed off this land. I hoped this would reveal what was in the water.
Settler Occupation Heartbreak
The history of the settler occupation of the Ohio River basin is heartbreaking. White settlers, especially Americans, engaged in decades of ethnic cleansing and genocide to open the region to settlement. This process is called settler colonialism. Historian Patrick Wolfe sums up the goal of settler colonialism as elimination of indigenous populations in order to make land available to settlers. And, in her essential book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz elaborates:
“Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals. People do not hand over their land, resources, children and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.”
Air Force officer and Associate Professor of History at the United States Air Force Academy Lieutenant Colonel John Grenier goes so far as to call the extravagant violence perpetrated by Americans against indigenous peoples as the US military’s “first way of war.” He explains in his book The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814:
“For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders.”
The Ohio River basin is home to many indigenous nations including the Senecas, Shawnees, Miamis, and Delawares. Americans fought wars of extirpation against all of these nations. Grenier describes why:
“The one constant road block to the settlers’ expansion into the interior of the continent was always the Indians. Thus, if they could eliminate the Indians, the settlers could make North America their own. Limited wars…did little to drive the Indians from their lands. Americans thus chose the most effective means of subjugating the Indians they faced. They sent groups of men, sometimes a dozen, sometimes hundreds, to attack Indian villages and homes, kill Indian women and children, and raze Indian fields.”
When I read this history, the movements happening across the country to remove statues and memorials dedicated to genocidal men came to mind. How can anyone who has read the words of men like George Washington, words ordering Americans to ethnically cleanse the land of indigenous peoples, oppose efforts to remove memorials to these men?
There is Malice Enough in our Hearts
During the American Revolution, for example, Washington wrote instructions to Major General John Sullivan to take peremptory action against the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois confederacy which included the Ohio River basin’s Seneca) to “lay waste all the settlements around…that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed…[Y]ou will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected…Our future security will be in their inability to injure us…and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.” Sullivan replied, “The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support.”
In this spirit, in 1779, the Continental Congress mustered three armies against the Senecas. Dunbar-Ortiz describes how the three armies scorched “earth across New York and converged at Tioga, the principal Seneca town, in what is now northern Pennsylvania. Their orders were to wipe out the Senecas and any other Indigenous nation that opposed their separatist project, burning and looting all the villages, destroying the food supply, and turning the inhabitants into homeless refugees.” To encourage enlistment in these armies, Dunbar-Ortiz notes that the Pennsylvania Assembly authorized a bounty on Seneca scalps, without regard to sex or age and concludes, “This combination of Continental Army regulars, settler-rangers, and commercial scalp hunters ravaged most of Seneca territory.”
The end of the Revolutionary War did not ease the violence Americans employed against the indigenous peoples of the Ohio River basin. Grenier writes that, in March 1791, Secretary of War Henry Knox (the namesake of Knoxville, TN), directed Brigadier General Charles Scott to recruit 500 Kentucky mounted rangers to destroy Miami towns along the Wabash River, a major tributary of the Ohio. Scott sacked two of the Miami’s largest towns, captured 41 women and children, and then issued the following threat to the Miami:
“Your warriors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity, and you may be assured that those who escape the fury of our mighty chiefs shall find no resting place on this side of the great lakes.”
The Shawnees received the same treatment. Dunbar-Ortiz recounts how George Washington charged alcoholic Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne (the name sake of Fort Wayne, IN) with destroying the Shawnees. Wayne marched into what is now northwestern Ohio and established Fort Defiance. He then made this ultimatum to the Shawnees: “In pity to your innocent women and children, come and prevent the further effusion of blood.” When the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket refused submission, Wayne’s forces began destroying Shawnee villages and fields and murdering women, children, and old men. At Fallen Timbers, on August 20, 1794, the main Shawnee fighting force was overpowered and Wayne’s men created a 50-mile swath of destruction while laying waste to Shawnee houses and cornfields. Wayne and his men carried on for three days after the battle.
