by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 29, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
In the first essay of my Protecting Mauna Kea series, I made a mistake. I wrongfully described the ongoing, illegal American occupation of Hawai’i as an “annexation.”
Hawaiian friends of mine pointed this out to me and gave me a thorough history lesson. I was referred to documents, books, and websites that tell the truth. For the last several days, I’ve been reading everything I can on the subject.
The more I read, the more convinced I become not only that the Thirty Meter Telescope project lacks any legal right to build on Mauna Kea, but that international law, indeed American law itself, demands that the United States end its occupation of Hawai’i.
I have two hopes for this piece. First, I want to give a history lesson for haoles. “Haole” is the Hawaiian word for white person. I am specifically directing this lesson at white settlers – at haoles – because the first thing haoles can do is understand the history of violence we benefit from.
This history lesson will demonstrate that the current regime controlling Hawai’i is illegitimate and as such has no authority to enforce the construction of the TMT on Mauna Kea.
Second, I want to relieve Hawaiians from the responsibility of educating haoles. Hawaiians have no responsibility to educate us. As a white settler hoping to stand in true solidarity with Hawaiians, I am upset with myself for the mistake. I have seen how frustrating it can be for a movement when valuable time must be spent coaching well-meaning settlers along.
I want to be clear: I am not advocating for a “call-out” culture on the front lines of resistance where resisters perpetually attack each other for their choice of words. Many of us must go through our personal experiences unlearning the lies we are taught and this takes time. The dominant culture, of course, does an excellent job lying. That’s why it’s the dominant culture.
But, I am saying that settlers need to take responsibility for educating other settlers. Leaving education to oppressed classes, forcing them to do the work of spreading consciousness, is a form of oppression in itself.
Before I begin, it is necessary to explain that this essay represents my opinions and my personal perspective of Hawaiian history stemming from the research I’ve done and been directed to. I am not a spokesperson for the Hawaiian people, neither am I spokesperson for the Mauna Kea protectors. I understand that there is no One True History, but I refuse to abide by the relativism I see perpetuating around me.
The complexity of a situation does not signify a lack of meaning. Rather, the complexity of a situation – especially ones with real, physical consequences – demands that we grapple with information to take a stand. As the world disintegrates before our eyes, I see too many people mired in the neutrality their belief in the relative nature of reality produces.
Make no mistake, if the construction of the TMT project results in the spill of hazardous chemicals in the largest freshwater aquifer on the Island of Hawai’i – a very real possibility – there will be very real consequences for life on the Island.
***
Milan Kundera famously stated the “struggle against oppression is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I have found this to be shockingly true learning the history of Hawai’i. It is my belief that haoles have forgotten – or never knew – the history of Hawai’i. If we did not forget, there would be more of us supporting the Mauna Kea protectors and supporting true Hawaiian sovereignty.
What have we forgotten?
It starts centuries ago when Hawaiians first arrived in Hawai’i. Over the centuries, Hawaiians developed a culture based on ecological balance that included communal land tenure. I am very self-conscious that my attempts to explain a complex culture that existed for centuries before the arrival of Europeans would amount to so much generalization. I cannot possibly do the Hawaiian culture justice in a short essay, but so many discussions of Hawaiian history begin with the arrival of Captain Cook in 1778 erasing Hawaiian history pre-European contact.
There are always those that will accuse me of romanticizing Hawaiian culture, who will say “all human cultures are inherently destructive.” I do not mean to romanticize Hawaiian culture and it simply is not true that all human cultures are inherently destructive. We know the Hawaiian culture before 1778 had it’s own problems, but wide-scale ecological collapse was not one of them. In this era of total environmental destruction, we would do well to empower cultures who lived in balance with theirland base.
From 1826 until 1893, the United States government recognized the independent Kingdom of Hawai’i including full, complete diplomatic relations with the Hawaiian government. For all intents and purposes, the United States viewed Hawai’i as a nation just like Mexico, Canada, or Great Britain. In fact, the United States entered into treaties involving navigation and commerce with Hawai’i in 1826, 1842, 1849, 1875, and 1887.
