Deanna Meyer of Deep Green Resistance Colorado and Brian Ertz of Wildlands Defense teamed up to organize a 2015 campaign to delay construction of a Castle Rock, Colorado, mega-mall to save threatened prairie dogs. They discuss the campaign and some broader lessons for activists.
Action Alert!
Please let Channel 7 news know that their coverage of the following story lacked factual information and was unacceptable. With prairie dogs disappearing across the landscape with populations at less than 1% of their historic numbers, it is more important now than ever that the truth is told and that prairie dogs are not associated with vile rumors built on insubstantial lies.
Phone: 303-832-7777
email: 7NEWS@thedenverchannel.com
In the Channel 7 news clip, channel 7 news inadvertently tries to blame the plague on prairie dogs. There is no evidence that this is the case, and if it were, the prairie dogs involved would be dead as the colonies “plague out” and die within 3 days to a week if they have plague carrying fleas. There is absolutely no evidence that any of the prairie dogs in Larimar County were infected with plague carrying fleas or that the teen in this story contracted the plague from prairie dogs. Any “rodent” can have the fleas and dogs and cats actually carry the plague.
Keep the following prairie dog facts in mind:
“Prairie dogs are too busy dying from the plague to act as carriers and spread the disease. Prairie dogs lack immunity to plague, and mortality rates from outbreaks can exceed 99% of prairie dog populations. Prairie dogs typically die within a few days after contact with the plague bacterium. Other mammals, such as cats and dogs, do carry the plague. Plague in humans is easily treatable with standard antibiotics. While humans should take the health threat posed by plague seriously, the chances of catching it from a prairie dog are much less than the danger of being struck by lightning. In fact, some of the cases of direct transmission of plague from prairie dogs to humans involved people killing and skinning the animals.”
Follow the Facebook page Save the Castle Rock Mall Prairie Dogs for updates.
Editor’s note: This first appeared on Great Basin Water Network’s Water Gab newsletter. Read Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition’s analysis of the proposed SNWA groundwater pipeline project here.
Nevada’s Great Basin consists of pinion and juniper covered mountain ranges that run North/ South like wooly worms with long, wide, mostly arid valleys in between. However, Spring Valley is an exception. Traveling East/West on Hwy 50, one will notice that the floor of Spring Valley is tree covered. These trees, Rocky Mountain Junipers, were pushed there by Ice Age conditions. Their root system is very shallow. Consequently the trees are in extreme danger from groundwater drawdown from the Southern Nevada Water Authority groundwater pipeline and exportation project.
Near the Shoshone Pond
Natural Area of the BLM
Newe, Nevada’s Native peoples, were hunters and gatherers and roamed in small familial groups in their search for sustenance. This forest of junipers was centrally located, providing shade during hot summers and became the favorite gathering place for the Newe. Ample water-enabled plant and wildlife proliferated. Many game birds and animals, rare medicinal plants, pinion forests with their ample bounty of nuts were near and fish thrived in the nearby streams and ponds. The “Cedars” became a Sacred Ceremonial site, friendships were renewed, young people found mates, sacred ceremonies were performed and food and medicinal stores replenished prior to snowfall.
Delaine Spilsbury’s
grandmother survived
the final massacre.
Unfortunately, when the settlers arrived, the ceremonial gatherings were misinterpreted as war parties and massacres occurred. The first two massacres are of official U.S. Cavalry record. A military unit had traveled from Fort Ruby and was not aware of the marshy conditions in Spring Valley. Soon after the attack order, many of the cavalry ponies were mired in Spring Valley mud and most of the intended victims escaped. The Newe, now called Shoshone, were not so fortunate at the second Military massacre. Many were killed in this second “skirmish”. Written reports state that men’s penises were cut off and shoved into their mouths and tree branches were shoved into women’s vaginas. Newe believe that because of their violent deaths, the spirits of the victims remain in the Sacred Trees. A third Cavalry massacre was in process but abandoned when attackers became aware that the gathering was not a war party, but Newe gathering pine-nuts.
The final massacre of the Newe (Great Basin Shoshone) was by vigilantes, so there is no military record. Two little girls, approximately age eight, hid in a ditch and were not discovered. They were able to walk south to the Swallow Ranch. One of the girls, Annie Jack, eventually joined the folks at Ibapah, UT. The other survivor was named Mamie by the Swallows. She lived with the Swallow family until she married a hired hand, Joe Joseph, a Paiute from Shivits, UT. The Josephs made Baker, Nevada their home.
