Civilisation’s assault on traditional Himalayan cultures

by Elliott Ford, Deep Green Resistance UK

Whist traveling in the North Indian State of Uttrakhand, my beloved (Rachel) and I decided to visit a small village in the Himalayas called Khati, that had yet to receive a connection to the national electric grid. We hoped to get a brief insight into existence of a people that hadn’t become ‘developed’ and at the same time take in some beautiful views of the Himalayan range. I also thought this would be an appropriate time to start a book I’d been meaning to read called Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge which describes the effects of ‘development’ of the Ladakhi people in the 1980’s.

We set off on an old Enfield motorcycle traveling North into the mountains until the road turned to a treacherous uphill track and then eventually stopped altogether. We left the bike by the house of a friendly local man and started the walk to Khati which would last three days and take us over passes of 3500m.

As we approached Khati and walked through terraced monocrops of wheat, we realised it was unlikely we would be visiting a village unaffected by globalisation. Growing a single crop usually indicates that a rural area has switched from being self sufficient to selling the produce of monocrops to earn money and buy the necessities of life, as well as alluring luxuries. Our suspicions were confirmed when we stopped in a local tea shop and were offered Coca-cola and a selection of packaged foods that were essentially refined wheat and sugar, processed and marketed in different ways. Continuing on our journey we noticed litter was increasingly present as we neared the village. Prior to development there would have been no litter as everything would have come from the local area and eventually returned to the cycle in a different form. Plastic is different, it has no cycle to return to, it remains as litter, is burnt (releasing lots of carcinogens) or is thrown into a river to be carried to the ocean.

Many empty alcohol bottles were amongst the litter indicating a high level of alcohol consumption, another consequence of ‘development’ said to be caused by increasingly stressful lifestyles and exposure to advertising. And it appeared that these people were consuming plenty of advertising because, as houses came into view, we could see that each had a small solar panel and satellite dish on the roof. This meant that each house had a TV, exposing its residents to all the material things they “need” to be happy, and making them firmly aware of how much they lack. Prior to having the lifestyles of people from faraway places transmitted into their homes, it is likely that people would have been more content with what they had.

As we walked though the village to a guesthouse we passed a group of uniformed children who were returning home from school. It seemed that the Western education system had been adopted meaning children no longer spent their days learning knowledge and wisdom from their elders about local traditions and how to live on the land. Instead, children would compete with each other to learn abstract knowledge, chosen by people that had never set foot in their village. The result would be young people who lack skills to live on the land and instead have a skill set designed to serve the global economic system that will often involve them leaving the community for an urban centre.

It’s not just lack of appropriate skills that motivates young people to leave their community, as through exposure to T.V and tourists, young people reject their own culture, which is now viewed as inferior or backward, and strive to adopt the new Western culture and image. Teenagers we passed later were dressed in a way that meant they wouldn’t have looked out of place in any European city. Older generations still dressed in a more traditional way, wearing locally woven fabrics suggesting that the development process started relatively recently.

We stayed the night in the village and left the next day feeling sad, but not surprised, that the Western civilisation, based on endless expansion, had grown to envelop such a remote place. Norberg-Hodge describes the process of being enveloped as a “systemic transformation of society”, including many of the recent changes we’d observed in Khati.

I later reflected on what would cause the people of Khati to sacrifice their independence and rich, complex way of life to strive for ‘development’ where they’d become servile in a system of billions of people, with little chance of success, having their lives determined by activities and decisions made in distant places. Norberg-Hodge claims that looking at the modern world from the perspective of undeveloped people, “our culture looks infinitely more successful from the outside than we experience it on the inside.” In other words, it is a carefully crafted illusion that lures communities into an inescapable grasp before they realise the fallacy. Or maybe, like the majority of people in the West, they won’t realise the fallacy and instead continually strive for something that is just beyond their reach.

In the past, communities would be violently coerced to adopt ways of living for the benefit of ruling groups. “Today’s conquistadors are development, advertising, the media, and tourism.” Norberg-Hodge states, a process considerably more insidious than previous techniques and as a tourist one I must accept my part in. Although tourism to Khati is small compared to Ladakh, our presence would have far-reaching and unknown consequences.

My lasting impression was that if Western civilisation stopped tomorrow, after an initial period of readjustment, the people of Khati would experience a considerable improvement in their lives. Generations of people are still alive that possess knowledge that the younger generations seem unable and uninterested to receive. But those elders won’t be alive for much longer. Western civilisation must be stopped as soon as possible.

Guardian article on FBI harassment of DGR members & lawyer

The DGR News Service reported last October about a string of FBI contacts with Deep Green Resistance members. Adam Federman, a reporter with The Guardian, has just published an article about that wave of harassment and three recent detainments of lawyer Larry Hildes. Federman shares details of the initial FBI contacts with multiple members, including an especially intimidating pair of workplace visits, and with their families.