Then, in January, 1893, John L. Stevens, an American agent in Hawaii (his official title was United States Minister), conspired with non-Hawaiians and members of the U.S. Navy to overthrow the Hawaiian government. On January 16, 1893, Stevens and armed US naval personnel invaded Hawai’i and positioned themselves next to Hawaiian governmental buildings including Iolani Palace to intimidate Queen Liliuokalani. Queen Liliuokalani, under threats of bloodshed, yielded her authority to the government of the United States – NOT Stevens’ provisional government – until the time the United States would undo the actions of its representatives in Hawai’i.
Grover Cleveland was the president in 1893 and he initiated an investigation into the actions of Stevens and his cronies while calling for the restoration of the Hawaiian monarchy. The investigation concluded that Stevens and other US officials in Hawaii had abused their authority and had engaged in “an act of war.”
Still, the provisional government sought annexation in Congress, but was unable to rally the support of 2/3 of the Senate needed for annexation. So, on July 4, 1894, the provisional government that had forcibly invaded and overthrown the Kingdom of Hawai’i, declared itself the Republic of Hawai’i.
In 1896, William McKinley replaced Grover Cleveland as president. Using the excuse of the Spanish-American war and the need for a naval base in the Pacific, McKinley and the Senate began to entertain the notion of annexing Hawai’i, again.
In 1897, the Hawaiian people delivered a massive petition where nearly 90% of Hawaiians alive at the time declared their desire not to become part of the United States of America. Unable to secure a treaty of annexation, Congress passed a joint resolution titled “the Newlands Resolution” on July 7, 1898.
The illegality of this joint resolution is one of the most important things to understand about Hawaiian history. This resolution had no legal basis, had no validity, and was possible simply because of the armed might of the United States.
The resolution has no legitimate basis because laws passed by Congress have no authority internationally. Congress can only pass laws that apply within the United States.
Hawaiian legal scholar Dr. Keanu Sai explains it better than I can in his blog-article “International Law Prevents Construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope” when he writes, “The underlying problem that Congressmen at the time knew was that no law of Congress can have any force and effect beyond the borders of the United States. In other words, the United States could no more annex the Hawaiian Islands by passing a domestic law, than it could annex Canada today by passing a law.”
As part of the Newlands Resolution, the Republic of Hawai’i passed 1,800,000 acres of what had been crown, government, and public lands of the Kingdom of Hawai’i to the control of the United States. Included in this land is Mauna Kea. Through the acquisition of Mauna Kea in this way, the State of Hawai’i has leased land on Mauna Kea for the TMT’s construction. But, an illegal state giving land acquired illegally can only give – you guessed it – an illegal lease.
Of course, you don’t have to take my word for this history, because all of these facts were already admitted and apologized for by Congress on November 23, 1993. You can read their apology here.
***
So, can you see why we cannot call the occupation of Hawai’i an annexation? No treaty of annexation was ever signed. “Annexation” implies consent on the part of those annexed and clearly the Hawaiian people never consented.
To take this even deeper, the term “annexation” hides the truth, softens the reality that Hawai’i was invaded while the invaders still seek to assert dominance over Hawai’i. To use the term “annexation” is to forget and forgetting clears the wayfor oppression.
There’s something, though, that bothers me about all this. How can the American government and the American people after learning this history, after admitting the wrongs done to Hawai’i still allow something like the TMT project to happen? I think the answer is that learning the history is only the first small step. Knowing the history, we must act.
One of the intentions behind my writing is to try to understand how so many people can recognize problems in the world and then fail to act to solve those problems. I am a haole, so I can only speak as a haole, and I believe too many haoles settle for pointing out their privilege while the more important work involves undermining the forces that grants them that privilege over others in the first place. The history is clear. Hawaiians are being wronged. Now, we need to act.
From San Diego Free Press
Find an index of Will Falk’s “Protecting Mauna Kea” essays, plus other resources, at:
Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i: Protect Mauna Kea from the Thirty Meter Telescope
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 23, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest, Rape Culture
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
I am preparing to leave for Hawai’i to offer myself in support of resistance to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project that would place a large telescope and stadium-sized structure on the peak of native Hawaiians’ most sacred place – Mauna Kea.
