by DGR News Service | Dec 25, 2019 | Listening to the Land
by Rebecca Wildbear
The first time I was invited to speak to nature in my late twenties, I walked into the oak-hickory forest near the Blue Ridge Mountains, skeptical but eager. A former Outward Bound guide and a Wilderness Therapist, I loved nature and preferred being there to anywhere. I biked and backpacked, kayaked and rock climbed, always longing to be closer in some way, but I didn’t know how. It had never occurred to me that I could have a real conversation.
A squirrel began barking almost immediately. I felt surprised and captivated. The sound grew louder and closer. When I finally looked up, I saw a squirrel only ten feet from my head, looking straight into my eyes and barking loudly. I had witnessed squirrels bark before, but never one like this. He was persistent and emphatic. He barked while maintaining eye contact for a long time. Then he began to move up and down the tree and along several branches, still barking, before returning to the place where we first encountered one another. Again, he looked into my eyes. He seemed neither upset nor injured. It seemed clear this squirrel was tirelessly trying to communicate something, but I felt dense to his message.
I was participating in a Soulcraft Intensive, my first Animas Valley Institute program, and the guides had urged us to wander in nature alone and listen for who wants to speak with us. Soulcraft[1] springs from nature-based cultures, eco-depth-psychology, the poetic tradition, and wilderness rites of passage; it offers a contemporary path to soul discovery.
He must be talking to someone else, I concluded, but I looked around the forest, and there were no other squirrels or animals in site. He moved closer, looked into my eyes, and continued his sequence for more than an hour. I thanked the squirrel, feeling elated to have had this intimate connection even if its meaning was still mysterious.
Our deepest place of belonging is nature. Most young children instinctively sense this connection. They are enchanted by the flutter of hummingbird wings, the colors of wildflowers, and the sounds of a rushing river—until they’re separated from nature, placed behind walls, and removed from the sounds of leaves blowing in the wind and the smell of rain falling on meadows.
We reside within Earth; she’s our home and our greatest teacher. Re-attuning our perception—our sensing, feeling, and imagination—so that we’re able to listen to the Earth is imperative to the wellness of both humans and all of life. Author and activist Chellis Glendinning believes our “original trauma” is the horror of the domination paradigm in Western civilization that has systematically removed our lives from participation in the natural world, a psychic displacement or homelessness.[2] What if the anxieties and mood disorders of the DSM-V[3] are symptoms of this greater illness? What would our treatment be then?
Although I’d witnessed people grow and heal in the wilderness in my roles as guide and therapist, I’d intuited in my heart that even this connection wasn’t deep enough. Nature was still merely a backdrop for human healing. Indigenous nature-based peoples know a deeper way. When I read “conversations across the species border” on an Animas brochure, I knew I had to participate.
A couple weeks after returning home, I walked on the farm where I lived in West Virginia at dusk. Across the small pond, a red fox appeared. He stared at me, and then he too began barking. His bark was different from the squirrel’s, more shrill and piercing. He looked at me and barked for a long time before turning to continue his walk. “What were the squirrel and red fox saying?” I asked in an email to my Animas group. Lauren, my Animas guide, responded, “Perhaps they were noticing and welcoming your presence in the wild world?”
Whatever was happening, it was evoking aliveness and connection. As I remember the squirrel and red fox, I experience Mary Oliver’s words in Wild Geese. I feel the wild world offering itself to my imagination, calling out to me “harsh and exciting,” as if to announce my “place in the family of things.”
Replant Ourselves in Nature
It’s vital we realize that Earth and all its creatures are fully alive; to be healthy ourselves we must attend to our relationship with the Earth community. A “re-enchantment with the Earth as a living reality” is needed to stop the destruction humans are imposing. What we experience as alive and sacred, we naturally want to protect.[4] We can’t be healed separately from the planet, because the human soul exists within the world soul.[5]
Our wholeness comes from rooting in the rhythms and cycles of nature. When tending the health of a damaged ecosystem, we improve the soil quality and plant native species, rather than eliminating invasive species. Likewise, we tend the health of our psyches, not by getting rid of pathology, but by cultivating the “native species” within ourselves. Bill Plotkin’s Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche offers a pathway to cultivate wholeness by replanting ourselves in the natural world; this occurs through allowing nature to be our primary guide.[6]
When we’re whole, we feel both Earth’s magnificence and her destruction, because we’re no longer separate. This awakening is urgent. “We belong to this world…[and] of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response.”[7] Our ecological crisis is sourced in our species’ “collective perceptual disorder,”[8] a “collective myopia”[9] that has missed the basic reality of our innate connection to Earth, perhaps originating from “the historical and conceptual split between ‘in-here’ and ‘out-there’”[10] between self and world.
We become whole not only for ourselves, but also to strengthen our capacity to protect and serve our world. Protecting nature means resisting the dominant culture, industrial civilization, a way of life fueled by the perpetual exploitation of peoples and lands in a futile addiction to an unsustainable lifestyle. A strong resistance is one that is multi-faceted; a foundational ingredient is rooting the depths of our psyches in a genuine perception of the Earth as a living and breathing being with whom we can commune and listen.
We must let it direct us. “Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her.”[11] Laura Sewall offers five practices to cultivate ecological perception:
- Learn to attend. With mindful awareness, we get out of our heads, and become open, receptive, and reverent to the forms, textures, and colors of nature.
- Perceive the relationship between things. We look at the interface where everything meets everything else and see the Earth through “love eyes.”
- Develop perceptual flexibility. We feel how human time interacts with the pace of Earth’s processes and grasp time scales beyond that of a human lifetime.
- Re-perceive depth. We recognize that we are within and wholly dependent on the vaster body of Earth, living in a communion similar to that of a lover.
- Receive images from Earth through the imaginal self, through body and psyche, like a force of nature entering us. We become co-creative.[12]
Most of us received messages in grade school that imagination isn’t real—that we must put it away like an outgrown toy. Yet nature-based peoples have always experienced imagination as a way to listen and commune with the world. Strengthening our imagination returns us to our primal roots; it’s an avenue to our aliveness. The deepest layer of this realm isn’t under our control, but bubbles up from some mysterious place deep down.[13] It’s not created from our minds, but has its own intelligence. Rather than trying to interpret it, we allow it to guide us; we partner with it in the process of co-creating the world.
Six months after my encounter with the squirrel and red fox, I quit my job, moved out west, and participated in an Animas Quest, a ceremony to be alone in conversation with the land for three days and nights while fasting. Nature was my greatest love, and I put my life on the altar and asked how I might serve. My question, however, was met either with silence or a simple response: “You’re not ready.”
I felt weakest on the third day of the fast. I’d just hiked back up the steep trail after placing a rock on the stone pile to signal I was okay. Every few feet, I had to stop. My heart beat so rapidly it scared me, reminding me of when I’d been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma at the age of twenty-one. The two lymph nodes in front of my heart had grown a nine-centimeter tumor. Chemotherapy and radiation had been the prescription, and I was told there was a thirty-three percent chance it would work. It was then that I first learned to let go of my plans and truly listen.
Feeling unsteady from the hike, I sat on a large rock that had invited me to a high perch with its glimmer from across the red rock canyon. It comforted me. “What is my purpose?” I asked, more softly this time, directing my question to the juniper and pinyon trees covering the canyon.
“Brave Heart,” a nearby pinyon pine whispered. I felt disarmed.
“No, that’s a movie.” My response was rapid, but too late to stop the mysterious flood of memories, images, and emotions that ensued, including both moments I had been a brave heart, inciting tear-filled awe, and moments I’d turned away afraid, breaking my heart in utter disappointment. Some memories highlighted my courage to speak the truth and others were of times when I’d silenced my own voice.
Many a night in the months after the quest, this vision awakened me as if asking me to tend my newly de-thawing heart in its unraveling. I’d write poetry at 3 a.m. with tears running down my face, feeling as if a dam had burst and the inner river of my heart and soul and words were finding their way back to life.
Layers of understanding the meaning of “brave heart” unfurled over decades, persuading me that perhaps I was being asked to embody the strength of a warrior and summoning me to hear again the bark of squirrel and red fox as a call to speak out, make a lot of noise, perhaps through guiding or writing.
Restore Animistic Perception
When we listen to the Earth, we may receive the most important instructions of our lives. As Geneen Marie Haughen wrote in “Wild Imagination,” to listen to Earth requires we access our deep imagination; this is a necessary capacity to decolonize the mind and “revive animist perception”—a perception that experiences all things as alive or sentient. For those who experience the world as ensouled, and for whom bear, river, tree, and rock are regarded as intelligent, are more likely to fight against global industrial civilization. Yet it’s difficult to thwart the fragmented narratives that our colonized world urges us to live, and to engage, instead, directly with the natural world and our deep imaginations.[14] Perhaps in part, because this would require us to feel our grief and rage at the ongoing destruction of so many beloved wild places and beings.
