Agriculture

…but at least they released the trailer for the new Star Wars film. Julian Langer / Deep Green Resistance UK Children are choking to death and being prepared for evacuation as forest fires ravage Indonesia in what is probably the most severe environmental disaster of the 21st century. Endangered orangutans are losing their homes and food sources, which, obviously, has a severe knock on effect for their survival. Every day, the carbon emissions from these fires equals those from the USA, and we all know how much Americans love to be “green”. ...

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. ...

Originally posted by Suzanne Williams at Elephant Journal Born and bred in London, I’m a city girl through and through. But there is something fundamentally missing from city life that I believe is absolutely vital to our continued existence on this planet; a meaningful relationship with the land. However, when the ground is covered in cement and buildings nobody asks, “What relationship do I have to this land?” I don’t think anyone even notices the land at all, except when struggling up a hill with their shopping. ...

In 2007, David Fridley of Lawrence Berkeley Labs and San Francisco Oil Awareness presented a well researched and thorough debunking of the idea that biofuels are sustainable, environmentally friendly, good for farmers, or a path to energy independence. Fridley and his audience approach the issue from an industrial-human-centric standpoint concerned about peak oil, rather than from a holistic earth-centric and anti-civilization perspective, but his presentation is excellent for what it is. This is a great way to get up to speed on the dramatic, across the board problems and limitations of biofuels. ...

Saba Malik is on the board of Fertile Ground Environmental Institute, a non-profit dedicated to political and environmental education, and on the advisory board of Deep Green Resistance. She is a mother of two and has been a feminist and anti-racist activist for most of her adult life. Derrick Jensen interviewed her for the May 25th airing of Resistance Radio. In this interview, Saba Malik and Derrick Jensen discuss misogyny, ecocide, and the relationship between the two. Malik explains that a mindset of domination links the various forms of oppression we see in civilization. This mindset seizes on perceivable differences between groups to create classes, with one class justified in exploiting the other. This began with agriculture: the formation of sex classes gave men the “right” to use women for labor, offspring, and sex. As civilization expanded, this relationship was used as a model for dominating other “races” of humans and other species. ...

The annual March Against Monsanto is coming up May 24th. Kim Hill of Deep Green Resistance Australia wrote this speech for the March, supporting direct action and questioning the value of begging those in power to change. Life itself has been stolen from us. Genes, the very basis of life, no longer belong to the living beings who embody them, but to institutions that convert life into profit. Our basic needs, of food and water, no longer come from the land where we live, but from distant corporations that use the exact same food and water as a dumping ground for their wastes. ...

The following is from Bud Nye, A Deep Green Resistance supporter in Washington State: \\\___________ After reading Pandora’s Seed, Why the Hunter-Gatherer Holds the Key to Our Survival (2007), by Spencer Wells, here are some of my thoughts: Early in the book I sensed a technotopian slant. Sure enough, as I read more it became clear that, like so many technological utopian people today, Wells seems seriously to believe that we can steal energy from Earth’s ecosystems at the scale of our fossil fuel use without massively damaging those living systems with their billions of living beings. ...

One measure of the state of balance in a human society is its treatment of soil. Topsoil is the fertile basis of land life. Without soil, there are essentially no creatures larger than lichens, mosses, and microorganisms. It takes a forest approximately 1000 years to create 1 or 2 inches of topsoil. In extremely fertile conditions, grasslands and forests can create topsoil at double this rate. The last 10,000 years, the length of agricultural civilization as a way of life, has been an unmitigated disaster for soil. In many regions, the soil has been completely eroded, compacted, denuded, salinized, or otherwise destroyed. This has been the fate of the “Fertile Crescent”, of North Africa, Ethiopia, the Mediterranean regions of Europe, much of Eastern Europe, and of much of the interior of China, Mongolia, and India. ...