The project, funded by a partnership including the University of California, the California Institute of Technology, and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy among others, would also place a 5,000 gallon chemical waste container above the largest freshwater aquifer on Hawai’i Island.
I first heard about this struggle from the brilliant documentary film-maker Anne Keala Kelly when she spoke at the Earth at Risk conference in San Francisco organized by the Fertile Ground Environmental Institute last fall. I was beyond excited when a friend recently put me in touch with Keala explaining that the Mauna Kea protectors seek more support from the mainland.
It’s been over a year, since I gave up on the possibility that – as a white settler – I will ever truly be able to call stolen native land “home.” Instead of settling into one place, I believe I can be more effective traveling in support of indigenous sovereignty. So, after a wonderfully encouraging conversation with Keala, I am resolved to go.
The first practical step towards getting to Hawai’i is finding the funding. After some donations from friends and a generous offer from the organization that originally introduced me to the struggle at Mauna Kea – Fertile Ground – it looks like I will be set to leave in the next couple weeks.
Before I go, however, it is important to articulate exactly why I am going. Why is stopping the construction of a telescope on top of a mountain thousands of miles away so important? Why, with all the social ills in the world, are you headed to Hawai’i, Will? Or, to borrow the phrase forming the title of Keala’s current documentary film project, “Why the Mountain?”
One essay is insufficient to articulate why, but I will start with this:
The dominant culture currently threatens the ability of the planet to support life itself. No where else is this more apparent, perhaps, than in Hawai’i. Hawai’i is widely known in ecological circles as the extinction and endangered species capital of the world for the staggering rate of extinction decimating Hawai’i’s largely endemic plant and animal populations. Bird populations are the famous example.
According to Dr. Les Beletsky, a wildlife biologist formerly of the University of Washington and now a full-time writer, at the first arrival of Europeans in Hawai’i 200 years ago, 59 known bird species existed in Hawai’i. 21 currently survive and more than half of those are endangered. One of the important connections to make here is that colonization – the theft of indigenous land and destruction of indigenous peoples – precedes ecological collapse. It is a pattern that has played out around the world for centuries. With every species wiped off the face of the planet, every indigenous culture destroyed, every acre of old-growth forest lost, we move closer to total annihilation.
I’ve spent the last year traveling in support of indigenous sovereignty and environmental protection. Before that, I spent a year as a public defender and three years as a law student volunteering in prisons trying to use the system to fight institutional racism. My experiences lead me to believe we will never see a mass movement to save the world. If we’re going to save the world, we’ll have to do it ourselves. And, because we must do it ourselves, we need to be armed with an analysis that allows us to strategically maximize our effectiveness. To maximize our effectiveness we need to recognize the root processes fueling the destruction of the world. Then, we must attack and defeat those processes.
Over the next few weeks, my essays will attempt to point out the processes at work in Hawai’i that even make the desecration of a place as sacred as Mauna Kea possible.
***
I want to back up, though, and get back to answering why I personally feel so strongly about protecting Mauna Kea. One of the first reasons, I am going to Hawai’i is because I am sick of those in power – whether they are men, astronomers, or the American government – refusing to take no for an answer.
My experiences that follow are an attempt to show just how deeply this refusal to take no for an answer runs. I share these experiences because I want the attacks on those I love to stop. And, the first step involves all of us recognizing that these attacks are happening.
In the last few months, I’ve sat with four different women – all of them close friends – as they’ve told me they’ve been raped or severely beaten by men. I have heard similar stories from other women, but never at this rate. Of course, this will come as no shock to women, but the conversations have become commonplace. Writing the word “commonplace” to describe conversations about the rape and battery of my friends makes me feel physically ill.
Sometimes, I know the man who did it. Sometimes, I can only picture him and then feel disturbed by how easy it is to imagine a man doing this. Sometimes, I watch as pain pools in a friend’s eyes. Sometimes, I want to reach out as a distance seems to open in a friend’s mind.