One of the oldest belief systems in the world, animism isn’t a religion, but a way of experiencing the world. It suggests that soul or spirit exists not only in humans, but also in animals, plants, rocks, and geographic features such as mountains, oceans, or other entities of nature, including thunder, wind, and stars. Although each culture has different mythologies and rituals, animism is a foundational thread of indigenous peoples around the world.
Being that all humans are the descendants of indigenous peoples somewhere, we all have ancestors who once experienced the world this way. Therefore, it’s in our DNA to open to this way of sensing and perceiving. Bill Plotkin describes three possible ways to be indigenous: culturally (of a particular people or tribe), ecologically (of a particular ecosystem or geographical place), and terrestrially (of Earth).[15] Though only some of us are culturally or ecologically indigenous, we are all terrestrially indigenous. Remembering our relationship with Earth in our flesh and bones is a resource of the greatest significance and potency.
For nearly all of the time humans have been on the planet, regular conversations across the species border were an everyday natural part of life. Sadly, this seems like a strange invitation in our world today; most people have difficulty initiating such a conversation. Perhaps this is because we’ve been taught from a very young age to perceive nature as separate, a life-less object, a commodity. This mistaken perception seems to be at the foundation of our cultural ills.
In The Lost World of the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post writes about living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and describes how shocked they were that he couldn’t hear the stars. At first they thought he must be joking or lying. When they realized he really couldn’t hear the stars, they concluded he must be very ill and expressed great sorrow.[16] For the Bushmen knew anyone who can’t hear nature must have the gravest and deadliest sickness of all.
Humanity’s ability to perceive the sentience of Earth is critical to our survival and to all life on Earth. Eco-psychology reinforces insights from naturalists like E. O. Wilson, who suggests that we possess “an innately emotional affiliation with all living organisms,” a biophilia.
Longing to be in conversation with nature can catalyze us. And perhaps the natural world longs for this relationship with us too. Longing is not acquiring, as the vulnerability of failure feels all too possible. Instead, longing incites us into feeling the love-ache of what we really value, and it matures us into becoming and creating that which matters most, like an embodied prayer that lays our life on the altar to serve what we love.
One week after the Quest, I backpacked six miles into a remote and ancient red rock canyon in Arizona; dwellings and petroglyphs were abundant here, marking the lives of those who came before. It was the middle of the night, and I couldn’t sleep. The canyon seemed to be calling me out of my tent, to wander in the dark and be in conversation. I was afraid of the dark—tarantulas, rattle snakes, anything I couldn’t see—but I longed to engage with my surroundings as I had on the Quest. And I wanted to accept the invitation to be a brave heart.
I wandered to the creek that meandered through the canyon; it formed a large pool near a tall red rock wall; the stars glimmered in the water. Meanwhile, a memory from my Quest arose. I had picked up a heavy rock and tossed it down hard on several rock surfaces repeatedly. I was trying to crack it open, whilst asking nature to help me crack open my heart so that I could feel it fully. Sometimes I felt as if I lived imprisoned behind a protective shell. There were tears to cry and secrets to encounter, but I could not access them. Unsuccessful, I eventually fell over exhausted from my effort.
I tasted the possibility of failure. How would I ever become a brave heart if I couldn’t even feel my heart? I spoke to the rock wall and the creek, the spirits of the ancient ancestors who lived in this canyon and the cottonwoods, to any wild being who was listening.
I spoke of my longing to feel my heart, to free the dam of my emotions and cry, so that I could be a brave heart. When a few tears came, I offered them; they fell and splashed in the water. The wind and water seemed to respond to my words and tears in gusts and ripples. The light of the stars seemed to dance and grow brighter on the water.
I made rhythm with two small rocks, one red and one white, which I left at the edge of the creek. Some of my words later turned into a poem, the first I’d allowed myself to write since high school.
A mysterious ache in my chest keeps me from sleep.
Is this pain ~ heartbreak, longing, or love?
I survived by skipping my feelings.
Sensitivity grown tough.
Let the dam crumble.
Let the river flow free.
Let me cry for the Earth and all its people.
In the morning, I returned to the water. My two rhythm rocks were not on the ground where I had left them. They now sat elegantly atop a rock a few feet off shore, surrounded by water. Placed underneath them were red and yellow flowers. My heart began racing. How could this be? Who moved my rocks and put flowers underneath them? No other humans had hiked or camped out there since my arrival. I felt as if the canyon and its inhabitants had heard me and were grateful for my presence and words. This felt magical and touched my heart deeply.
This thread of my conversation with water has grown into an unfolding tapestry. Un-damming the waters of my own heart has ushered me into an inexplicable conversation with the ocean and river. The more-than-human world has become my family, my best friend, my muse, and my lover. They guide me to new edges every day.
Co-create & Dismantle with Earth
The rock canyons with whom I have lived see me more deeply than I see myself. Nonhumans are more intelligent and wiser than we are, although most humans believe they’re superior. Humans have a lot to offer, and our greatest contributions are inspired from a relationship with nature. If we can decolonize our minds and our lives by allowing the beings of nature and our deep imagination to be our guides, they may offer us genuine direction and possibilities we’ve never considered.
Surprising and even extraordinary occurrences arise personally, such as my experience with the rocks and flowers in the canyon, and they also exist on a grander scale. Thomas Berry calls them “moments of grace”—the star out of which our solar system was born collapsing in enormous heat, scattering itself as fragments in space; the first living cell, a prokaryotic cell capable of a metabolic process never known previously, involving the energy of the sun, the carbon of the atmosphere, and the hydrogen of the sea; or 2.5 million years ago in northeast Africa when the first humans stood erect.[17] These wondrous transformations certainly don’t lessen our responsibility to engage directly and act politically, but rather they encourage us to open our communication to those who are of greater intelligence, and the guidance, support, and potentialities they offer us.
The Earth community is in dire circumstances. Our old paradigms don’t work—individualism, patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, human supremacy, and technology won’t save us. If we look at the environmental devastation and the political-economic corruption, there seems to be little hope. Ecological revolution by any means necessary is a moral imperative; we must do what we can to stop industrial civilization from destroying the planet.[18] We must listen closely to the animate natural world and be willing to engage through direct action. We must become visionaries and revolutionaries who tune in, engage, serve, and fight both in deep relationship with and on behalf of Earth.
What we co-create in concert with nature is far more powerful than anything our minds create in isolation. Through embodying the images that arise from nature and our deep imagination, perhaps we can dismantle and de-construct our pathological, adolescent civilization and co-conceive and remember alongside nature another way of being human in relationship with all of life on Earth.
Converse with Nature ~ an Invitation
Wander in a wild place, away from humans, and see who attracts, repels, or scares you (rock, tree, or wind). Speak aloud to the others as you attend to what’s happening. Introduce yourself out loud and tell the others what you notice about them. Share a deep truth or offer praise. Be curious. Perhaps communicate with song, dance, or movement. Listen with all your senses, intuition, feeling, and imagination. Notice shifts in the world around you as well as in your own perception.
Be surprised. A response may come as a sign, synchronicity, dream image, vision, memory, or kinesthetic or emotional sensation. It may be immediate or delayed, auditory or visual (color, shape, movement). It may be unusual, and you may miss it or talk yourself into believing it was nothing. What’s mysterious is well worth pursuing, being with, and learning from!
Rebecca Wildbear is a river and soul guide who helps people tune in to the mysteries that live within the Earth community, dreams, and their own wild Nature, so they may live a life of creative service. She has been a guide with Animas Valley Institute since 2006 and is author of the forthcoming book, Playing & Praying: Soul Stories to Inspire Personal & Planetary Transformation.
Image by Doug Van Houten, “A Journey to the Depths of Soul” [Collage]
Upcoming Listening To the Land Program
Rebecca & Doug will offer an Animas Valley Institute program to Deep Green Resistance members and allies, June 26 – 30, 2020, A Wild Mind Intensive for Activists & Revolutionaries: Partnering with Earth & Dreams. We’ll engage in practices to replant ourselves in nature, restore animistic perception, co-create & dismantle with Earth…and more!
See the flyer for full description ~
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57aa148c579fb35739b5a8e0/t/5dc2386072a5cb0a5d29a3f8/1573009507740/AnimasDGRflyerFinal2.pdf
Or register on-line ~
https://animas.org/event-registration/?ee=364
References
[1] Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, New World Library, 2003
[2] Chellis Glendinning, My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1994).
[3] Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition.
[4] Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (New York: Random House, 1999).
[5] James Hillman’s essay, “A Psyche the Size of Earth” was published as the foreword to Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, Allen Kanner (New York: Random House, 1995).
[6] Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, New World Library, 2013
[7] Joanna Macy, www.joannamacy.net.
[8] David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage, 1997
[9] Laura Sewall’s essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception” was published in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, Allen Kanner (New York: Random House, 1995).
[10] Theodore, Rozak, The Voice of the Earth, Phanes Press, 2001
[11] C.G. Jung, Letters, Volume 1:1906-1950, Routledge, 1973
[12] Laura Sewall’s essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception” was published in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, Allen Kanner (New York: Random House, 1995).