Photo of a painting depicting the Battle of Fallen Timbers taken by the Kentucky National Guard Public Affairs Office, I doubt the Kentucky National Guard Public Affairs Office endorses my work. My use of this image should not imply that the Office does endorse my work.
The history of the American invasion of North America is filled with stories like the ones described here. It would take pages upon pages to represent this history in its entirety. Anyone attempting to understand the reality of American history needs to contemplate what Dunbar-Ortiz points out: “The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate [native nations’] existence as peoples – not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.”
Macutté Mong and the Wabash River
The following stories finally showed me what was in the water that made me feel so sick.
George Rogers Clark is considered a hero of the American Revolution. He was likely a psychopath. Outside of Vincennes, IN, in February 1779, Clark demanded the unconditional surrender of the British inside Fort Sackville. When Henry Hamilton, Fort Sackville’s commander, refused to accept Clark’s demands, Clark showed what Grenier characterizes as “the Americans’ darker side.”
Hamilton described the events in his journal. Clark had four Indian captives. He ordered these four men taken into the street in front of the fort’s main gate where the fort’s occupants could watch. Hamilton reported:
“One of [the Indians] was tomahawked either by Clark or one of his officers, the other three foreseeing their fate, began to sing their death songs, and were butchered in succession. A young chief of the Ottawa nation called Macutté Mong one of these last, having received the fatal stroke of a tomahawk in the head, took it out and gave it again into the hands of his executioner who repeated the stroke a second and a third time, after which the miserable being, not entirely deprived of life, was dragged to the river and thrown in with the rope about his neck where he ended his life and tortures.”
When Hamilton continued to argue for lenient terms, Clark began to wash his hands and face “still reeking” in Macutté Mong’s blood and threatened to put the entire British garrison to death if it did not surrender immediately. Hamilton opened the fort’s gates the next morning.
When I read that Macutté Mong was thrown into the Wabash River, I realized that what was left of his brutalized body was carried south towards the Ohio River. I did not know how long it takes rivers to break down human bodies. I did not know how far a body’s materials might be carried by a river, either. But, I did know that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.
Macutté Mong’s body was no doubt recycled by the Wabash and Ohio rivers over the centuries. Some of his body was likely eaten by fish and insects who in turn were eaten by other fish, insects, birds, and animals. His bones likely sank into the riverbed, reunited with the bones of countless primordial marine organisms that form the white limestone southern Indiana is famous for. His blood stained the water until the river could wash enough of it away. And, in this way, Macutté Mong was spread throughout the watershed where he was murdered. I was born in southern Indiana, not far from where Macutté Mong was dumped into the Wabash River. Ever since I encountered Macutté Mong’s story, I have been haunted by the possibility that a part of his body – no matter how minuscule – became part of my body.
In March 1782, three years after Clark used four Indian men to intimidate the British in Indiana, Delawares living along the Tuscarawas River at a Moravian mission in Gnadenhutten, Ohio were rounded up by a Pennsylvania settler militia under the command of David Williamson. These Delawares, who had converted to Christianity, were told they were being evacuated for their own safety. Then, the militiamen searched their belongings to confiscate anything that could have been used as a weapon. The militiamen accused these Delawares of giving refuge to Delawares who had killed white people and condemned them all to death.
The condemned Delawares spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morning, the militiamen marched over ninety people – forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children – in pairs into two houses and slaughtered them methodically. Daniel K. Richter, in his book Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, found that one killer boasted he had personally clubbed fourteen Delawares to death with a cooper’s mallet. After killing these fourteen people, he handed the mallet to an accomplice and announced, “My arm fails me. Go on with the work.”
The Tuscarawas River flows into the Muskingum which flows into the Ohio. I never learned how these Delawares were laid to rest. But, considering the wanton cruelty the Pennsylvania militiamen demonstrated while slaughtering the Delawares, it is easy to conclude the militiamen used the Tuscarawas River to dispose of their dirty work.