Sometimes, she seems to be struggling with a presence I only vaguely detect. Sometimes, there are tears. Sometimes, there is only an icy determination to recite the story. Every time, though, I feel an overwhelming desire to take the pain away. And, in those moments listening, I know I can’t. I know I can’t stop violence that’s already happened.
With each successive story, I find myself wondering how these almost unspeakable horrors continue to be possible. I cannot call the stories “unspeakable” because these women have been so brave speaking about what has happened to them. They have shown incredible courage revisiting traumatic memories to name the abuse they’ve suffered. My pain, simply listening to their stories, is nothing compared to the pain they’ve felt and continue to feel.
I know I cannot take their pain away, but I can work to make sure this shit stops happening.
***
Abuse is essentially a refusal to take no for an answer. Rape happens when a woman tells a man no and he refuses to respect that. The degradation of natural communities happens when humans refuse to respect boundaries set by other beings.
Mauna Kea and the Hawaiian people are being abused by the TMT project. It started in 1898 when Hawaiians wrote to Congress after they were forcibly annexed to the United States explaining that they did not want to be Americans. It continues as Hawaiians say no to the desecration of Mauna Kea.
What allows men to decide that rape is acceptable? What is it about the American government that allows it to decide that the occupation of a land that does not want it is acceptable? What is it about the TMT project that allows them to decide they can desecrate Mauna Kea?
In each case, it’s a culture of entitlement. I’ve heard culture defined simply as the stories we tell ourselves. Men are told through the media, through pornography, and through centuries of institutionalized hatred towards women that women are objects to be used. Hearing these stories, men feel entitled to take from women what they want.
The American people are told that the American government is the best possible government in this scary world and as such the government is entitled to take the land and lives of other peoples. Meanwhile, a steady rain of American bombs falls around the world.
The scientists, astronomers, and corporations backing the TMT are told that science is going to save the world, that spending billions of dollars to make sense of planets lightyears away while the planet we’re on burns is justified because science is the highest form of knowledge the universe has ever seen. As a result, one of the world’s most sacred places is under attack.
I, for one, am ready for some new stories.
Comparing abuse of all kinds to the TMT project at Mauna Kea is more than just a passing connection. When we allow violations to occur over a whole culture’s protests, we normalize the abuse. We give the dominant culture another story of entitlement to add to a bloody list that’s already grown much, much too long.
So, why am I going to Mauna Kea? I am going because a people have clearly said no and I am sick of this violation imperative harming those I love while destroying the world.
From San Diego Free Press
Find an index of Will Falk’s “Protecting Mauna Kea” essays, plus other resources, at:
Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i: Protect Mauna Kea from the Thirty Meter Telescope
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 26, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Ashley Michels / Fox 31 Denver
Castle Rock will soon be home to one of the biggest malls in the country, but a local group is trying to push the project back to save the prairie dogs that live there.
The Castle Rock Promenade is scheduled to open by the end of 2015 near I-25 and Meadows Parkway. It will be one of the biggest shopping complexes in the country. While it is expected to bring a major economic boost to the region, several residents have serious concerns.
“I live here because of the open spaces, the topography,” explains long-time resident Linda Vannosdrand. “It is absolutely gorgeous and they are ruining it.”
Several Castle Rock residents stood in protest of the mall Tuesday because the area where it will be built is home to one of the biggest prairie dog colonies in the state. Many worry they will die with the development.
“There are thousands of prairie dogs out here and their lives are just as meaningful as mine is to me,” says prairie dog activist Deanna Meyer.
Protesters are asking Alberta Development Partners to push back their timeline until June.
“There is a way to do it right. The problem with that way is they need to wait until June because all the females are pregnant right now and when they do that they don’t come out of the burrows,” Meyer explains.
Alberta Development has hired a pest control company to begin placing traps over the prairie dog holes. It is not clear if they are being used to exterminate or relocate the animals. Attempts to contact the development company Tuesday were not successful.