[13] E.S. Gallegos, Ph.D, Into Wholeness: The Path of Deep Imagery, Moon Bear Press, 2002.
[14] Geneen Marie Haughen, Wild Imagination, Parabola, May 2019.
[15] Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, New World Library, 2013.
[16] Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977.
[17] Thomas, Berry, Moments of Grace, Yes! Magazine, Spring 2000.
[18] Max Wilbert, The Moral Argument For Ecological Revolution, Deep Green Resistance News Service, November 2019.
by DGR News Service | Nov 18, 2019 | Listening to the Land
By Boris Forkel / Deep Green Resistance Germany
I want to tell you a story. A story about permaculture, food chains, friendship, love and death. People are storytellers. We transport information through stories, or narratives, to use the more sophisticated term.
Actually I wanted to go with my good friend Cengiz to a political event, a meeting of the initiative aufstehen (stand up) about the resistance of the yellow vests in France. However, Cengiz decided to spend the evening with his newly hatched chicks, his cats and a good friend whom he looks after because she has addiction problems. He is one of the finest characters I have ever met. I taught him how to kill. We have already taken the lives of a many proud roosters together. At the same time, I have never met a person who cares more about his animal friends than he does.
Without him, I had no desire to go to the event. I wanted to spend such a wonderful spring evening in the garden. That was a good thing, because I think I learned much more there.
I heard voices all around me. It was the voices of the toads that migrated from the forest into my garden to perform their ecstatic mating rituals. The three ponds I have built over the last few years were suddenly full of toads, talking loudly to each other. I consider it a great honor that they lay their eggs in my ponds.
Derrick Jensen says “So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is.”
Listen. In medieval fairy tales, toads are a symbol of wisdom. In many tales there is the hero who suddenly understands the language of the animals after a magical initiation event. Medieval people still had a relationship to the natural world and an understanding of the wonders of life. What the toads tell me is that whether we call ourselves quite immodest Homo sapiens sapiens, the wisest of wise, wolves, bears, bison, toads or any of a thousand other names, we are all sitting on the same boat.
The world speaks. They all speak. The chicks who are calling for food. The toads with their mating cries. Trees communicate with each other and certainly with us. If we had not forgotten how to listen and if, as members of this culture, we had not largely given up our empathy, we could never allow this mass murder to happen.
It was not right to exterminate the wolves. The only way we can all permanently exist together is to recognize the needs and lives of others, as as important as our own lives and needs. Moreover, life is sacred. All life.
This is, in my understanding, the core statement of permaculture and the only way for us and all other species to survive. We can fantasize all we want about colonizing Mars or other planets. All this is pure technocratic ideology. It has never worked. We are still all on the same boat.
The toads are much smaller than the ones I saw 10 years ago. Through the war of our culture against insects, we are depriving them of food. Insects are the animal basis of the food chain. To exterminate them is an abysmal stupidity and will cost us dearly.
Last year I wanted to participate in the toad rescue operations that environmentalists carry out every spring. The toads have to cross roads on their way to their spawning grounds; the toad rescuers collect them in buckets and carry them safely across the road. Last year, the toad rescue was canceled because there were too few toads. They live in warlike conditions, but life wants to live. They still migrate, sing, mate and lay their eggs.
I had to think of the film Life is a Miracle by Serbian director Emir Kusturica, which takes place during the Bosnian War. The protagonist wants to commit suicide after his son was taken prisoner of war. But then the Serbian Militz hands him a young Muslim woman as hostage, with whom he falls in love. They sleep together while bombs fall in the background.
Life wants to live.
Recently, I killed two quails. It was hard. I cut their heads off with sharp poultry scissors. The eyes and beak opened a few more times in shock. The little body twitched in my left hand in agony. I cried. Then I plucked them, gutted them and ate them. It was the best meal I’ve had in months.
If you are a self-sufficient chicken farmer, you usually only have to perform the ritual of slaughter once a year. In autumn you kill the surplus roosters and the hens that no longer lay.
Since all my wonderful chickens, turkeys and also my young peacock were massacred this winter by a hungry marten, I have given up breeding chickens for the time being and now try quails.
Quails are smaller, but they are much more efficient feed converters and have a better ratio of body size to egg size. All processes are much faster in quails than in chickens, which means for me that I will have more meat more often, which in turn means that I will have to kill much more often.
I breed them in my incubator, I raise them, I feed them. Like all children, they are always hungry. They always want to eat and grow so fast that I can almost watch them getting bigger. With big intelligent eyes they look at me and shout “Feed us, feed us”, as little chicks all over the world call out to their parents. They scream for life. I love these little, sweet, intelligent birds and I love raising them. Most of them I will slaughter and eat one day.
I often feel like a cannibal eating his own children. But so is the harsh reality, adult knowledge, true wisdom: As long as we live on this earth, we consume the lives of others. Even the great Homo sapiens sapiens is, biologically, nothing but an animal. And as such we are part of the archaic food chain that we in the West destroy so diligently.
The whole history of the world is the history of eating and being eaten. One can explain the whole world in food chains, and understanding food chains means understanding the world. The real world, not the artificial structure of civilization that we have created from ideologies, slavery and exploitation. Civilized people think they can cross any natural boundaries, including food chains. A fatal error.
I consider vegetarianism and especially the extreme form, veganism, to be fundamentally wrong. I myself grew up mostly as a vegetarian, fortunately only from an age of about 8 years. I understand the moral arguments very well, but my body always said something different. I always had a ravenous appetite for meat and stuffed it into myself wherever opportunity presented itself. I think I might have grown bigger and stronger, if I had consumed more meat as a child.
Vegetarianism and veganism are modern phenomena with a religious character. The way our culture is treating our fellow creatures is a sin, without any doubt. But the vegan is pulling out of the affair, washes his or her hands in innocence, and often tries to convert others with religious zeal and a moral club.
Never before has a human society existed that could do without animal products. The Inuit, who consume almost exclusively raw meat and fish, have the best results in blood panels ever measured in humans. A friend of mine and her daughter, both of whom have been vegetarians for several years, have very poor blood panel results. The doctor explained two options: either eat meat or take a handful of vitamin supplements every morning. The 21 year old daughter chose the latter for moral reasons. Her pale skin and glassy eyes speak of malnutrition.
One last argument: Does any of you know a second generation vegetarian or vegan? I met one once. A 3 year old girl, whose mother was a very dogmatic vegan. Even her shoes featured the inscription “VEGAN” in big letters. Her little daughter was severely physically and mentally handicapped, could hardly speak, had glassy squinting eyes and such weak bones that her legs had grown crooked and she could not walk.
On my stove the bones of the slaughtered quails simmer slowly and for a long time, to later feed my own as nutritious broth.
I think that this woman will never free herself from the vegan ideology, because if she had to admit what she did to her daughter, she would have to spend the rest of her life in the hell of immeasurable guilt.
We all have to eat.
I can’t imagine a more intimate relationship than eating someone else. Your flesh becomes mine. We unite. This must be seen as a sacred act.
The least I have to do is to give my quails the best possible living conditions. And I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to worship them with rituals as holy animals. Haven’t indigenous people always done this, with salmon, bison, and many other animals that were their food source, before the Europeans exterminated them (the salmon, the bison, and the native humans…)?
When I take someone else’s life to eat or otherwise utilize him or her, I am responsible for the wellbeing of that species. Both for moral reasons and for pure self-interest. I want to continue eating in the future.
Seriously, I think that a hunter-gatherer culture is the most respectful way of dealing with our fellow creatures. Stable natural communities, from which healthy, strong, wild animals can be hunted when needed, to which appropriate respect is shown in cult and ritual. I would like to hunt, and in a healthy culture I would certainly be a hunter. But the completely degraded ecosystems no longer allow this. Animal husbandry is therefore a necessary compromise.
From a permaculture perspective, the final solution of a reasonable culture would be a large-scale and worldwide ecological restoration, solely for reasons of morality and justice. The restoration of habitats and the transition to a respectful, strictly taboo- and ritual-regulated extraction by hunting as source for meat.
If, for example, the American prairies, with their 100 million murdered bison were restored, one could have a considerable amount of high-quality bison meat every year, without the enormous ethical problems and environmental hazards of factory farming.
Currently, the United States spend about 69 million dollars per hour to finance its gigantic military apparatus. In Germany, this sum amounts to a paltry 5,023 thousand dollars per hour, and rising. If we would spend these gigantic sums not for imperialism, war, murder and destruction, but for ecological restoration and thus for the future of our children, projects like the vital cleaning and regeneration of the oceans and the regeneration of healthy, game rich forests, meadows and prairies would appear quite feasible.
Unfortunately, our culture seems to strive for the apocalypse as the final solution.
Preventing it from destroying the food chains and ultimately all life on the planet must be our common and most sacred duty. For moral reasons, for reasons of justice and for pure self-interest. Because we all have to eat. Now and in the future.
by DGR News Service | Nov 18, 2019 | The Solution: Resistance
Written and photographed by Max Wilbert
In 1941, as World War II thundered across half the planet, my grandfather was drafted into the United States military.