— Compiled by Delaine Spilsbury, Granddaughter of Mamie & Joe Joseph.
Rick Spilsbury at Swamp Cedars
Editor’s Note: this first appeared on Denver Freedom Riders
It is difficult to be radical in Denver. We are so privileged here. There’s a Starbucks and a Whole Foods on every corner; and dog parks and community gardens and it’s all so…seductive. It has an almost soporific effect. One can be lulled right to sleep by the idyllic snow-capped mountains and trendy cafes that suggest there is no crisis here. Our hoods aren’t like hoods in Chicago, Detroit, Jersey, parts of New York, New Orleans, St. Louis…Baltimore. No gritty crime drama about the drug trade and the alarmingly high homicide rates in the inner city could ever be filmed here. We are a little too deft with our trash pickups and our gentrification. Let me start near the beginning.
What I knew after the spectacle of horror that social media alerted us to on that Saturday afternoon in August in Ferguson Missouri was that I could not protect my children. That is an impossibly soul crushing thing to carry. Especially for somebody like me; somebody whose adolescence was punctuated by the slings and arrows of too many rapacious men and boys and all of the tripwire that accompanies growing up black and female. The one thing I felt certain about when I became a mother was that I would become a fortress. I would keep my children safe at all costs. They came from me; matriculated from my simple womb ands burst through this skin brilliantly. Being a woman in a patriarchal society makes you interrogate whether you can keep the softer parts of who you are and still defy the limitations of misogyny, but being a mother makes you a wolf. The way I love my children told me I was woman enough and wolf enough to keep them safe.
But then Trayvon happened and I felt the ground slipping underneath me. Still, I fought against the despair. I brought my children to rallies that called for Zimmerman’s arrest and I challenged out loud, the notion that Trayvon deserved to be seen as a threat and therefore murdered in the gated community his father lived in. The effort was exhausting and replete with all of the pushback that comes from those whose bodies have never been so undervalued.
Zimmerman was not convicted. I watched the verdict come in with my children and cried and lamented and then almost instantly felt naïve to hold out hope that our judicial system, the same system that criminalizes black and brown bodies to feed the prison industrial complex, would care about one black boy walking down a road at night who never made it home. A boy my community iconicized in hash tags and hoodies. See, we are so accustomed to being slain; so accustomed to the lynching ritual and the picnics afterward, sometimes the only fight we can manage is a blog post about white America and Facebook posts about the legacy of racism.
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.
The depression that reached for me was thick. I woke up every morning trying to convince myself that there was still a righteous fight somewhere. That life still held beauty. That I could still love my children seismically and urgently, and protect them from the insistent ugly of the world.
I don’t want to suggest that this feeling distinguished me from so many others in this country and around the world who felt uproarious about Big Mike’s body lying in the street for more than four hours and I don’t want to suggest that my suffering was somehow more pronounced than other people. I saw Leslie McFadden pleading with police officers to get her boy out of the street…her firstborn. And I saw those same officers tell her to get back behind the police tape. I saw and heard the eruption of rage that interrupted the consciousness of brothers on the block who were all too familiar with police brutality but who nevertheless could not forgive the offense of seeing that child’s body face down in the street. I carried the death of Mike Brown hard. I still do. I can’t think about him for too long without gnashing my teeth. I can’t think too long about the fact that my own firstborn son stayed up every single night all summer long watching CNN trying to understand what world this is. And I am his mother so it is incumbent upon me to do something, right? To get in between my child and the horror…but how do I do that? What does my fight look like? How can I arm him? I didn’t know.
What I do know is that somewhere in the course of grieving for a boy I had never met, killed in a town I had never heard of, was that I was starting to deny my children affection. I didn’t think it was wise to love them up close. I might lose them after all. I died a thousand times just carrying that thought.
At some point I did get up. School started up again. Lunches needed to be made. Field trips needed to be planned for. Mike Brown was not entering college but my youngest was starting Kindergarten. I had to have enough daylight in my body to acknowledge that. I couldn’t stop mothering just because I was unsure how to do it without defeat attached to it. Life, or something like it, went on.
There was an empty I kept though. Writing elegiac poems about these murdered sons was not sufficient. It was not the revolution I wanted; the revolution that was required. It was too convenient. Too safe. Too academic. I didn’t want to be guilty of that. I was looking for an opening; a way forward; a blueprint. How do I respond rather than react?