The FBI has a long and shameful history of surveillance and disruption of legal organizations working against the status quo. From outright intimidation and assassination to more subtle interventions to destroy the social glue of resistance communities, the FBI has engaged in illegal and undemocratic activity for decades. The recent incidents may be part of a Modern COINTELPRO directed against DGR and other environmental movements.

The article begins:

Deanna Meyer lives on a sprawling 280-acre goat farm south of Boulder, Colorado. She’s been an activist most of her adult life and has recently been involved in a campaign to relocate a prairie dog colony threatened by the development of a shopping mall in Castle Rock.

In October of last year, an agent with the Department of Homeland Security showed up at her mother’s house and later called her, saying he was trying to “head off any injuries or killing of people that could happen by people you know”.

Read the entire article about FBI harassment of Deep Green Resistance.

Prairie dog liberation campaign: report-back & video

The DGR Southwest Coalition recently held their annual Southwest Gathering, sharing skills & good food, and engaging in many discussions & strategy sessions. As part of the gathering, Deanna Meyer of Deep Green Resistance Colorado joined Brian Ertz of Wildlands Defense to discuss their recent campaign against a Castle Rock mega-mall development. We’ve reported here a little bit on the struggle, and are excited to share this video of Meyer and Ertz describing the campaign in more detail.

The campaign initially petitioned the developer to “do the right thing”: delay construction until June, so that threatened prairie dogs on-site could be relocated with the best chance of survival. Though this would leave the prairie dogs as refugees, displaced from their homes and with the rest of their community killed, at least they would have a chance to try to rebuild their lives. When the developer responded by poisoning the prairie dogs en masse (along with many others, human and nonhuman), the campaign focused on saving those who were left, and on creating an example of the developer by inflicting as much pain as possible.

The campaigners were unable to stop the development or to save all the prairie dogs, but their dedicated grassroots organizing succeeded at achieving their secondary objectives. They forced the developer to halt construction for months, allowing workers to rescue those prairie dogs who survived the mass slaughter. They’ve probably cost the developer millions of dollars and countless headaches, demonstrating the practical value to future developers of doing the right thing from the start.

Learn how these defenders of life leveraged their strengths to overcome a powerful opponent despite mainstream environmental groups saying “it can’t be done”, and how they plan to build on their win:

See more videos at the Deep Green Resistance Youtube channel

Deep Green Resistance “After Dark” short video

This short video gives a glimpse into social interactions in the life of a Deep Green Resistance member, friend, or family member. There’s a lot of good food, talking, laughing, good food, playing, learning, and some good food. This footage was taken after the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) in spring 2015, and shows a group of DGR attendees and presenters relaxing after their days of sharing and learning.

DGR After Hours from KITTYHAWK on Vimeo.

If you’re interested in joining us as we build a culture of resistance, please visit our website: Join Deep Green Resistance.

Baltimore & Black Lives Matter by Dominique Christina

Deep Green Resistance member Dominique Christina wrote a very powerful piece sharing her perspective and experience as a black woman in an institutionally racist America where black people are killed almost every day via state sanctioned, extrajudicial executions. Christina watched in anguish and grief and anger and terror as the murders of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore drove home the knowledge that her fierce motherly devotion could not guarantee protection of her children from our unjust society. Black mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters have watched life after life stolen with little or no consequence to the vast majority of the killers.

Christina got involved with Denver Freedom Riders, a movement to attain liberation, self determination, and healing for the black community. She journeyed with other members to Baltimore, to witness and participate in the uprising of anger catalyzed by the latest prominent brutality in an all-too-long string. In her post, she shares her experiences there and relates them to a bigger picture analysis of racism in this country:

My grandfather was born in 1911. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He knew all about the spectacle of black bodies dangling from trees, burned alive, castrated and beaten. What I could not personally reconcile was that I was having the same conversations about the same culture of violence that he was having as a boy growing up in the West End of Little Rock, Arkansas. Nothing had changed. Martin Luther King’s magnificent legacy did not result in black people being a protected class. Malcolm X’s unapologetic, larger than life, tell you the truth to your face way of being in the world did not stop the slaughter.

Both of those men were cut down by bullets in their prime anyway, which should have been all the evidence the following generations needed that this country is willful about its acts of brutality against black and brown people. If we couldn’t be slaves anymore we could be prisoners. We could be disenfranchised. We could be economically dispossessed. We could be squeezed and starved and relegated to barrios and ghettos that would kill us one way or another anyway. We should have known better. But we couldn’t see it…too much blood in our eyes.

Christina’s writing is an important view into the ongoing repression faced by blacks, and what blacks and those in solidarity with their struggles are starting to do about it. Read the whole article and share with friends: Baltimore & Black Lives Matter.

A visit to Hambach Forest

By Dan Planet, Deep Green Resistance

Just a short post on my visit to Hambach Forest in Germany, a resistance camp set up to defend the forest and prevent the RWE mine (Europe’s largest CO2 emitter) from further destroying the planet. (For background on the struggle, see The Battle for the Hambach Forest.)