Faced with the prospect of being sent overseas to kill other young men in World War II, his morality rebelled. He refused to join the military and applied for conscientious objector status, which he was eventually granted.
This was not a popular stand to take. Among 10 million draftees, about 43,000, or less than half of one percent, became COs. He and other COs were widely criticized, attacked, and ostracized. Their beliefs were tested by draft boards, families, and communities who rejected their moral convictions and labeled them cowards, deserters, and traitors.
Nearly fifty years later, I was born into a family that looked up to my grandfather’s example. He was a warm, kind grandfather to me. When I was a child, discussions of war, imperialism, racism, exploitation of women, oppression, and the destruction of the planet were not unusual among my family. I was taught that these things must be ended. Social change was a necessity, and non-violent resistance was the method.
Faced with the prospect of World War II, what choices would I have made in my grandfather’s place? On the one hand, the Nazi regime was one of unspeakable evil, and imperial Japan’s actions were equally horrific. On the other hand, the actions of US empire—before, during, and after the war—were not exactly benevolent. As Howard Zinn writes, before the war broke out the United States:
“had opposed the Haitian revolution for independence from France at the start of the nineteenth century. It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain, and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base, investments, and rights of intervention. It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had “opened” Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats. It had declared an Open Door Policy in China as a means of assuring that the United States would have opportunities equal to other imperial powers in exploiting China. It had sent troops to Peking with other nations, to assert Western supremacy in China, and kept them there for over thirty years.”
And of course, this is just a partial list. In 1942, the U.S. was still a rigorously segregated society (which it remains today) committed to extracting value from people of color using any means necessary. Slavery built the wealth of the United States, and literally built the White House. And of course, the entire country was built on a settler-colonial genocide—a genocide that Hitler took as inspiration for his “final solution.”
Many prominent Americans, like Henry Ford, were supporters of the Nazi regime. The U.S. government not only failed to speak out against persecution of German Jews before the war, despite clear evidence, but actively rejected those seeking refuge and thereby condemned them to death.
The United States did not fight because of fascism, although individual soldiers may have. Critical history tells us that the U.S. fought Germany, Italy, and Japan primarily for geopolitical reasons: to control a competitor in Germany, to contain communist Russia, and to expand control of the Pacific.
For example, historian Gabriel Kolko says “the American economic war aim was to save capitalism at home and abroad.” This was achieved by consolidating American control over oil in the Middle East, gaining access to new markets formerly dominated by the British, and by a concentrated injection of public funds into private corporations: Boeing, Lockheed, and the other war profiteers.
And at the conclusion of the war, the United States killed 150,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the militarily unnecessary atomic bombing that P.M.S. Blackett calls “the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.” In other words, 150,000 people were murdered not out of military necessity, but for the sake of geopolitical posturing.
The fascists needed to be stopped, yes. But the United States’ war was not a particularly just one.
I respect my grandfather’s choice. Most especially, I am impressed by the ethical toughness required to endure serious personal and professional consequences while maintaining his principled stance. There are not many people with that dignity and conviction.
Eighty years after the rise of Nazi Party, we’re faced with rising fascism around the world.
Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Erdogan, Putin. Countless fascist political parties and grassroots movements are on the march. Their main systemic opposition comes from neoliberal capitalism, a soft fascism of it’s own and the primary force which has decimated the planet over the past 40 years. By dismantling public institutions, embracing corporate power and unbridled militarism, corrupting the language of justice, and doubling down on exploitation of the poor and the third world, neoliberals like Barack Obama and the Clintons have helped pave the way for the rise of outright fascism today.
Capitalism itself is a war against the planet and the poor. The global economy is built on exploited farmworkers, sweatshop labor, and a toxic electronics industry that drives workers to mass suicide. All this takes place on top of stolen indigenous lands and a legacy of ongoing genocide.
The material goods that drive economic growth are made from the dead bodies of the land. Mountains are mined and blown to pieces. Rivers are dammed and enslaved. Prairies are plowed under. Forests are scalped. The oceans are strained of all life. Biodiversity is collapsing, the oceans are collapsing, and global warming is advancing faster than the worst-case scenarios. Greenhouse gas emissions are higher year after year, despite slick marketing campaigns about green industry.
The mindset of exploitation and greed is mirrored in the dominant culture. Sexual assault is endemic. Black and brown people are disenfranchised and exploited for slave labor in the prison system, then regularly executed on the streets in a form of modern public lynching. The poor, the homeless, addicts and countless other people are treated as disposable in this society, and they die by the millions as people like Jeff Bezos enjoys a cruise in his latest $100 million yacht.
Now we must grapple with the same question our grandparents did.
What is the moral course of action in this world?
Before we can know the right course of action, we have to understand the root of the problems we face. This step of diagnosis is essential to proper cure. And in fact, the origin of the term radical comes from the Latin word meaning “root.”
Too many people in society today look only at surface-level causes. We must go deeper.
First, we must understand that the problems we face are not an accident or the result of a glitch in the system. This is the normal functioning of industrial civilization. This is business as usual. The economy is booming, and the wealthy are doing very well. Things are working perfectly.
For those in power, times are good
I’ve heard it said that capitalism is a war against the planet and the poor. This is not a metaphor. The dominant economic system is killing, maiming, and destroying the lives of countless billions of humans and trillions of non-humans.
As the world’s third-richest man, Warren Buffett, once said, “there’s class warfare alright, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
This is a war, and it is a one-sided one.
Working people, the poor, and especially environmentalists often don’t see this system as a form of warfare against us. Relentless propaganda, fed to us through mass media and education, teaches us that we live in a beautiful, just society. All the problems we face—migration, climate disasters, terrorism, sexual abuse—are externalized. Instead of being factors integral to the American experience, these are regarded as someone else’s problem, or ignored completely.
Propaganda, besides inculcating American exceptionalism and the capitalist ethic, also enforces a rigid box of acceptable ways to change the world. Social struggles, we’re told, should take place via policy changes, at the ballot box, and in non-profit offices.
But these models aren’t working
Legislative change, for example, is rarely permanent. Long-standing policies like the Voting Rights Act can easily be struck down or undermined. This is happening right now. The Voting Rights Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act—all of these laws, which are very limited in the first place, are being gutted.
The business of running empire is firmly bipartisan. The Democratic and Republican parties in the United States play out a society-wide “good cop/bad cop” routine. They deceive us into believing that we live in a democracy. They allow robust debate within an extremely narrow range of acceptable politics, and therefore keep people distracted from the theft and violence of the ruling class.
The truth is we have little to no say in how our own communities operate, let alone in how the country is governed.
Constrained by felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, the electoral college, constant propaganda, and a representative system with zero accountability, our votes are largely meaningless.
We are so alienated from the concept of self-governance that we have a hard time even imagining it. When was the last time you made a meaningful decision about the political, economic, and social future of the neighborhood, the city, the state, or the country you live in?
For most of us, the answer is “never.”
To call the United States a democracy is laughable. Scholars have proven that our society is an oligarchy. Professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page concluded, in their 2014 research paper, that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
This is reflected in the nation’s capital. It has been decades since Congress passed a major bill that didn’t benefit the ultra-rich and corporations. Every major national policy decision is designed to steal more from the poor, to destroy the planet even faster, and in the process to make the owning class even more decadently wealthy.
The Non-profit Industrial Complex (NPIC)
Faced with a bankrupt political system, where do people go? Many turn to non-profits, expecting to find a world of small, fiery, organized groups fighting for social change. Instead, they find a new nightmare of bureaucracy, 60-hour work weeks, and starvation wages.
The non-profit system emerges from a liberal ideology that sees American-style capitalism as righteous. In this worldview, small gradual reforms are all that is needed to keep the system humming along happily.
Many of today’s largest foundations we’re created by tax-dodging ultra-wealthy elites in the early 20th century. These have been lucrative investments. Liberal foundations have long served to pacify social movements and prevent radical change.
One of the biggest examples of this is the professionalization of black resistance in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In the wake of revolutionary social upheavals of the 1960’s, foundations invested billions of dollars to create countless new non-profits and social service organizations. Vietnam War hawk McGeorge Bundy, head of the Ford Foundation, led a nationwide push to address racism. But behind the rhetoric was a desire not to address the roots of racism, but to pacify and assimilate oppositional black power movements into the dominant power structure.
Today’s non-profit movement politics reflect the same values: elitist liberalism, individual empowerment, and the optics of diversity. And they produce the same results: endless campaigning for progressive candidates, countless fundraising campaigns, and burnout.
What is absent is a revolutionary agenda for collective liberation from systems of oppression.
The Indian dissident Arundhati Roy, one of the most brilliant writers of our time, has a blistering critique of the non-profit system. She writes:
“Corporate-endowed foundations administer, trade and channelize their power and place their chessmen on the chessboard, through a system of elite clubs and think-tanks, whose members overlap and move in and out through the revolving doors.
Contrary to the various conspiracy theories in circulation, particularly among left-wing groups, there is nothing secret, satanic, or Freemason-like about this arrangement. It is not very different from the way corporations use shell companies and offshore accounts to transfer and administer their money—except that the currency is power, not money.