Many months later I got word that, Anthony Grimes, a dear friend of mine was going to be at a vigil being staged at a police station in Aurora because a black man had just been killed by officers in the middle of the day just a stone’s throw away from an elementary school. This particular man was not a man that was easy to advocate for. He had warrants and an extensive history of assault and domestic violence and had done a significant amount of time in prison. Still, he had been killed and when you choose to stick your chin out over your feet against extrajudicial killings you don’t really get to compartmentalize or choose which victims are deserving of your outrage. Even ex cons, even felons, even unsavory characters don’t deserve to be murdered at the hands of police without just cause.
I am notoriously opposed to marches and rallies because it has always felt like the pantomime of action to me. A lot of smoke and noise and signs and songs and 28 hours later another one of us is killed so my cynicism, while admittedly significant, is not without merit or historical context. But Anthony was going to be there and Anthony had gone to Ferguson and to Palestine over the summer and had become activated by the over-muscled need to defend us against such violence. He had risked much and sacrificed much. He started a group called the Denver Freedom Riders but this group was more a movement than a group; a deliberate call to action. For these reasons, I decided to attend the vigil and support my friend.
When I got there I saw Anthony along with many other community leaders gathered around the family of the man recently killed by Aurora PD. I could see Anthony’s grief and his rage. I could see his need to do something about what was happening and it mirrored my own need.
Thus began my relationship with the Denver Freedom Riders (DFR). It has not been easy. But how could it be? Gradualism and tokenism, which have been thematic to resistance movements involving black people in this country and abroad, can begin to pull at the hem of your garment. There are those that say they wish to fight with you to end the tyranny but the second they disagree with your position, they will call you crazy and disavow themselves from you. There is the quandary of fighting a dangerous fight with folk who think that it should be less inconvenient, more academic, more religious, less radical, more controlled, on and on. That’s not new. Any student of history can find that struggle in every movement. It does not tell me the sky is falling. It tells me the strong ones are rising. Hell, it feels like natural selection to me. If you do not have the necessary scrap and gristle to challenge power and acknowledge the tremendous risk involved, personal and professional, then you should go back to your campuses, your cubicles, and your 401K’s and keep writing papers about police brutality. That is not how I fight. That is not the stuff of DFR.
Weeks later, I was in a hotel in Chicago having just performed at the University of Illinois when the Baltimore uprising lifted off. Anthony and I had been talking about Freddie Gray, the young man who was illegally detained by Baltimore City police, roughed up and then subsequently brutalized in the back of a police van that resulted in 80% of his spine being severed from his neck, resulting in his death days later. We were seized by grief and levitating with rage from it all. I walked down to the lobby at the Hilton Hotel the day Freddie Gray was buried and saw young black people throwing rocks and bricks at police officers dressed in riot gear. It rocked me. I watched them climb on top of patrol cars and smash the windows with their feet. I saw them cuss officers and throw tear gas canisters back toward the line of police who were grossly outnumbered and outmatched by the sheer will and rancor of young folk who were done with the slow suicide of starvation and poor schools and miles and miles of boarded up row homes, (the evidence of Wells Fargo’s sub-prime lending practices and the foreclosures that threw so many black families into chaos), and the absence of recreation centers and resources, and the brutal practices of overseers who donned police uniforms and went looking for black men to criminalize, beat up, and murder. These young people were done.
I was captivated…and inspired. I’m sure that statement will make some people question whether or not we can continue to be relative to each other. How could I be proud of “looters?” Why would I ever support violence and the burning of buildings? I will tell you how. I am unwilling to keep waiting for America to count us in, to keep killing us and then vilifying us in death. I am tired of America’s violence being the inheritance of historically and contemporarily marginalized people who, when we finally erupt, are told to give peace a chance, and wait on the lord. I am tired of our anger being delegitimized. I am tired. Dog tired.
Anthony and I hopped a plane to Baltimore along with Corean, an 18 year old high school student and Kamau, a student at Howard university; two young people who have more courage and clarity than I ever did at their age. When we got into the city the first thing that assaulted us was the sight of tanks and the national guardsmen holding assault rifles, and cops, undercover and otherwise, peppering the steps of the capitol and hanging out in parks, watching more than a thousand protestors insist on justice. We got into things right away. That’s’ why we were there. We listened to the speeches, avoided CNN, talked to folks whose daily reality was the chaos we were seeing, and then finally made our way to meet with Reverend Sekou who was introduced into the consciousness of so many because of the role he played during the unrest in Ferguson. He was in Baltimore standing with the people there as well as conducting a series of civil disobedience trainings. He told us about the experience he and others had the night before when the police started cracking skulls once it was curfew, a curfew that was instituted after Baltimore City Attorney Marilyn Mosby gave a precedent setting press conference announcing that she was going to prosecute all six officers for the untimely death of Freddie Gray.