From Fox 31 Denver: http://kdvr.com/2015/02/24/group-protests-trapping-of-prairie-dogs-at-huge-castle-rock-shopping-development/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 24, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest, Mining & Drilling
Image Credit: Ryan Martinez Lewis
Deep Green Resistance (DGR) is dedicated to the fight against industrial civilization and its legacy of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism. For this reason, DGR would like to publicly state its support of the San Carlos Apache tribe and the residents of Superior, AZ in the fight to protect Oak Flat from the destructive and unethical practices of foreign mining giant Rio Tinto.
Background
For over a decade the San Carlos Apache tribe and supporters have been fighting against profit-driven attacks on their land by the Superior, AZ based company Resolution Copper (RC), a subsidiary of the international mining conglomerate Rio Tinto. The foreign Rio Tinto is an Anglo-Australian mining company with a shameful history of environmental degradation, human rights abuses, and consorting with oppressive regimes around the globe.
Resolution Copper plans a massive deep underground copper mine in the Oak Flat area using a technique called block caving, in which a shaft is drilled more than a mile deep into the earth and the material is excavated without any reinforcement of the extraction area. Block caving leaves the land above vulnerable to collapse.
Despite this, Resolution Copper is set to acquire 2,400 acres of the federally protected public land in the Tonto National Forest in southeast Arizona in exchange for 5,000 acres in parcels scattered around the state. The 2,400-acre land, part of San Carlos Apache’s aboriginal territory, includes Oak Flat, Devil’s Canyon, and nearby Apache Leap – a cliff where Apaches jumped to their death to avoid being killed by settlers in the late 19th century. The San Carlos Apaches and other Native people hold this land as sacred, where they conduct ceremonies, gather medicinal plants and foods, and continue to build connections with the land. The now public land is held in trust by the federal government and is also used by non-Native nature lovers for hiking, camping, bird watching and rock climbing, and is used for field trips by Boy Scout groups.
Recent Activity
On December 4, 2014 the House passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which included the Oak Flat Land exchange as an attachment to the annual must-pass defense bill. This particular version of the land exchange included in the NDAA (the “Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act of 2013”) is the 13th version since the bill was first introduced in Congress in 2005 by former Congressman, Rick Renzi (later convicted in 2013 of multiple counts of corruption, including extortion, racketeering and other federal charges). AZ Senators McCain and Flake, responsible for sneaking this unrelated attachment into the NDAA, subverted the will not only of Native American Tribes, conservation organizations, the Superior Town Council, and others, but the will of the United States Congress which has forcefully rejected the land exchange for nearly 10 years. Flake, who previously worked for Rio Tinto at their uranium mine (co-owned by the Iranian government) in Namibia, acknowledged the bill could not pass the US Congress on its own merits.
Shortly after passing through the House, the NDAA was signed into law by President Obama on December 19, 2014, exactly 5 years after he signed the “Native American Apology Resolution,” a little-noticed expression of regret over how the U.S. had abused its power in the past.
The Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act demonstrates a total disregard for Native American concerns. Resolution Copper has also openly admitted to the fact that their process of mining would create significant land cracking and eventually subsidence. Another grave concern is the permanent damage to surface and groundwater. This mine will deplete enormous quantities of water and pollute it, which will devastate local communities.
Oak Flat is also a rare desert riparian area. Less than 10% of this type of habitat remains in Arizona. The land exchange would allow mining companies to avoid following our nation’s environmental and cultural laws and would bypass the permitting process all other mines in the country have followed. Since this mining would, by design, lead to the complete destruction of the Oak Flat area and potentially impact both Apache Leap and Gaan Canyon, the San Carlos Apache Tribe (along with over 500 other tribes across the country) strongly opposes it and the illegal land exchange.
Call for Solidarity
Indigenous peoples have always been at the forefront of the struggle against the dominant culture’s ecocidal violence. Beneath the violations of US law lies the glaring threat of sacred Apache land being further harmed and colonized. If RC is allowed to follow through with its mining plan, not only would this land be stolen from the Apaches, but it would be rendered unrecognizable.