There are now millions of non-profit organizations, many of them connected through a byzantine financial maze to the larger foundations… The Privatization of Everything has also meant the NGO-isation of Everything. As jobs and livelihoods disappeared, NGOs have become an important source of employment, even for those who see them for what they are. And they are certainly not all bad. Of the millions of NGOs, some do remarkable, radical work and it would be a travesty to tar all NGOs with the same brush.
However, the corporate or Foundation-endowed NGOs are global finance’s way of buying into resistance movements, literally like shareholders buy shares in companies, and then try to control them from within. They sit like nodes on the central nervous system, the pathways along which global finance flows. They work like transmitters, receivers, shock absorbers, alert to every impulse, careful never to annoy the governments of their host countries.”
Greenwashing the environmental movement
One of the most damning examples of the bankruptcy of the non-profit system comes from the large environmental organizations. From The Sierra Club taking $25 million from the fracking industry to Greenpeace cooperating with the Canadian Lumber Industry to the Nature Conservancy’s collaboration with the world’s most polluting corporations, environmental non-profits have a track record of atrocities, compromises, and failures.
On their watch, everything is getting worse. And their solutions? Vote for a democrat, change your lightbulbs, and ride your bike. It’s pathetic.
Today, the global non-profit industrial complex serves as a “pressure relief valve” for budding revolutionary sentiments. By redirecting the energy that should demand fundamental change into piecemeal reformism, organizations like this are worse than distractions. They are in some ways complicit in the system that is killing the planet. Instead of radical change, these groups campaign for relatively minor reforms, such as a shift away from fossil fuels and towards green energy. These efforts are applauded by international conglomerates like General Electric, which stand to make billions in guaranteed government contracts in this so-called “green transition.”
Meanwhile, the forests continue to fall, mountains continue to be mined, and greenhouse gas emissions trend upwards.
Even in places like Germany, home to the supposed “green miracle” of wind and solar energy, emissions continue to rise and corporations grow ever more bloated on government handouts and electricity rebates, while the poor pay for big business to expand the electric grid. To be clear: big business is exempted from the taxes to pay for grid expansions and wind energy projects, then turns around and profits from the contracts to build these industrial megaprojects. Meanwhile, working people foot the bill.
This is a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich.
From one capitalist agenda to another, major environmental non-profits are shaped by what can get funded, and what gets funded is a de facto pro-corporate, pro-capitalist agenda of industrial energy production and “green products.” Driven by a results-oriented framework designed to please large donors, this system inherently deprioritizes radical critiques and revolutionary ideas in favor of what makes money and political sense in the short term.
In short, large non-profits are the social wing of the capitalist system.
Individuals within these non-profits may mean well, but intentions are not as important as outcomes when the fate of our world is at stake.
Cory Morningstar calls liberal climate activism “the hope industry,” writing that “350.org and friends serve a vital purpose . . . [by making] the public feel good about themselves. Simultaneously, they ensure obedience and passiveness to the state in order to secure current system/power structures and keep them intact… We have now reached the critical juncture where corporations will begin the slow process of ridding themselves of their toxic holdings while preparing for a new wave of unprecedented, unsurpassed ‘climate wealth.’ We are about to witness the global transition to profitable false solutions under the guise of ‘green economy’ . . . all while they simultaneously greenwash themselves as noble stewards of the Earth.”
This is how the ruling class rules
In his book Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote that an effective totalitarianism doesn’t look like pointing a gun at every person, all the time. “A really efficient totalitarian state,” he writes, “would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
Today’s elites have worked hard to create such a world. They ride the dynamic tension between reform and reaction. When political and economic conditions make it possible to do so, they mercilessly expand their exploitation of the planet and the poor. When groundswells of social discontent force concessions, they offer limited reforms. With the illusion of democracy provided by elections, legislative changes, and the non-profit industrial complex, the ruling class manipulate global society. In this way, they defuse revolutionary potential, expand their power, and consolidate their gains.
These elites, the owning class in global society, are waging an offensive struggle. Meanwhile, progressives and radicals are stuck in a reactionary position, defending ourselves against the latest assault and falling ever further behind. Our work is almost entirely defensive.
But as any experienced warrior knows, wars are not won defensively. These defensive measures can only end one way: in steady erosion of victories, slow slides into fascism, and eventual defeat. This is what we are experiencing right now.
Counter-revolutionary propaganda
Systems for social change have been co-opted by the corporate elite. But agents of oppression are never satisfied with dismantling organizations and institutions alone. They must murder revolutionary leaders, too.
When Che Guevara was on the firing line, his last words were: “Shoot, coward. You’re only going to kill a man.” Fred Hampton, murdered by the police as he lay drugged in his bed at the age of 21 years, once said “You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution.” Thomas Sankara, the Burkinabé revolutionary sometimes called “Africa’s Che,” had the same message before he was killed: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you can’t kill an idea.”
This hasn’t stopped those in power from murdering dangerous individuals and trying to smash dangerous ideas. Psychological and information warfare is constant in modern society. Popular music, television, movies, and other media, as well as institutions like the school system and non-profits, all promote vicious counter-revolutionary propaganda.
According to the psychologist John F. Schumaker we “are by far the most propagandized people in history.” Corporations are expected to spend $2.1 trillion on media in 2019.
Developing an effective offense requires that we discard the mythologies and misconceptions taught by these systems. In other words: as long as our minds are still colonized, we will not be able to fight and win.
One of the most pervasive misconceptions we must dismantle is the mythology of pacifism. This mythology is carefully constructed. School lessons around social movements—if the topic is covered at all—paint a picture of civil non-violent struggle. This is no accident. A whitewashed version of Martin Luther King, Jr. is emphasized, while the Black Panthers are never discussed. The bourgeois American Revolution is celebrated, while the Haitian Revolution is ignored. Women’s suffrage is mentioned, but the radical direct action of suffragists around the world is bypassed. In this way, the imaginations of entire societies are shaped and molded.
The reality, of course, is that social change is won through struggle. The history of our society is the history of class warfare. And revolution is the solution to the problems we face. But revolutionaries are ignored in our education system, slandered in the mass media, and actively opposed in US policy. We must reject these toxic lessons to have a chance.
Beyond non-violence
Non-violence is a profoundly moral way of changing society. In the right conditions, it can be highly effective. But deepening inequality, global ecological collapse, and the utter failure of established institutions to address these crises have led me to question non-violence—not as a moral guiding light, but as a practical strategy.
This morning, I am following the latest news from the Unist’ot’en Camp. In western Canada, the Unist’ot’en have stopped proposed tar sands and fracked gas pipelines for nearly a decade.
They have never ceded their land to the Canadian Government or signed a treaty. Under Canadian law, their land has been recognized as sovereign. But in December, the pipeline company applied for an injunction from Canadian courts. This injunction gives the police (the RCMP) authority to removing any blockades from the roads.
Now, as a result of the injunction, armed men are in Wet’suwet’en Territory to remove the land defenders and facilitate the fracking, logging, water poisoning, road building, and other destruction the pipeline will bring.
The late Secwepemc organizer and international leader on indigenous rights Arthur Manuel called injunctions the “ace in the sleeve of the Canadian government.” He said, “every time there is a dispute between indigenous people’s territories and industry, the court pulls out their court injunctions and sides with industry.”
This fight is still in progress. We don’t know how it will end. It might end in a victory, as did anti-fracking fights on Mi’kmaq territory in 2013. Or it might end in a defeat like at Standing Rock.
But we do know that, as this fight continues, industry is going about their business unimpeded elsewhere. We are not able to fight them everywhere at once. Around the world, coal oil and gas extraction is booming. Tar sands in South America, offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean, fracking in the Marcellus Shale, coal mining in Mongolia. Major industrial projects are booming worldwide, and greenhouse gas emissions are rising to unprecedented levels as forests, wetlands, grasslands, and oceanic preserves are destroyed for industry. Carbon emissions in 2018 surged by 3.4 percent over the previous year—the largest increase in eight years. Time is short.
To have a chance of stopping the forces that are squeezing the life from the planet, defensive stands like Unist’ot’en Camp are crucial. But defense alone is not enough, and governments continue to side with industry. If we want to survive, we need legitimate offensive strategies.
What does offensive struggle look like?
Legislative change, voting, and the non-profit industrial complex are all controlled by the ruling class. Offensive struggle is, by design, essentially impossible in these arenas.
Real offensive struggle is inherently revolutionary. A revolution is “a forcible overthrow of a government, class, or social order, in favor of a new system.” While that force does not necessarily mean open violence, violence is a part of every revolutionary struggle.
Most people who want social and environmental justice have been taught that violent revolution is morally indefensible. Through fear and lies, elites have shamed us out of organizing and carrying out a revolution. Thus, they limit us to defensive action.
Breaking our allegiance to the dominant system is the first step to effective resistance. This requires we decolonize our minds and remember the true source of life. We all need to choose sides: life or the machine.