Sekou warned us that if we were going to stay outside and deliberately defy the curfew, that we would need to be careful. We had not yet determined what we were going to do. We just wanted to be useful and needed to spend some time figuring out how to do that.
We went back out to North and Penn, the location that was the epicenter of the “rioting” just days before and when we got there we saw grassroots organizations getting kids to paint and Anonymous handing out various anti-capitalism pamphlets, and Black Israelites and anarchists and the Nation of Islam and churches and on an on. We parked our car and as we were passing a basketball court I noticed three young boys shooting hoops. I walked on to the court and spoke to the littlest that I later learned was five years old. I asked him if I could play with him. He looked at me hard and said, “You sure?” “Yes!” I replied. “I’m sure. Shoot the ball.” At the same time, Anthony and Kamau dropped their backpacks filled with water bottles and Maalox and gas masks, and all of the accoutrement of guerilla warfare, and started playing with the two older boys. We did this for more than an hour. It was 8:30pm when we started winding down. I asked the five year old, who told me to call him “Meek Meek” if he was bothered by all of the chaos and he said he didn’t think about it. I asked him if he liked school and he said he had not been able to go on account of his teacher getting shot and the National Guard coming in.
Yeah man, I shoot around sometimes but volleyball was my thing.
He said,
Nah. Do you like to shoot?
“Yes…I do know how to shoot, Meek Meek.” I said. “What gun you like best?” He asked. “Um…I like a 45.” I said, feeling strange about having a conversation like this with a child a year younger than my own baby. He looked at me and said, “Oh that means you know how to shoot. I like a 9. No kickback on it.” And see, that is the distance your consciousness has to travel to understand Baltimore and how mighty the people there are, how warrior they have had to be. Theirs is a life that has to be muscled through. But be clear: during our time in Baltimore I didn’t meet a single victim. Not one. The politics of oppression are not always about the breaking and the broken. Sometimes it’s about the breaking and the undeniably unbroken. That doesn’t mean there are no bruises. It certainly doesn’t mean there are no casualties. There are so very many casualties. Those battle lines are drawn in this country over and over again and whether you will survive in spite of or because of is largely about your melanin content, your zip code, and your gender.
We said goodbye to the boys and it was hard to say goodbye. I fell in love with Meek Meek, the five year old who had the best shot out there and who looked longingly at me when I told him I had to go. I have thought about him every single day since the day I met him. I wonder if he is ok. I wonder if they opened his school, if he is getting at least two square meals again (because when they closed the schools in Baltimore they denied 85% of the children in those schools food since they rely on the Free and Reduced Lunch program.) I wonder if he knows how much he meant to me. And I wonder how I can see him again.
North and Penn at night was not what it was during the day. During the day it almost felt like a block party; like Juneteenth. Loud music, a DJ, people dancing, laughing, strategizing. But while that was happening, a militarized police force was surrounding us on all sides, watching everything we did. At night though, we could feel the shift in energy. Something was going to happen. You just knew that.
Joseph Kent suddenly walked to the middle of the street, bullhorn in hand, and started asking people to join him.
Joseph is a fiery, prominent young activist who captured the attention (and concern) of many people when someone videotaped him being swept away by riot police just three nights earlier. But there he was, big as ever, leading us in a chant:
“I got a feelin…I got a feelin brother…I got a feelin…somebody’s tryin’ to hold us back, and there ain’t gonna be no stuff like that….”
We started following him as he led us in a march away from North and Penn and toward the inner harbor. We walked for about forty minutes. When Anthony checked his watch it was 9:30pm. Curfew was at 10pm. We knew getting back to our car by curfew was going to be tough. We were trying to decide whether we were going to stop right then and turn back when an 11-year-old kid walked up to me and asked if I was going to stay out there with him. He said he defied the curfew the night before and had witnessed police officers beating people once the clock struck ten. I asked him how he managed to escape and he said, “You just gotta know how to move.” Then looked at me again and said, “So…are you staying out with me or not?” “Of course I am.” I said. “No way are you gonna outlast me. If you are out here then we are too.” I continued and Anthony readily agreed. The kid looked at all of us and grinned then walked over to Anthony and asked if he could borrow his gas mask. Anthony accommodated him. The kid immediately put it on and kept marching.
