April 30, 2015

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.

April 25, 2015

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.

April 22, 2015

Deep Green Resistance on Instagram

A new DGR member has revived our Instagram page, posting beautiful pictures, political cartoons, thoughtful quotes, and all manner of resistance oriented memes. Follow our page to receive regular doses of visual inspiration, and please share our page with friends and family!

Deep Green Resistance Instagram

April 16, 2015

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.

April 12, 2015

DGR NY on Guy McPherson's Nature Bats Last

Pauline Schneider and Guy McPherson interviewed Frank Coughlin of DGR NY for the March 3rd episode of the Nature Bats Last podcast. Coughlin gives a basic overview of Deep Green Resistance: our philosophy, our strategy, our campaigns, and our goal of building a culture of resistance. He speaks, from his perspective as a health care practitioner and his experiences abroad, about the need for resistance in the heart of empire, rather than leaving the responsibility for revolution solely to those most oppressed and with the fewest resources. He also ties this exploitation of global capitalism to social injustices at home, and to ecological devastation.

Coughlin helped organize a workshop in New York City in late February featuring McPherson, and explains how the recent event grew out of a successful partnership the year before. McPherson presents a sober assessment of the state of climate change and the dire circumstances for all life on earth, including humans. Deep Green Resistance presents a strategy based on such a realistic assessment, proposing action on the same scale as our predicament. This sort of eyes-wide-open learning and decision making is likely to lead to more effective action than analyses and approaches oriented towards feel-good personal actions.

Listen to this episode as a good introduction to Deep Green Resistance with a personal spin: Frank Coughlin on Nature Bats Last, and visit Deep Green Resistance New York if you live in the area and would like to get involved.

April 1, 2015

Chris Hedges on the State of Extraction: exploitation, capitalism, and patriarchy

Chris Hedges spoke last weekend at the State of Extraction conference at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. While most speakers focused exclusively on natural "resources" ripped from the planet, Hedges brilliantly linked this environmental devastation with the social impacts of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism on our most vulnerable populations. He challenged the narcissism, individualism, and identity politics that have come to dominate modern culture, including most of the left. He identified as especially insidious the widespread acceptance of prostitution and pornography: no other subjugation is so widely rationalized and dismissed as these abuses of women. Even in so-called progressive and radical circles, sexualized violence and racism are fiercely defended where no one would try to justify such violations in any other circumstances.

In fact, Hedges was temporarily deplatformed from the State of Extraction conference precisely for calling on the left to recognize the war against women as part of the larger colonialist project, in his recent article amplifying the voices of women on the front lines. Even in venues actively opposing the status quo of capitalism and extraction from the earth, any challenge to the accepted wisdom of patriarchy is met with knee-jerk attacks and an unwillingness to listen. We've seen this again and again in recent years as radical feminist speakers have been silenced: deplatformed from venue after venue, threatened with rape and murder, and attacked in vicious smear campaigns. The only thing unique about this latest incident is Hedges' position as a privileged white man.

Deep Green Resistance strongly advocates for a radical view of our interlocking crises, environmental and social. We need to get to the root of our problems to fashion effective solutions. In our FAQ Is DGR a Feminist Organization? we explain:

Right now, patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. Women are just another resource for men to use in their endless quest to prove their toxic masculinity and breed soldiers for civilization’s constant state of war. The masculinity and the war—against people, against the planet—together have created a perpetual motion machine of domination and destruction of the land and human rights. This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. We will never dismantle misogyny as long as domination is eroticized. We will also never stop racism. Nor will we mount an effective resistance to fascism, since, as Sheila Jeffreys points out, fascism’s root is ultimately the eroticization of domination and subordination–fascism is in essence a cult of masculinity. Those are all huge spin-outs from the same beginning. The result is torture, rape, genocide, and biocide.

Please ponder this as you watch Chris Hedges give this amazing and truly radical speech:

Trigger warning: Besides the generally disturbing nature of this subject, Hedges reads a graphic account of a brutal rape from minute 46 to 48.

Also read DGR member Jonah Mix's analysis of the speech and male backlash against it: When “Paternalism” is Worse Than Commercial Rape: #StateofExtraction and the New Manarchist.