Which side do you choose?
Even the preeminent strategist on non-violence, Gene Sharp, talks about non-violent resistance as a form of war. Perceiving our struggle in this way is important. Defensive struggles are possible to undertake while denying that you are engaged in a war. But once you acknowledge that we are in a war, offensive struggle becomes a legitimate possibility.
Once our imaginations have expanded, we can attempt to answer the question: what does offensive struggle look like?
In military strategy, the purpose of offensive action is to destroy your opponents ability to wage war. After effective offensive action, they cannot continue to fight you, no matter how badly they want to.
In my analysis, the primary weapon of war being used against the planet and the poor is the global industrial economy. Therefore, offensive struggle today means breaking the supply lines of industrial capitalism by targeting and destroying key bottlenecks in the the global economic system, and dismantling the institutions of the dominant culture.
If this were carried out, it would change the balance of power globally. Those in power would no longer be physically able to destroy the world, and the way would be clear for alternative cultures, land restoration, and the Earth itself to begin the process of healing.
Ending the war
The war against the planet and the poor is raging right now. To end this war as quickly as possible and with the smallest possible loss of life, our only feasible path is to stop the aggressor’s ability to harm the poor and destroy the planet.
Capitalism has made this a life-or-death struggle. Voting isn’t working. Signing petitions isn’t working. Liberal institutions are in shambles. Those of us who reject this system cannot survive by trying to coexist with the system. At the current rate, it appears that either industrial civilization will survive, or the biosphere will.
War is terrible, and business as usual is a war. The faster the global industrial economy is ended, the less suffering there will be. Ending this war must be our overriding objective. This means destroying capitalism’s ability to wage war. Anything less is merely whistling on the way to our collective grave.
Fighting a war is dangerous, difficult, and demanding. Sometimes I imagine sitting this war out, becoming a modern conscientious objector, and living simply. But that path isn’t a moral one. Given our current political situation, we must make adult choices. The crisis we face is calling all of us to become revolutionaries.
I wish that my grandfather was still alive so I could sit down with him to discuss all of this. Alzheimer’s disease claimed him before I was fully grown. But I still know that, unlike so many, he would not flinch away from these realities. He would face the truth, think, and decide on the right course of action.
My political stances are extremely unpopular at every level. I have received death threats from racist far-right ideologues. I have been shouted down by the left and the environmental community. And I have been harassed by federal agents. When she heard about the FBI harassment, one of my aunties told me that my grandfather would have been proud of me. She told me that he would have said, “you must be doing something right.”
That is what we must do: what is right.
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.
by DGR News Service | Oct 7, 2019 | Agriculture
Editor’s note: people with various diets are involved in Deep Green Resistance. Critical analysis of agriculture is central to our understanding.
By Lierre Keith
Start with a sixteen-year-old girl. She has a conscience, a brain, and two eyes. Her planet is being drawn and quartered, species by species. She knows it even while the adults around her play shell games with carbon trade schemes and ethanol. She’s also found information that leaves her sickened in her soul, the torment of animals that merges sadism with economic rationality to become the US food supply. Their suffering is both detailed and institution- ally distant, and both of those descriptors hold their own horrors.
A friend of mine talks about “the thing that breaks and is never repaired.” Anyone who has faced the truth about willful or socially- sanctioned cruelty knows that experience: in slavery, historic and con- temporary; in the endless sexual sadism of rape, battering, pornography; in the Holocaust and other genocides. You’re never the same after some knowledge gets through with you. But our sixteen-year-old has courage and commitment, and now she wants to do what’s right.
The vegetarians have a complete plan for her. It’s simple. You can create justice for animals, for impoverished humans, and for the earth if you eat grains and beans. That simplicity is part of its appeal, partly because humans have a tendency to like easy rules. But it also speaks to our desire for beauty, that with one act so much that’s wrong can be set right: our health, our compassion, our planet.
The problem is they’re wrong, not in their attempts to save the world, but in their solution. The moral valuing of justice over power, care over cruelty and biophilia over anthropocentrism is a shift in values that must occur if we are to save this planet. I didn’t call this book The Vegetarian Lie. I called it The Vegetarian Myth for a reason. It’s not a lie that animals are sentient beings currently being tortured for our food. It’s not a lie that the rich nations are siphoning off the life of the planet for literally oceans full of endless, empty plastic junk. It’s not a lie that most people refuse to face the systems of domination— their brute scale—that are destroying us and the earth.
But the vegetarians’ solution is a myth based on ignorance, an ignorance as encompassing as any of those dominating systems. Civilization, the life of cities, has broken our identification with the living land and broken the land itself. “The plow is the … the world’s most feared wrecking ball,” writes Steven Stoll. For ten thousand years, the six centers of civilization have waged war against our only home, waged it mostly with axes and plows. Those are weapons, not tools. Never mind reparations or repair: no peace is possible until we lay them down.
Those six centers were each driven by a tight cohort of creatures, at the center of which stand an annual plant or two. And humans have been so useful to corn and rice and potatoes, clever enough to conquer perennial polycultures as vast as forests, as tough as prairies, but not smart enough to see we’ve been destroying the world. The cohort has often included infectious diseases, diseases like smallpox and measles that jumped the species barrier from domesticated animals to humans. Humans who stood in the way of civilization’s hunger have been eradicated by the millions through civilization’s microbes, the first clear-cut preparing the way for the plow.
This is the ignorance where the vegetarian myth dead ends. Life must kill and we are all made possible by the dead body of another. It’s not killing that’s domination: it’s agriculture. The foods the vegetarians say will save us are the foods that destroy the world. The vegetarian attempt to remove humans from a paradigmatical pinnacle is commendable. And it’s crucial. We will never take our true place, one sibling amongst millions, sharing a common journey from carbon to consciousness, sacred and hungry, then back to carbon, without firmly and forever rejecting human dominion.
But in order to save the world we must know it, and the veg- etarians don’t, not any more than the rest of the civilized, especially the industrially so. Hens driven insane in battery cages are visible to vegetarians; both morally and politically that insistent sight is needed. What are invisible are all the other animals that agriculture has driven extinct. Entire continents have been skinned alive, yet that act goes unnoticed to vegetarians, despite the scale. How do they not see it? The answer is they don’t know to look for it. We are all so used to a devastated landscape, covered in asphalt and the same small handful of suburban plants, a biotic coup of its own. The whole east coast should be one slow sigh of wetland, interspersed with marsh meadows and old growth forest. It’s all gone, replaced by a McMonocrop of houses, shackles of asphalt, the brutal weight of cities.
Where the water goes shy, the trees should thin to savanna and prairie, although even there the wetlands should cradle the rivers. But there’s nothing left. The deltas and swamps, bison and black terns, have been turned into soy and wheat and corn. The capitalists say we should turn those into animal units; the vegetarians say we should dump them near the starving; I say we should stop growing them and let the world come back to life. Then we can take our place again, that place that the vegetarians claim to want, our place as participants.
We can dominate or we can participate but there is no way out. That’s what no one is telling that sixteen-year-old. The earth is liter- ally dying for wetlands and forests, rivers and prairies. And if humans would simply step aside, the world would do the work of repairing itself. But that repair involves death. It means letting the beavers eat the trees, letting the wolves eat the beavers, letting the soil eat us all. It means taking down every last dam and letting the salmon come home to lay their eggs and be eaten, and in the eating become the forest. This is the world as it should be, resiliently nourishing itself, the gift both given and received. No one is going to tell that sixteen- year-old girl the truth, because there’s no one left in her world who knows it.
Letting the beavers come back will mean that wetlands may well cover one-third of the land in places. Those wetlands can’t coexist with our roads and suburbs and agriculture. So where does your loyalty lie? Ask yourself that question as if you really mean it. Those wetlands would also feed us forever. To bring the wolves back would require a similar and massive contracture of human activity: they need land, wild land, sturdy with functioning forests and grasslands, not broken by cars, gouged into subdivisions, and coerced into mono- crops. You can’t have it both ways, vegetarians. If you want to save this world, including its animals, you can’t keep destroying it. And your food destroys it.
If you want rules about what to eat, I can give you some principles. They’re slightly more complicated than “Meat Is Murder,” but then the living world is complex, and beholding it should leave us all aching with awe. So start with topsoil, the beginning place. Remember, one million creatures per tablespoon. It’s alive, and it will protect itself if we stop assaulting it. It protects itself with perennial poly- cultures, with lots and lots of plants intertwining their roots, adding carbonaceous leaves, and working together with mycelium, bacteria, protozoa, making a new organism between them, the mycorrhiza that talks and nourishes and directs.
Defend the soil with your life, reader: there is no other organism that can touch the intelligence of what goes on beneath your feet.
So here are the questions you should ask, a new form of grace to say over your food. Does this food build or destroy topsoil? Does it use only ambient sun and rainfall, or does it require fossil soil, fossil fuel, fossil water, and drained wetlands, damaged rivers? Could you walk to where it grows, or does it come to you on a path slick with petroleum?