There is a monumental need for solidarity work to save Oak Flat. The only acceptable action on the part of Resolution Copper is immediate cessation of any and all plans to mine in the ancestral home of the Apache people; anything else will be met with resistance, and DGR will lend whatever support it can to those on the front lines. The time to act is now!
For more information or to lend support, please visit the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition.
**DGR recognizes that members of settler culture are living on stolen land in the midst of a current and ongoing genocide of indigenous people and culture. We encourage those who wish to be effective allies to indigenous people to read our Indigenous Solidarity Guidelines.
References
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Jan 18, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Lobbying, Obstruction & Occupation, Strategy & Analysis
Featured image by Sierra Forests Legacy
By Michael Carter / Deep Green Resistance Colorado Plateau
Read Part 1 of this series here
Law enforcement has been so ineffective in preventing illegal ORV use that citizens are usually left to face the problem on their own. Stopping ORVs isn’t easy, but short of an end to gasoline—which we can’t wait for—impacts will continue to worsen if there’s no intervention. In remote areas like the Mojave Desert and Colorado Plateau, where would-be activists are scattered and overwhelmed and the police are essentially powerless and blasé, all strategies for stopping ORVs involve active and sustained effort. Here are a few:
Pressure law enforcement to do their jobs. Carry a camera with you always, and photograph illegal activity, if at all possible getting clear images of license plates. Document the time, place, and circumstances. Bring it to the attention of both the local and federal police, if on federal land. Be polite but persistent.
Physically close illegal trails. This can be surprisingly effective. Adopt an area and close off illegal trails with rocks, logs, whatever is handy and doesn’t further disturb the land. ORVers will keep trying to use the trail, but continued discouragement might eventually work.
Physically close legal trails. Similar to the last category, people may choose to carry out underground actions that close legal routes. [1] There must be a strict firewall between aboveground and underground activists: people or groups choosing to use underground tactics should not engage in aboveground actions, and vice versa. [2]
Close and reclaim established, authorized routes through administrative and legal channels. It’s the open roads that draw ORVs deeper into land they can then illegally violate, so every closed road is particularly helpful. This, too, takes a long and sustained effort. One helpful organization is Wildlands CPR (Now Wild Earth Guardians), [3] but don’t expect any non-profit group to have the resources to do the job for you. If you love the land you live in, be prepared to fight for it—a simple solution of hard, dedicated effort. Organize with those who agree with you, and fight.
Coyote Canyon Revisited
Private landowners neighboring Coyote Canyon in southeast Utah fought the originally illegal ORV use of the canyon, and tried to stop the BLM from sanctioning it. They pleaded with the public via every venue they could think of to write letters to the BLM opposing the move, yet ORV interests grossly outnumbered the effort. Fewer than ten opponents to the trail even bothered writing letters, and when the decision to open the canyon to ORVs was made the BLM didn’t even bother notifying the respondents, a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
Otherwise, however, the agency had prepared its documents thoroughly and neighbors were advised that a legal challenge probably wouldn’t have been effective. Although the BLM offered a number of concessions—the trail is only open Friday and Saturday to registered users, from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., among other restrictions—the agency legitimized crime, rewarding criminals with the sacrifice of another dwindling scrap of feral public land.
The Coyote Canyon example highlights several reasons why so few are willing to protect the land, and why they’re losing so badly. One is fear of reprisals from enemies (such as intentional trespass and vandalism of property, already an issue for neighbors of Coyote Canyon). Another is a reasonable assumption that their efforts will be ineffective—though of course making no effort will certainly be ineffective. Yet people tend to accept whatever situation they’re given. It’s uncommon to question an established arrangement, whatever it may be, and if one continues to question it life gets more uncomfortable. A resister will always face ridicule, accusations of poor mental, emotional and social adjustment, eventual ostracizing and occasionally murder. Yet social changes demand challenges to established practice.
When the BLM announced their decision to open Coyote Canyon to oil spills, noise, litter, piles of shit and soiled rags of toilet paper, almost everyone who was asked to help offered only a passing moment of sympathy. Not “what can I do,” not “what are our options,” but “that’s too bad.” It’s no wonder fights like this are frequently lost, when reactions are so feeble.
