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This is an excerpt from the book Bright Green Lies, P. 20 ff By Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as- usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.” 1 —PAUL KINGSNORTH ...

Excerpted from Chapter 8, “Organizational Structure,” of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay. The most basic organizational unit is the affinity group. A group of fewer than a dozen people is a good compromise between groups too large to be socially functional, and too small to carry out important tasks. The activist’s affinity group has a mirror in the underground cell, and in the military squad. Groups this size are small enough for participatory decision making to take place, or in the case of a hierarchal group, for orders to be relayed quickly and easily. ...

The Problem by Lierre Keith From the introduction to the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet . “You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you’re not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.” ...

Excerpted from the book Deep Green Resistance — Chapter 15: Our Best Hope by Lierre Keith. Featured Image: Women in 1919 Revolution in Egypt via Flickr 5. Deep Green Resistance means repair of human cultures That repair must, in the words of Andrea Dworkin, be based on “one absolute standard of human dignity.” That starts in a fierce loyalty to everyone’s physical boundaries and sexual integrity. It continues with food, shelter, and health care, and the firm knowledge that our basic needs are secure. And it opens out into a democracy where all people get an equal say in the decisions that affect them. That includes economic as well as political decisions. There’s no point in civic democracy if the economy is hierarchical and the rich can rule through wealth. ...

Excerpted from the book Deep Green Resistance — Chapter 15: Our Best Hope by Lierre Keith. 4. Deep Green Resistance requires repair of the planet This principle has the built-in prerequisite, of course, of stopping the destruction. Burning fossil fuels has to stop. Likewise, industrial logging, fishing, and agriculture have to stop. Denmark and New Zealand, for instance, have outlawed coal plants—there’s no reason the rest of the world can’t follow. Stopping the destruction requires an honest look at the culture that a true solar economy can support. We need a new story, but we don’t need fairy tales, and the bread crumbs of windfarms and biofuels will not lead us home. ...

Excerpted from the book Deep Green Resistance — Chapter 15: Our Best Hope by Lierre Keith. Featured image: Felix Mittermeier via Unsplash 3. Deep Green Resistance must be multilevel. There is work to be done—desperately important work—aboveground and underground, in the legal sphere and the economic realm, locally and internationally. We must not be divided by a diversionary split between radicalism and reformism. One more time: the most militant strategy is not always the most radical or the most effective. The divide between militance and nonviolence does not have to destroy the possibility of joint action. People of conscience can disagree. They can also respectfully choose to work in different arenas requiring different tactics. I can think of no scenario in which a program to provide school cafeterias with food straight from local, grass-based farms would be advanced by explosives. In contrast, a project to save the salmon would do well to consider such an option. ...

Excerpted from the book Deep Green Resistance — Chapter 15: Our Best Hope by Lierre Keith. Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. —G. K. Chesterton The IRA had Sinn Fein. The abolition movement had the Underground Railroad, Nat Turner and John Brown, and Bloody Kansas. The suffragists had organizations that lobbied and educated, and then the militant WSPU that burned down train stations and blew up golf courses. The original American patriots had printers and farmers and weavers of homespun domestic cloth, and also Sons of Liberty who were willing to bodily shut down the court system. The civil rights movement had the redefinition of blackness in the Harlem Renaissance and the stability, dignity, and community spirit of the Pullman porters, and then four college students willing to sit down at a lunch counter and face the angry mob. The examples are everywhere across history. A radical movement grows from a culture of resistance, like a seed from soil. And just like soils must have the cradling roots and protective cover of plants, without the actual resistance, no community will win justice or human rights against an oppressive system. ...

Chapter 8: Organizational Structure An excerpt from the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. There is one thing you have got to learn about our movement. Three people are better than no people. — Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights leader Resistance organizations can be divided into aboveground (AG) and underground (UG) groups. These groups have strongly divergent organizational and operational needs, even when they have the same goals. Broadly speaking, aboveground groups do not carry out risky illegal actions, and are organized in ways that maximize their ability to use public institutions and communication structures. Underground groups exist primarily to carry out illegal or repressed activities and are organized in ways that maximize their own security and effectiveness. ...

Today we share an excerpt from the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. This selection comes from Chapter 12: Introduction to Strategy and it contains a brief observation on how most activists lack a clean and concise strategy as well as an overview of the Principles of War & Strategy. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. ...

Today we share an excerpt of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. This selection comes from Chapter 2: Civilization and other Hazards. In the preceding pages, various ecological crises were presented. The media report on these crises as though they [ecological crises] are all separate issues. They are not. They are inextricably entangled with each other and with the culture that causes them. As such, all of these problems have important commonalities, with major implications for our strategy to resist them. ...