Everything falls into place with those three questions. Those annual monocrops lose on all three counts, unless you live in Nebraska, where it “only” fails the first two. Animal rights philosopher Peter Singer argues that you should only eat animal products if you can see their origin with your own eyes. While I agree with the impulse—to end the denial and ignorance that protect factory farming—this demand has to be much bigger: you should know where every bite of your food comes from. We need to end the denial and ignorance that protect agriculture. The worldview that gives any and all plant foods an automatic pass is profoundly blind to how those very foods devour living communities. Go look at Nebraska, where the native prairie is 98 percent gone. Even if you’ve never seen an Audubon bighorn or a swift fox, you must surely miss them.
We’ve all built this living world of gift and need, birth and return. To repair this planet, we must take our sustenance as part of those relationships instead of destroying them. We can pull the forest down or we can eat the deer that live there. We can rip up the grass or we can eat the bison that should stretch across the plains. We can dam the rivers or we can eat the fish that could feed us forever. We can turn biologic processes into commodities until the soil is salt and dust, or we can take our place as another hungering member of an ancient tribe, the tribe of carbon. All flesh is grass, wrote someone named Isaiah in a book I don’t usually quote. In Hebrew, the word translated as “flesh” is basar, meaning meat, something one eats. Isaiah understood what is no longer physically visible to us, living at the end of the world: we are all a part of one another, made from grass, become meat.
“But food requires destruction,” a vegan argued with me, in an e-mail exchange that went exactly nowhere. That is the final myth you must face, vegetarians. Because the food I am proposing, the food of our ancestors, whose paleolithic hearts and souls we still inhabit, does not require destruction. At this moment it would in fact require repair and restitution: the forests and grasslands mended, conquered territory ceded back to the earth for her wetlands. Steven Stoll sums up agriculture: “Humans became parasites of the soil.” It’s your food that has brought us to the end of the world.
My food builds topsoil. I’ve watched it happen. The mixture of grasses and trees, cousins in their own right, provides for the animals, who in their turn maintain and nourish by their simple biological functions of eating and excreting. On Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm— the mecca of sustainable food production—organic matter has increased from 1.5 percent in 1961 to 8 percent today. The average right now in the US is 2-3 percent. In case you don’t understand, let me explain. A 6.5 percent increase in organic matter isn’t a fact for ink and paper: it’s a song for the angels to sing. Remember that pine forest that built one-sixteenth of an inch of soil in fifty years? Cue those angels again: Salatin’s rotating mixture of animals on pasture is building one inch of soil annually.
Peter Bane did some calculations. He estimates that there are a hundred million agricultural acres in the US similar enough to the Salatins’ to count: “about 2/3 of the area east of the Dakotas, roughly from Omaha and Topeka east to the Atlantic and south to the Gulf of Mexico.” Right now, that land is mostly planted to corn and soy. But returned to permanent cover, it would sequester 2.2 billion tons of carbon every year. Bane writes:
That’s equal to present gross US atmospheric releases, not counting the net reduction from the carbon sinks of existing forests and soils … Without expanding farm acreage or removing any existing forests, and even before undertaking changes in consumer lifestyle, reduction in traffic, and increases in industrial and transport fuel efficiencies, which are absolutely imperative, the US could become a net carbon sink by changing cultivating practices and marketing on a million farms. In fact, we could create 5 million new jobs in farming if the land were used as efficiently as the Salatins use theirs.
Understand: agriculture was the beginning of global warming. Ten thousand years of destroying the carbon sinks of perennial polycultures has added almost as much carbon to the atmosphere as industrialization (see Figure 5, opposite), an indictment that you, vegetarians, need to answer. No one has told you this before, but that is what your food—those oh so eco-peaceful grains and beans—has done. Remember the ghost acres and the ghost slaves? What you’re eating in those grains and beans is ghost meat, down to the bare bones of whole species. There is no reconciling civilization and its foods with the needs of our living planet.
To save the world, we must first stop destroying it. Cast your eyes down when you pray, not in fear of some god above, but in recognition: our only hope is in the soil, and in the trees, grasses, and wetlands that are its children and its protectors both.
“And why are we not doing this now?” is the clarion call Bane ends with. For a lot of reasons, most of them having to do with power. But a new populism could spring from this need, a serious political movement combining environmentalists, farm activists, animal rights groups, feminists, indigenous people, anti-globalization and relocalization efforts—all of us who are desperate for a new, and living, world.
That’s the real reason I’ve written this book. The earth, our only home, needs that movement, and she needs it now. The only just economy is a local economy; the only sustainable economy is a local economy. Come at it from whichever angle matches your passion, the answers nest around the same central theme: humans have to draw their sustenance from where they live, without destroying that place.
That means that first we must know that place. I can’t give you a list of what to eat because I don’t know what can live where you do. I can only give you the principles I’ve already laid out. Then you’ll have to ask questions. How much rain falls where you are? What’s the terrain, the temperature, the soil? Dairy cattle, for instance, do great things where I live in cold, wet New England. I wouldn’t suggest them in dry New Mexico.
Understand my point. Farming—the growing of annual mono- crops—will never be sustainable. Our only chance is a judicious and humble human participation in perennial polycultures. We can do that poorly, as demonstrated in the overgrazing due to population pressures that is currently turning grasslands to desert the world over. Or we can do it well, like the Fulani of Africa, with a largely unbroken line reaching back to a pre-human time four million years ago.
How much can we change the landscape before participation becomes destruction? Especially when our impact may not be visible for a thousand years? Should we, for instance, use fire? Fire will drive out some species, both plant and animal, and encourage others. Where I live, sugar maples are iconic. Yet five hundred years ago, they wouldn’t have been here, or not many of them. The burning practices of Native Americans kept the forest here shifted toward fire-resistant and mast-bearing trees. That information was a shock
to my system: don’t mess with my maple trees. But Brian Donahue makes the point that as long as there has been a forest in New Eng- land, there have been humans living in it. We belong here, too, if we would just behave like it. The pristine forest free of human influence has never existed here, so is it the ideal we should be aiming for?
If so, that ideal must presuppose a devastated landscape some- where else and an interstate highway system to transport the foods produced out of it. None of this can last: not the devastation, the fossil fuel, the distance. We need to eat where we live and our food must be part of the repair of our home.
Let’s look at an example. Do dairy cows belong in New Eng- land? In the here and now, as I make my personal and political decisions about breakfast, are cows on the side of good or do they need to be hauled up Mount Doom?
Dairy cattle were brought over from Europe four hundred years ago. Does that rule them out automatically? But if you dig deeper into the past, there were once thirty-three more genera of large mammals on this continent, relatives of horses, cows, elephants, giraffes— and not that long ago, a mere 12,000 years. Their absence has left evolutionary widows, trees like honey locust and osage orange that are in decline because they need large herbivores to help them.9 In that sense, horses and cows were perhaps reintroduced with the spread of Europeans. So dig deeper still. Are these new animals similar enough to the ones that are gone, or do their divergences make them destructive assailants on the land base? There were, for instance, once equids here, but they had cloven hooves and no upper teeth. The result of the solid hooves and incisors is “ecological havoc.”10 The feral horses from Europe destroy desert seeps and springs, smother spawning gravel with silt, and strip grasslands to bare dirt. The most in-depth analysis of nineteen study sites found severe damage to “soils, rodents, reptiles, ants, and plants.” That damage puts species from desert tortoises to the endangered Lahontan cutthroats at risk.
There are clearly brittle landscapes too fragile for cows—especially for dairy cows—as well. Most of the west is more suited to the animals that were already there—buffalo, pronghorns, elk—and that’s what the people there should be eating. So that’s a directive: restore the prairie, long grass and short, and the drylands, and return their animal cohorts. Then think long and hard about other megafauna and their place on this continent. Do the grasslands and savannas want them back, or their relatives that still survive? What about the honey locust and osage orange, who need their large seeds to be di- gested and carried by large herbivores? Is their dying simply evolution at work? If we humans reintroduce some creature that might fulfill that function and restore the range of those trees, is that also evolu- tion? Or is that interference?
And I still need to decide about breakfast.
Cattle on pasture in my climate can easily be sustainable. Joel Salatin is certainly proving that. The model is sound and the climate and rainfall are suitable. But pasture isn’t the natural landscape of New England. Forests, wetlands, and marsh meadows are. The Europeans’ cows first grazed in those meadows and forests. As the beaver were eradicated, the wetlands and marsh meadows disappeared. Meanwhile, in Europe, experimentation with plant admixtures improved the sustainability of pastures dramatically. How does turning some forest land into pasture compare with the habitat shift of burning? Both of these are activities that, done well, will build topsoil and provide for human sustenance essentially forever. So how much impact are we allowed to have? The entire rainforest is a human project. Small patches are burned by the indigenous like the Lacandon Mayan, and then planted in a secession of eighty different crops, including the vines, shrubs, and trees that will take over when the plot has been abandoned—though “abandoned” is not really an accurate description, as the plot will be revisited in a twenty-year rotation, and will meanwhile produce food, fiber, and building materials, as well as a home for the wild animals that serve as protein.