Industry and recreation groups, by contrast, are well organized and ready to rush to their own common cause. The right wing tends to be more accepting of orders; the boss says jump, they ask how high. They have something tangible they’re working for, a thing they like doing, a righteous maintenance of their privilege—such as driving anywhere they want. They stand to gain something where resistance stands only to prevent something—at least in situations like Coyote Canyon, where no comparable force opposes them.
Fighting Back
Resistance is tough. It means making one’s self unpopular, a hard thing to do among those who’ve been taught their whole lives that popularity is everything. Organizing can provide the possibility of overcoming our fear of reprisal, of ridicule, and of failure; it’s the only chance at effectively confronting injustices. Those who wish to prevent agency actions like the Coyote Canyon trail, or to promote re-localization of food production—any defensive or restorative action—can become an effective force if they work together, consistently and reliably supporting one another. Many progressives have been bled off by dogmas of non-confrontation, by intoxicating feel-good-ness, and by the idea that individualism is of primary importance. They’ve become lazy, fatalistic, and cynical; committed, organized struggle seems to be the sorry lot of desperately poor people in faraway places.
The examples that we have of committed resistance movements often are of desperately poor people, immediately threatened by the activities of rich and powerful enemies. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta is one good example, and so are the more than 130 First Nations governments in western Canada that have gathered against the tar-sands Enbridge Northern Gateway Project and the Kinder Morgan pipeline and tanker projects. [4] We who are in a position to protect the land mostly lack the ability to respond, to turn our empathy for places like Coyote Canyon into action.
The situation at the frontiers of wild land is desperate, too. Wealth and privilege let us pretend it isn’t, because we get food from supermarket shelves and water from a tap. We see little or no connection between the health of the land and our own well-being. Public land use is an issue that can be influenced relatively easily—unlike, say, racism—because land managers so routinely ignore or violate laws and effective tactics usually have to do with citizen enforcement. But environmentalists continue to lose, partly because exploiters have miscast conflict as user-group obstruction—framing the terms of the debate to ridicule love of the wild world, separating its fate from human fate. By allowing this, would-be activists surrender the land and leave the future to sadists and imbeciles.
The destruction of the planet, however easy it is to ignore, will catch up with us all. The civilized economies that steal from the poor to give to the rich will eventually end. They need to consume limited resources to exist and those resources—fossil fuels, topsoil—will not last forever. When this happens, we will again depend upon the land to sustain us. If that land is stripped of its capacity to sustain life by industry, agriculture, and recreation, then there will be nowhere else to go, and nothing to do but wage war and starve.
Abuse of the land is now normalized by faith in nonexistent frontiers (of renewable energy and electric cars, for example) and by misguided tolerance. Naming abuse—the destruction of the land in the name of fun or individualistic pursuits and the destruction of our selves by abusive people and systems—is often portrayed as abusive in itself. This is outrageous and infuriating, but should be expected.
Though it is far less damaging than industry and agriculture, the evidence for ORV destruction is well documented and easy to come by. It’s not even really contested by ORVers themselves. Those of us determined to stop this behavior face the same problem law enforcement does: the damage is so widespread and difficult to regulate that there’s little anyone can do. But there’s also a serious lack of activists with effective tactics and a coherent strategy to follow through on. This doesn’t mean, though, that we should back down.
Identifying with the Real World
Once on Cedar Mesa, in Southeast Utah, I watched an ORV intentionally veer to crush a dozing snake. The reptile churned and writhed in the machine’s track, dead or near dead as its nerves popped and struggled and ran down. I went to it, to witness its pointless death. A thick and handsome bull snake, it spent its last moments bleeding out in the dust. Why? Why do this? What drives this sick, stupid behavior? Why does our culture hate every living thing?
I lifted the snake into the sage and blackbrush so it could at least die in its home. “If they can’t evolve to get out of the way,” someone once told me about road killed animals, “then that’s their problem.” Of course, not evolving to changing conditions is what causes extinction. There’s little doubt that our culture will not voluntarily evolve to halt the worsening conditions that industry and recreation are creating on the planet. So how does anyone fight activity like this? How do we stop deforestation, global warming, ocean acidification? And given those immense problems, is ORV land abuse something to focus limited energy and resources on?