I couldn’t drive the images of Macutté Mong pulling the tomahawk from his head or the cooper’s mallet falling on Delaware heads from my mind. The death songs sung by the men George Rogers Clark murdered drifted across time and space to give me nightmares. I heard the Delawares singing hymns in the distance. I saw skulls shattering. Clark’s man hesitated when Macutté Mong handed him the tomahawk back. The man swinging the cooper’s mallet grunted as he tired. Mangled bodies piled up. Blood spilled across floors, washed from door frames, and swirled with river currents. Crimson pools slowly expanded in formerly clean river water.
Shattered souls spill like blood
These visions taught me what the ancient red oak I stood under in Warren, PA was trying to tell me when she suggested there must be something in the water.
Some violence is so heinous that it shatters souls when it destroys bodies. Shattered souls spill like blood. Some of the shattered souls seep into the soil and make their way into groundwater. Some of the shattered souls flow with surface water to mingle with streams and rivers. These shattered souls contaminate water with the metaphysical equivalent of chemical carcinogens. They poison water with grief and dread.
Shattered souls litter the North American continent. When you confront this history, it is difficult to envision any water untainted by the horrors of settler colonialism. And, when you drink water polluted with shattered souls, you may get sick. Symptoms include a nagging angst, inexplicable grief, spiritual discomfort, the urge to flee, and sometimes physical nausea. There is no cure for this sickness. But, you will find relief facing the violence that shattered these souls, searching for the truth, and working to ensure that settler colonialism never shatters souls again.
Buildings crowding the river in Warren, PA.
This painting depicts Henry Hamilton’s surrender to George Rogers Clark at Fort Sackville near Vincennes, IN. Hamilton’s surrender came after George Rogers Clark tomahawked four native men to death at the fort’s gate to intimidate the British.
Will Falk is the author of How Dams Fall: On Representing the Colorado River in the First-Ever American Lawsuit Seeking Rights for a Major Ecosystem and a practicing rights of Nature attorney. Rights of Nature advocates work to transform the legal system so that it recognizes the “personhood” of natural beings. For the rest of 2020, Falk will travel through the Ohio River Basin asking the Ohio River the two questions he asks any client who steps into his office: “Who are you?” And, “What do you need?”
Street medics, or action medics, are volunteers with varying degrees of medical training who attend protests and demonstrations to provide medical care such as first aid. Unlike regular emergency medical technicians, who serve with more established institutions, street medics usually operate in a less formal manner.
Street medics, or action medics, are volunteers with varying degrees of medical training who help provide medical care, such as first aid, in situations frequently neglected by traditional institutions – protests, disaster areas, under-served communities, and others. Unlike emergency medical technicians (EMTs), who work for state-sponsored institutions, street medics operate as civilians and are not protected from arrest.
Street medic organizations also run low-income herbal health clinics, wellness clinics for migrant workers, and temporary family practice clinics to support people who are organizing for self-defense or advocating for their rights. A group of street medics founded the first healthclinic to open in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Street medics work under the philosophy of “first do no harm” (i.e., the Hippocratic Oath), meaning that medics employ treatments that must never harm the patient more than they help. Because medics have different levels of training, they will be able to provide different types of care. Street medic collectives representing cities or regions plan training programs focusing on treating demonstration-related injuries, and plan health, safety, and medical coverage of upcoming demonstrations.
Sometimes an affinity group will include one or more trained street medics to attend specifically to members of that group.
Many street medics have pursued further medical training, most commonly in nursing, emergency medicine, and herbalism. There are street medics employed in almost every field of medicine and rescue, including surgery, family practice medicine, psychiatry, research, both classical and traditional Chinese medicine, medical herbalism, first aid instruction, fire-fighting, and wilderness medicine.
A Condensed History of Street Medicine in Practice
The concept behind street medicine is not new. Originally seen during the African-American Civil Rights Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, street medics are volunteer activists who attend political actions equipped with the knowledge and inventory necessary to give medical aid to protesters and civilians in need.
Street medics originated in the United States of America in 1964 during the African-American Civil Rights Movement. They were originally organized as the Medical Presence Project (MPP) of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), the voluntary health corps of the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1966 MCHR Orientation Manual, MPP is described.