Which brings me to my point. It wasn’t pasture that brought down the northeast forest. It was coal. As long as the human economy was based on wood in this cold climate, people more or less took care of the forest, because they needed it. Coal was what reduced the forest to simply one more commodity, and the land that forests grew on was more profitably used for wool breeds of sheep. What will happen as the price of oil first climbs past what the average household can pay, then past the effort worth retrieving it from the ground? Will New England be cleared from the Atlantic Ocean to the Housatonic River as people freeze to death? Or will the rural areas and private woodlot owners be able to hang onto their parts of this young forest, knowing that without it they, too, will soon freeze? Will we be facing a war not over Middle Eastern oilfields, but over trees in the Berkshires?
And I still need to decide about breakfast.
I can raise these issues, but maybe I can’t answer the questions.
I know that whatever we’re eating has to build soil, and if it doesn’t, it has to be struck forever from the human menu. It has to be part of a self-replicating community, where life and death are inseparable in the process of nourishment. Everyone has to give back, through the labor of their life functions, and then through the nutrients stored in their bodies. Our food can’t be based on fossil fuel, for nitrogen or energy. Nor can it use fossil water, or indeed any water that empties a river.
Dairy cows, where I live, meet those criteria and more. But is the change in species composition wrought by human-set fire on the acceptable side of the line while the change required for pasture placed in the unacceptable column? Then what we will eat instead will be deer and moose. Both of those, along with bison, migrated here from Eurasia not too long ago, maybe 12,000 years. They filled in niches left empty by the megafaunal extinctions. They’re Eurasian trans- plants, too. Do you see how complicated this gets?
And I still need my breakfast.
In the end, I do have my own answers to offer, of course, but they involve a bit more than drinking soy milk. Agriculture has to stop. It’s been a ten thousand year disaster, as life on earth will tell us if we listen. Writes William Catton:
The breakthrough we called industrialization was fundamentally unlike earlier ones. It did not just take over for human use another portion of the web that had previously supported other forms of life. Instead, it went underground to extract carrying capacity supplements from a finite and depletable fund …
As discussed earlier, I think the beginning of the fossil fuel age does mark a new level of human destructiveness, but he’s wrong in his characterization of agriculture as simply taking over more ecological niches. Agriculture is extractive: soil is depletable and “peak soil” was ten thousand years ago, on the day before agriculture began. We’ve been on the down curve ever since.
So agriculture has to stop. It’s about to run out anyway—of soil, of water, of ecosystems—but it would go easier on us all if we faced that collectively, and then developed cultural constraints that would stop us from ever doing it again.
Where I live, the wetlands need to return to cover the land in a soft, slow blanket of water. They will be a home for a lush multitude of species, many of which—waterfowl, moose, fish—could feed us. The rivers need to be undammed. And the suburbs and the roads need to be abandoned. I have no great solutions for how to make that economically feasible: I sincerely doubt it’s possible. I only know it has to happen, no matter how much we resist.
This is an excerpt from “To Save the World” in the book The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. Click here to order directly from the author.
by DGR News Service | Oct 4, 2019 | The Solution: Resistance
This is excerpted from Chapter 15, “Our Best Hope,” in the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. It was written by Lierre Keith.
In our story, the first direct hit to industrial infrastructure is likely to be something more pragmatic and less daring, like the electric grid. Our actionists have planned well. Remember the four criteria for target selection: the grid is accessible, vulnerable, and critical, and while it is recuperable, the abundance of the first three criteria could potentially make that recuperability more theoretical than practical.
The underground networks can hit a few nodes at once, and the unconnected affinity groups, well versed in DEW and the DGR grand strategy, can follow up on the vulnerable targets to which they have access. The first DGR blackout could last days or even weeks.
An instructive event to consider from recent history is the Northeast Blackout of 2003. On August 14, a huge power surge caused a rolling blackout over a large section of northeastern US and Canada, affecting fifty-five million people. This event brought home how very delicate power grids are. Because electricity can’t really be stored, it has to be consumed within a second of being produced or else dumped. Supply and demand have to be matched very precisely or costly infrastructure can be seriously damaged by either too much or too little power. The grid has built-in protective relays to guard against flashovers, which dis- connect any line that has a sudden surge in power. But with such tight correspondences, it’s amazing that any of us have reliable electricity.
August 14 saw a cascading failure that started with electric arcs between a few overhead lines and some trees in northeast Ohio. By the time the grid had finished responding, power plants all across the Northeast had gone offline and a full-fledged blackout was on. A total of 256 electric power plants shut down, and electricity generation dropped by 80 percent.
But the phrase “cascading failure” applies to a lot more than the grid. Oil refineries couldn’t operate and neither could the nine nuclear power plants in the region. Gas stations couldn’t pump gas. Air, rail, and even car traffic halted. The financial centers of Chicago and Manhattan were immobilized, and Wall Street was completely shut down. The Internet only worked for dial-up users, and then only as long as their batteries lasted. Most industries had to stop, and many weren’t running again until August 22. That last includes the auto industry. The major television and cable networks had disruptions in their broadcasts. In New York City, both restaurants and neighbors cooked up everything on hand and gave it away for free as the perishables were just going to have to be thrown out. Meanwhile, the Indigo Girls concert went on as planned in Central Park. And the New Jersey Turnpike stopped collecting tolls.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not seeing any drawbacks here. The cascade was broad and deep, if short. Fossil fuel use was seriously decreased; nuclear power plants rendered useless; oil went unrefined in northern New Jersey, my child’s eyes’ vision of Mordor in that last whisper of wetlands; the rich were kept from draining the poor; and the flood of lies and vicious media images stopped drowning our hearts, our children, and our culture for a brief night. And there were parties with neighbors and music on top of that.
The DEW activists will be soundly condemned, and not just by the mainstream, but by Big Eco, and by many grassroots activists. This is to be expected. Our actionists need to prepare for it emotionally, socially, organizationally. It can’t be helped. Remember the goal: to disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization. Judged by that goal, our actionists’ first attack on the electric grid has been a raging success. And nothing breeds success like success. More groups form, more cells divide in the network. Maybe a whole arm is dedicated to the grid while others go on to other targets. Like the tar sands. The pipelines carrying tar sands oil from Alberta to the coast are 800 miles long; sab- otage is too easy. Meanwhile, the equipment necessary for the massive scale of the tar sands extraction is almost inconceivable: twenty stories high and counting. Some of it has to be carried on trucks with ninety tires on twenty-four axles, weighing a total of 917,000 pounds, which is so heavy that two auxiliary trucks are needed to help push. These trucks need special permits and are only allowed on the highway during daylight hours.
Our story is accelerating. A victory for the Tar Sands Brigade comes on the night the draglines are torched, and a few of the factories that make them are incinerated. Does Suncor get more? Yes. And those are burned as well, somewhere on their vulnerable route between their arrival point in Bellingham, Washington, and their departure point in Fort McMurray, Alberta.
Again, Big Oil, Big Coal, and Big Eco all condemn the activists. The public overwhelmingly hates them. But in the Athabasca River, the northern pike and the tundra swans love them. More equipment is pur- chased. Our actionists respond by sinking the replacements on the boats before they even touch shore and, for added emphasis, a mid- night demolition of a corporate headquarters or two. Native Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree elders and more than a few Clan Mothers are smiling all week. The warriors, meanwhile, ask some questions, starting with: kakipewîcîhwin cî? Will you come and join me? It’s up to them to decide whether to move from protecting their community to offensive action. The young, of course, are all “Yes.” When the next DGR blackout rolls through the middle of the continent, a sudden blast blazes across the night as a key bridge comes down on Provincial Route 63. Try getting that million-pound equipment across the river now.
Only a few hundred people are involved at this point. There are three networks, one in the northeast US, one in the Pacific Northwest, and a smaller one in the upper Midwest. There are also affinity groups in Vancouver, Asheville, Burlington, Austin, Guelph, Montreal, and some of the First Nations’ warrior societies are now involved.
And in this story, there are people who want to join, but can’t. They make the decisions they have to make, and do what they can instead. They translate a scaled-down version of this book—the marrow, the soul—into Hindi and Spanish and Mandarin and Sámi. Deep Green Resistance becomes Résistance Verte Profonde and then Molaskaskwi Aod- wagan, slipping south into Resistencia Verde Radical, crossing oceans into Djúpur Grænn Mótspyrna, Dunkelgrüner Widerstand, Mörktgrönt Motstånd, Paglaban Malalim Berde. The question only changes its sound, never its heart: K’widzawidzi nia? Ti unirai a me? Kayo ay sumali sa akin? The question is asked and asked and asked, whispered like a prayer in that moment the heart shifts from petition to thanksgiving: will you join me? Until “me” becomes “us,” because finally a resistance has quickened.
Click here to read the book for free online, or to download an eBook. Click here to purchase a paper copy. The book has now been translated into German, Spanish, and Russian. If you wish to help with additional translation work or get involved with Deep Green Resistance, please contact us.