In addition to the suggestions made in these articles, activists can develop tactics and strategies and their way forward will eventually become clear. With hard work and determination a chance of winning would almost certainly emerge. But in a world of Keystone XL pipelines and epidemic levels of fracking, is the effort worth it? If you caretake a few acres of land, blocking travel and pulling weeds, how much does it matter if you stop, or get distracted, or die? If those acres are again immediately vulnerable, is your effort a waste?
Few things anger me more that seeing wanton destruction for fun. I wonder, though, if this is an unhelpful distraction. It’s easy to get angry at something so obviously disrespecting of the land. In terms of permanent impacts, though, industry is much worse, and the scale of destruction is enormous. Of course what runs it is oil. Always this—the temporary, illusory power locked in a liquid hydrocarbon, driving ORVs, factory fishing trawlers, factory farms, and industrial agriculture. It’s warming the atmosphere and leading us to a horribly impoverished future, where most of us will be unable to afford the lifestyle we’ve been subjected and addicted to, let alone find enough to eat.
Remove the oil and the engines stop, and a besieged biosphere can begin to heal. This is part of the strategy that Deep Green Resistance has proposed. [5] But in the meanwhile…ORVs, just one part of the picture, continue to cut apart what little wild life remains, the last seed bank of evolution as we’ll ever know it. The momentum of established civilized practice is now enormous—seemingly unstoppable—and its terminal is in global destruction, the eradication of all complex life. Challenge to this system is so psychologically and practically difficult that most of us ignore it.
Fighting for the real, wild world can begin with the understanding that humans are not everything, and that the fate of the world is ultimately our fate. It is much different to fight for your own beloved family than for a rocky canyon you’ll never visit. We progressives like to talk about how hatred of “other” races cannot be tolerated (not that much is ever done about that). But we hardly ever extend this principle to the non-human world—constant victim of our culture’s violence—because we’ve been conditioned to believe that humans are all that matter. The loons, the snakes, the too-slow creatures smeared across the roads and ground under rubber tires into the dirt, they and the people yet to come who won’t be able to live as we have because the oil is gone—none of them will care about our abstract, self-indulgent moral wrestling. That is the wall that human supremacy has built around us; it must be torn down.
Imagine again that an occupying culture, whose every act is force and theft, was destroying the means of your survival. Imagine them extracting fuel to use the world as a playground. Of course, it is not enough to stop them from driving their toys in every possible place. To survive in the long term we must also stop the extraction, the root of the problem, and eliminate the fuel for destruction. We must reclaim our adult responsibilities and stand up to defend the land where we live, knowing that until oil extraction and consumption is ended, there will always be a new group of occupiers finding new ways to destroy the land.
Endnotes
[1] Foreman, Dave. Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. Tucson: Ned Ludd Books, 1987, 89-109.
[2] Security Culture: A Handbook for Activists (PDF)
[3] “Resources,” Wild Earth Guardians, accessed July 13, 2014, http://www.wildearthguardiansresources.org/
[4] Carrie Saxifrage, “How the Enbridge Pipeline Issue Unified Northern BC,” The Vancouver Observer, February 13, 2012, http://www.vancouverobserver.com/politics/2012/02/13/nation-building-how-enbridge-pipeline-issue-unified-northern-bc
“Interior First Nations Pipeline Ban,” Dogwood Initiative, You Tube, December 2, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G5KtqPSW8Q
Carrie Saxifrage, “No Oil Pipeline Here: Enbridge Northern Gateway Joint Review Panel in Smithers finds 100% opposition,” The Vancouver Observer, January 17, 2012, http://www.vancouverobserver.com/sustainability/2012/01/17/enbridge-northern-gateway-joint-review-panel-smithers-finds-100-opposition
[5] “Decisive Ecological Warfare,” Deep Green Resistance, accessed August 28, 2014