“Just presence of … health … personnel has been found extraordinarily useful in allaying apprehensions about disease and injury in the Civil Rights workers… There also seems to be a preventative aspect to medical presence – actual violence seems to occur less often if it is known that medical professionals are present, particularly when Civil Rights workers are visited in jail at the time of imprisonment or thereafter regularly. In addition, medical personnel should anticipate violence in terms of specific projects and localities and be present at the right place and the right time. Thus, medical personnel should be in intimate contact with the civil rights organizations at all times, and … be aware of any immediate planned activities.”
The MPP evolved into the early street medic groups, who conceived of medicine as self-defense, and believed that anyone could be trained to provide basic care. Street medics provided medical support and education within the American Indian Movement (AIM), Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), Young Lords Party, Black Panther Party, and other revolutionary formations of the 1960s and 1970s. Street medics were also involved in free clinics developed by the groups they supported. The street medic pepper spray removal protocol was later adopted by the U.S. Military.
In the 1980s, “action support,” including medical support of long marches in the No Nukes and Indigenous Sovereignty movements, was provided by non-street medics. One of these action support groups, Seeds Of Peace, (formed in 1986), stopped offering medical support as the street medics re-emerged.
Street medics were active on a small scale during the protest activity against Operation Desert Storm (1990–1991). They were rejuvenated on a large scale during the 1999 Meeting of the World Trade Organization, when street medics attended to protesters who were injured by police and use of chemical weapons such as pepper spray and tear gas.
In the aftermath of the WTO Meeting, protest sympathizers and/or attendees organized street medic trainings nationwide in preparation for the next round of anti-globalization marches. The parents of the post-WTO street medic boom (1999-2001), who trained thousands of medics in a few years, were the Colorado Street Medics (the direct descendant of the first MCHR Street Medics), Black Cross Collective, and On the Ground.
As social movements gain momentum and attract attention, they become increasingly likely to come up against those who would do serious violence to maintain the status quo, rather than allow meaningful change. Metropolitan police represent the most immediate physical threat to those who attempt to change the system, even via peaceful means. A demand as simple as “please stop shooting unarmed citizens on public transit platforms” can and will be met with violent resistance from the state and its police force.
Into this volatile situation, where there exists a real threat of violence perpetrated against protest movements, come street medics. This guide hopes to serve as both a simple primer for those interested in educating themselves to take a medical role in situations of civil unrest or for those seeking to aid fellow comrades in the street.
Street Medic Training
The amount of training one seeks out before becoming a street medic varies, depending on the duties one intends to perform during political action. Don’t mislead other activists about your level of medical training or competency – be upfront with them about your supplies and abilities.
It is better that they call for outside medical assistance immediately, rather than wait to find you, only to hear that you cannot treat them. That said, one need not do more than carry water for other protesters, or bandages, or sunscreen, to make a difference. Even this minor effort can mean the difference between activists staying in the street, or having to go home for water, food, or medical treatment.
When a potential medic decides to start offering protest support, they should consider starting their training by taking a professional First Aid/CPR course. Learning proper treatment techniques for cuts, bruises, and other injuries is important, as inexperienced attempts at administering aid can potentially worsen an injury and leave the wounded worse off than they
would have been without your intervention. This is another reason it’s extremely important to be honest with yourself and your fellow protesters about your level of medical ability.
Further studies and training within the realm of street medicine can include free street medicine training provided by qualified instructors through a local health collective. One can continue studies by obtaining professional training such as that of an Emergency Medical Technician, Wilderness First Responder, or Paramedic. These resources require increasing levels of time and financial investment, so it’s best to use one’s own judgment about how much time and money can be invested into training and resources.
Potential medics may be employed by institutions that may take issue with their involvement in political action (such as ambulance crews, government organizations, and so on) – it would do such individuals well to disguise themselves as fully as possible before being seen and photographed taking part in any activism.