I arrived for the skill share camp which was a whole week of people hosting workshops on everything to do with activism from tree climbing, blockades, dealing with police, discussions on politics, philosophy etc. The defenders are very welcoming and will speak in English even if like me your German is almost non-existent! The determination to protect the forest is really quite something else when you see the blockades, tree houses and the protectors doing what they do. I camped in the woods not far from the main camp, which is considered a little risky, but I wouldn’t have it any other way as the woods are truly amazing to wake up in.

My time in Hambach was inspiring but what I remembered more than any of the workshops or connections that I made was the forest itself. Nowhere more than Hambach have I found such contrast between natural and unnatural, sane and insane, ecology and industry, life and absolute devastation. The forest and the RWE mine couldn’t be more different. To use the Tolkien mythology, I literally at times felt like I was in Fangorn Forest and that Mordor was somewhere lurking near at the edge ready to eat up what is now left of the beautiful and delicate forest. In England we have pockets of ancient forest but I still wasn’t prepared for how enchanting this particular forest was and the bravery and determination of the people who want to defend it.

In short, if you can then please visit and stay a while…or stay until RWE encounter too much resistance and give up their ecocide!

View my pictures of Hambach Forest (it will be much greener now!), and visit the official Hambach Forest website.

Lierre Keith on “Peak Moment” discussing The Vegetarian Myth

In March 2011, the popular video series “Peak Moment” interviewed Deep Green Resistance author Lierre Keith about her book The Vegetarian Myth. Keith summarizes, with well-researched eloquence, some of the primary myths of vegetarianism:

  • Eating vegetarian is good for our bodies
  • Eating vegetarian is good for the earth
  • Eating vegetarian will stop world hunger

Keith, formerly a long-time vegan herself, explicitly acknowledges and honors the morals, values, and passion that vegetarians and vegans bring to the struggle against factory farming and unethical and destructive food production. But she asks them to examine these “vegetarian myths” to get to the root causes of our horribly dysfunctional systems. Throughout the conversation, she stresses the primary problem of civilization and its prerequisite of agriculture, which requires a shocking amount of energy to fight nature. Maintaining monocrops is a never ending war. Whether to feed caged animals on concrete, or to directly feed humans, this is a war we can’t afford to win.

Read a transcript of the interview or watch the video below, and if you’d like to learn more, we highly recommend reading the full book: The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith.

For more videos featuring Lierre Keith, the other DGR authors, and DGR members, visit Deep Green Resistance on Youtube or our Member Appearances page for both audio and video.

Are You Ready To Resist Roundup?

Deep Green Resistance member Raven Gray is actively writing for her new blog, Wild Awake, on subjects ranging from “reskilling” and permaculture to listening to the land and protecting it against industrial civilization. Her whole blog is worth following and exploring, but we wanted to especially highlight her recent piece about planned use of Roundup and other broad spectrum herbicides along the Point Reyes National Seashore: Are You Ready To Resist Roundup? Following on a prior look at Invasive Plants: Friends or Foe?, Gray explores how legitimate concern for the health of native plant communities has been twisted into its toxic mimic: support for the widespread application of poison. This provides a quick-fix “solution” while not coincidentally feeding profits of companies like Monsanto which heavily fund anti-“invasive” propaganda.

For those with much exposure to permaculture, the notion of so-called invasive plants as healers of civilization’s multitudinous damages to our soils is not new. But as with so much other greenwashing promulgated by mainstream environmental groups on behalf of their corporate partners ― renewable energy technologies are good for the planet, clearcuts are good for the environment, and on and on ― many people accept the carefully crafted message: “We must poison to preserve life.” Gray’s articles debunk this variant of the notion that humans know best how to “manage” the land.

The evidence is mounting, and it is too large to ignore. Glyphosate has wide-ranging adverse effects on all of life. Several countries have banned (or are in the process of banning) glyphosate. But while the rest of the world appears to be waking up to its dangers, it’s business as usual in the US.

What is the true cost of polluting our world with toxic chemicals? What if Roundup is the next DDT, and responsible for the new Silent Spring? How exactly is Roundup going to protect the endangered plants, birds and animals that live in the Point Reyes National Seashore? The red-legged frog? The snowy plover? Tidestrom’s lupine?

Roundup does not serve plants or animals. It does not serve the public interest. It does not serve life. It serves the US biotech industry and the US government who are pushing glyphosate around the world in an attempt to dominate global agriculture.

Deep Green Resistance on reddit

Check out our new Deep Green Resistance subreddit, where we have postings from our chapter websites, Facebook pages, and the DGR News Service, plus stories submitted by visitors. Reddit provides a great platform for finding, discussing, upvoting, and sharing articles of interest, so take a look and Subscribe to the subreddit if you find it interesting. As the subreddit becomes more active, we’ll draw on it as a source for our other media channels, so it’s a great place to add anything related to radical activism and resistance to civilization which you think we should share more widely.

We look forward to growing this newest platform for Deep Green Resistance outreach!