Privilege

This story first appeared in Mongabay. By Maxwell Radwin Women in a rural part of El Salvador are leading an effort to stop urban development that could result in deforestation and loss of access to water. The Ciudad Valle El Ángel project involves the construction of stores, hotels and houses in Apopa municipality, an hour north of the capital, San Salvador. It calls for clearing 351 hectares (867 acres) of forest and diverting 17 million liters (4.5 million gallons) of water a day from the Chacalapa River watershed. The community has started working with other local organizations to stage protests, sit-ins and letter-writing campaigns, and has also filed numerous lawsuits. A group of women in rural El Salvador is standing up against a major infrastructure project that threatens to clear hundreds of hectares of forest and cut off access to rivers that provide the community with clean drinking water. ...

At least 4 environmental activists are murdered each week, these are only the reported and confirmed killings but even more likely disappear without being verified. Between 2002 and 2017, at minimum of 1,558 people have been murdered while attempting to protect land, water, and local wildlife – for a sense of scale, this represents about half of the U.S. troops killed in both the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts during that same period of time. We are now in the midst of a global ecological war where one side is defending life, and the other side is devouring life. ...

Editor’s note: this essay was written by Mark Behrend, a Routledge author and veteran of the Vietnam War who became an activist after refusing to facilitate shipments of munitions. DGR does not agree with all of the points in this essay, but it has value and deserves publication. Image: mwewering, Pixabay By Mark Behrend While environmental discussions typically center on climate change, pollution, and biodiversity, both activists and educators tend to avoid the question of human numbers. We might argue whether overpopulation gave rise to industrial capitalism, or vice versa. But we avoid discussing it further, due to fears of being politically incorrect on race, religion, or family rights. ...

Featured image: United Nations Population Fund. Opting in and out of sex-based oppression is something only the most privileged believe they can do. by Raquel Rosario Sanchez / Feminist Current When I was in grad school, I got into a heated debate with a classmate who insisted that “white feminism” was a serious problem in the women’s movement. The man (who was white and from the United States) argued that, “white feminism” meant that the women’s movement had centered the lives and experiences of only a select few — privileged white women in the US who traveled mainly in academic circles — “for most of its history.” ...

by Erin Moberg / Deep Green Resistance Eugene On Saturday, February 4th, several members of DGR Oregon attended a day-long NVDA training in Eugene, Oregon. The event was organized by local and regional activists. Over 200 people attended, including local activists, community members new to direct action, college students, youth, retired people, and others from nearby towns. DGR members attended this training as part of an increased effort to connect with Eugenians from other activist groups and to invite community members to two upcoming events: (1) a DGR Open House in downtown Eugene (March 8) and (2) an Advanced Direct Action Training to be held just outside of Eugene over Earth Day weekend (April 22-23). We also, of course, wanted to see what we could learn. ...

Featured image: Mining in Seite Suyos, Bolivia. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons user Mach Marco) By Derrick Jensen / Deep Green Resistance When living the dream means others will die I want to tell you three stories of winning and losing, of selfishness and sacrifice, of this culture. Story one. Last spring I gave a talk in a small farming community in northwestern Illinois. I drove there from my previous talk in Wisconsin, passing through prime agricultural territory, which is to say cleared and plowed and empty cornfield after cleared and plowed and empty cornfield. When I got to my destination, a delightful retired teacher took me to see the last remaining unplowed prairie in the county. It was more or less downtown, between a busy street and yet another field devoted to agriculture. As he led me across the slender tract, I couldn’t stop weeping at the sight of flowers who were once common and now barely hanging on, butterflies who were once common and now barely hanging on, a mother goose protecting her nest. My (human) host told me that even though this is the last six acres left—just six acres out of 360,000 in the county—the neighboring landowner refuses to stop applying insecticides and herbicides, which of course drift across the fenceline. ...

by Jonah Mix, Deep Green Resistance Some days, queer theory feels like an elaborate practical joke. I’m writing this after a good four hours spent in a marathon Twitter exchange, so forgive me if I’m a little short. The man in question was your average trans dude, berating women for their refusal to accept his identification as female; he did not take well to the news that, black choker and bad haircut aside, he wasn’t actually a woman. Over dozens of obnoxious Tweets, he accused so-called “TERFs” of “gatekeeping femininity,” “denying him womanhood,” and deciding that he wasn’t “worthy of the feminine.” Yes, he was actually claiming that his inability to wear fuck-me pumps was 1) due to the heartless machinations of radical feminists, and 2) evidence of oppression. Amazingly, all of this was said with a straight – and heavily painted – face. ...

Editor’s Note: For further analysis of effective resistance movements, please visit the Deep Green Resistance Book, and read about our strategy: Decisive Ecological Warfare. By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance When I am in Hawai’i, I ask everyone I meet if the United States will ever voluntarily de-occupy the Islands. No one ever says yes. Usually, before I can say anything else, people hurriedly start talking about the lack of a valid treaty or that the American occupation is illegal by their own laws or that the United States will pay for its human rights violations. ...

By Frank Coughlin / Deep Green Resistance New York Humility. An important word you rarely hear in our culture anymore. Our culture seems to be going in the opposite direction, everything with a superlative. Everything bigger, faster, better, stronger. Everything new, shiny, pretty, expensive. But never humble. “Dude, love that car. It’s so humble.” Yeah, you never hear that. Politically on the left, in the “fight” as we call it, we’re just as guilty. We have a tendency towards ego, self-righteousness, hyper-individualism. We want our movements to be better, stronger, bigger. We want the big social “pop-off”, the “sexy” revolution, perhaps our face on the next generation’s t-shirts. But we never ask for humility. As we near what most scientists predict to be “climate catastrophe”, I’ve been thinking a lot about humility. I recently was able to travel to Chiapas, Mexico to learn about the Zapatista movement. I was there for a month, working with various groups in a human rights capacity. While I was there to provide some type of service, I left with a profound respect for a true revolutionary humility. This essay is not designed to be a complete history of the Zapatista movement, but perhaps it can provide some context. ...

Photo Credit: David Clow By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance Each night Unist’ot’en Clan spokeswoman, Freda Huson, and her husband Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief Toghestiy fall asleep on their traditional land not knowing whether the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are going to storm their bridge in the depths of night. Each winter, when Freda and Toghestiy ride their snowmobiles down forestry roads to bring in supplies, to hunt, or to check their traplines, they don’t know whether they will find piles of felled trees maliciously dragged across their paths. ...