Street Medic Clothing and Gear
Street medicine is an inherently defensive action, as it is a direct response to offensive violence by the police. Medics should equip themselves accordingly. Inventory should be dictated by potential opposition, which can vary widely when confronting a heavily-armed, paramilitary police force. Equipping oneself on the side of caution is advisable, as one well-protected medic can do far more good than three medics who fell to tear gas. Below is a guideline inventory list for a well-equipped medic. Add or remove from this list as personal weight limit, resources, expected challenges, and range of motion dictates.
1. Wear as much clothing that covers as much skin as possible, without being overly hot or restrictive. Remember: you may have to run. Most street medics will clearly mark themselves with red crosses, to aid in quick identification in crowds. Nylon will dissipate heat and sweat easily, as well as protect the skin (to some degree) against chemical agents. Cargo pants or BDUs with accessible pockets can come in handy, as can hip bags, utility belts or tackle vests
2. If you wear corrective lenses ensure that the lenses are unable to be shattered, if possible. DO NOT WEAR CONTACT LENSES TO A PROTEST! Tear gas or pepper spray can become trapped between the contact lenses, and your eyes which can disable a medic.
3. Gas masks or industrial particulate respirators and sealed goggles. Respirators should havea NIOSH rating of N95 or higher, to ensure proper filtering of police chemicals.
4. Unbroken CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear) gas mask filter, should you carry a gas mask.
5. Protective shoes that will still allow quick movement. No open-toed, strapped, or high-heeled shoes. You may need to run, and your toes will be stepped on in crowds.
6. Ace (or equivalent) bandages for strains and splinting.
7. Gauze wraps.
8. Gauze pads.
9. Nonstick pads or xeroform/adaptic pads.
10. Triangle bandage.
11. Wound closure strips.
12. Tape (paper or plastic, not electrical).
13. Examination gloves (vinyl or nitrile, to avoid latex allergies).
14. Stick-on bandages (various size and type).
15. Saline solution (contact lens solution is fine, there is no need to buy a more expensive special formula).
16. Antibiotic ointment.
17. Anti-hemorrhagic agent (Most of these are only available to military or law enforcement, but QuikClot has a “sport” version that will do the trick).
18. Sunblock with UVA and UVB protection (water or alcohol-based, as oil-based sunblock can trap teargas or pepper spray against your skin and compound their effects).
19. Bandage shears (blunt tip can be important, as a sharp tip can more easily be deliberately misinterpreted as a weapon by the police, and used to charge you with crimes).
20. Tweezers.
21. Protein bars.
22. Clean bandannas, and/or bandannas soaked in water, for handing out to other protesters as tear gas masking. These should be carried in zip-lock bags until needed, to avoid evaporation.
23. Instant ice packs.
24. Messenger bag or MOLLE pouches that can be easily accessed without the medic having to stop and take them off. Backpacks can be difficult to access while you’re walking, running, or otherwise trying to keep up with your fellow activists, who may be marching, or running from danger.
25. Glucose tablets, honey packets, cake icing, or other emergency sugar supply, to treat diabetes-related hypoglycemia.
26. LAW mixture (see below).
27. Re-hydration mixture (see below).
28. Ear plugs for yourself and others in case of sound-based police weapons.
29. CPR mask or bag valve mask.
What is the recipe for LAW?
Liquid Antacid and Water is a 50/50 mixture of water and an antacid containing either Magnesium Hydroxide or Aluminum Hydroxide. This remedy is used on both eyes and skin in the event of a tear gas or pepper spray attack.
A small amount applied directly to the affected area should be sufficient to reduce pain once the afflicted person has been moved to a safe location. Application of LAW mixture (especially under the eyelids) can be difficult, and it is advisable for a medic to attend training sessions by established street medic groups.
If LAW mixture is not available, milk can be used as a stop-gap in the event of a tear gas or pepper spray attack. Other alkaline solutions, such as water and sodium bicarbonate, can also be used to combat lachrymatory agents. LAW is preferred by street medic groups as a result of both scientific testing and ease of manufacture.
![[The Ohio River Speaks] There Must Be Settler Colonialism in the Water](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2020/07/settler-colonialism.jpg)
