Celebrate achievements, or be lulled by hope?

Those of us who care about life and justice are often, understandably, disheartened by all indicators of the health of the planet continuing to worsen. Equally understandably, we tend to grasp at those rare signs that we may succeed in turning things around: a big turnout to a protest, hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition of national significance, or a year in which carbon emissions don’t increase over the year before.

We need fuel to keep us going as activists ― reason to believe our work can make a difference. We need to nourish our resistance by celebrating achievements. We know this is a long-term struggle and that we won’t achieve ecological sustainability overnight, that we must set strategic goals and allow ourselves to feel accomplishment when we complete tasks that contribute to meeting those goals.

But it is dangerous to conflate a possible support base, willing to make symbolic statements, with an actual effective movement. It is dangerous to confuse things-getting-slightly-less-bad with actual victory. We need to keep grounding ourselves in a big picture view of reality and of our strategy, tactics, and goals, and regularly ensure that our daily actions are consistent with a carefully thought out plan. When we reach milestones in enactment of our strategy, we should review them with pride and satisfaction, and build on them to further goals. But we shouldn’t seize on any bit of vaguely good news to make ourselves feel better in a bout of self-delusion.

We recommend reading the new post “Deep Green Resistance Seattle: The Climate Movement is Failing. Here are Two Models to Turn the Tide.” It opens with the Lauren Hill quote “Fantasy is what people want but reality is what they need,” then examines the lulling effects of a one-year leveling off of carbon emissions and of the excitement generated by the #ShellNO campaign. It puts these in context of what needs to happen, and introduces two model strategies ― CELDF as an aboveground approach to direct democracy in the US, and MEND as a belowground campaign of strategic sabotage against the oil industry in the Niger Delta.

And if you haven’t yet, read the strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare. If you’ve been uncertain as to how your activism fits into the big picture, these two links are a great starting point for you to contemplate how you can be most effective.

The Desert Star

by Unblind

There once was a little boy, who lived in the Middle East.

His family had been murdered when bombs rained in the streets.

He huddled silent upon the rubble of his crumbled home,

Suffering, starving, terrified, he survived there on his own.

Fire lit skies from ravaged landscapes burned into the night,

But when the smoke clouds cleared a lonely star came into sight.

Deep from within his broken heart, the boy wept out his wish;

End the massacre of his people by the hands of the Western Rich.

There was something magical in that star,

No one could understand it.

Even the boy didn’t realize that his wish would soon be granted.

What then followed was not what he had perceived,

Something far more incredible would make the world believe.

An army of one million spirits taken by the war,

Rose up from their graves that night to walk the earth once more.

They marched in silence hand in hand, mother father, child,

Through the endless battlefields that spread for miles and miles.

When the invaders’ outposts had finally been reached,

The spirits simply stood there until the gunfire ceased.

The soldiers were all dumbfounded as they looked on in disbelief,

There they stood hand in hand the spirits of their casualties.

One by one the soldiers dropped their heavy guns,

Staring at the ghostly faces, they realised what they had done.

Thinking of their own families and of those who they loved best,

The soldiers stripped off their uniforms, turned and headed to the West.

War machines stood empty, with weapons in the sand,

Smoke cleared to blue sky as peace fell upon the land.

The little boy stood there smiling, for his wish had come true,

Now he stared up at his mother’s face and asked;

“Can I come with you?”

The spirit embraced her child and gave him one last kiss,

She took his little hand in hers and granted him his wish.

His soul followed the others as they floated to the light,

Free from their deaths misery, they each glowed with renewed delight.

Wide-awake the world now sees,

Through the eyes of others new found empathy.

also see Unblind’s “Older But Not Wiser…”

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.

Why civilization must be stopped

Most of us born into industrial civilization assume that this is the way things are meant to be, and that any comforts and elegancies we can derive from its systems of exploitation are well deserved. Rarely are we willing to question what our culture will leave for future generations, or how it impacts other species and people around the world and right next door.

We in Deep Green Resistance feel it necessary to examine and challenge the dominant way of life, for both ethical and practical reasons. The short video below, portraying civilization from the perspective of some of the oldest people around, illustrates why.

If you’d like to help stop this omnicide before it’s too late, join DGR and a growing culture of resistance!

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.