Minutes later a CNN correspondent walked over to us and asked me if I was willing to talk to them. I am sure they were captivated by me walking shoulder to shoulder with a kid in a gas mask, but I also think they surveyed the crowd and determined that our crew would be the most “user-friendly.” Maybe I’m projecting but that’s how it felt to me. I looked at Anthony for direction and Anthony said, “No. We are not interested” and that was that. CNN’s coverage of Baltimore was abysmal and divisive and misleading anyway so that choice was the one with the most integrity, I think.
At ten minutes ‘til 10, riot police started moving in along with helicopters hovering overhead shining bright lights down on all of us. A tank pulled up on our right side essentially pinning us in. We couldn’t go back because the riot police were behind us. We couldn’t go right because the tank was there. We couldn’t reasonably go much more forward because we could see a line of officers already lined up behind their shields ahead. Suddenly there was an announcement over a loud speaker that curfew was imminent and that soon we would be in violation of it. The anxiety from the crowd was palpable. There were some white boys in Guy Fawkes masks rolling around on skateboards flipping cops off, there were others in gas masks trying to advise us, one lanky brother was moving through the crowd telling us to stay together by any means necessary. He was so frenetic it made me nervous. He was telling everyone to calm down but he himself was electric with worry and you could see it in him.
A second announcement came that it was three minutes until curfew and Anthony, Corean, Kamau and I were walking with our arms linked trying to quickly determine which way we were going to go. The lanky brother full of frenzy was passing by people, touching them on the shoulder ands telling them to remain calm. When he got to me he didn’t touch my shoulder, offer advice and keep going, but instead, put himself in front of me and put one hand on my breast and the other on my…ahem… baby box, and said “I wanna make sure YOU are safe.” It shocked me. Anthony told him to watch his hands, (I learned later that Anthony did not see that this young man had decided to molest me before the cops jumped on us. He just saw him being too close to me and didn’t like it.) I offer that part of the story only because what followed was so traumatizing, I actually forgot I had been molested until much later when we were all safely back at the hotel, debriefing our experience. For me to forget something like that is seismic. It means that what the cops put me through made that act seem insignificant. Oh trauma, you wanton bitch…
When it was 10pm the pepper spray came. Along with sirens and flashing lights and cops running after us with their guns out. People were screaming and fleeing and in my mind there was only one place to go that did not have the apparent presence of police. Down a dark side street to the left, which is where we went. We ran. We ran and felt all of the terror our ancestors must have felt when the slavers came, when the paddy rollers came, when the only thing in your head is NO. YOU WILL NOT TOUCH ME. It was an old feeling. It is a dangerous knowing.
We dipped into the projects. We didn’t plan on it. We had no plan except to get the hell away from the same old hands that have been chasing us for centuries. We went where we saw an opening. We found ourselves in a dark courtyard. There was no one around. I saw two chairs in front of someone’s apartment and suggested that we sit down in them and pretend to be at home. I figured they were looking for people who were running, people who were scurrying, people who appeared to have no belonging. I pulled one of the chairs out and at that moment, a fair skinned black woman with a stern face opened her door and asked us what was going on. Corean told her that we were running from police officers that meant to harm us; so many people had been harmed already. The woman told Corean to go inside then looked hard at me, Kamau and Anthony. Corean is a petite, baby-faced beauty, but Kamau is a young black man who, in that moment had a wild in his eyes having run from riot police, Anthony is 6’4” and undeniably black and I, myself, am 6 feet tall. The woman looked at each one of us for a moment more and then opened her door wide and said “Go inside. But you be careful coming in my house because I don’t know you.” She let us stay there until it was safe to get away.
The kid in the gas mask we were walking with was arrested. Joseph Kent, the dazzling young activist, was arrested by the very officers who were telling him as we were marching that they would NOT do so. I saw a girl who looked to be about 13 years old, clotheslined by a cop as she was running away from riot police. Her head hit the pavement hard. I keep hearing her screams in my head and the terrible smack of her head crashing onto the concrete. Things CNN didn’t show you. I saw police officers snatching people off of their porches, their own front porches, and putting them in police wagons because of that ridiculous curfew. I saw it. I never saw the media seek to have the relevant conversations. I never saw them really expose and condemn the officers who kept the media safely behind the caution tape while they pepper sprayed people for exercising their rights as human beings before snatching them down to the ground by their hair and dragging them on their faces. Instead, I saw media talking to protestors about the burned out CVS and the legitimacy of defying the curfew without ever interrogating how criminal it was to issue that curfew in the first place and the way it squeezed and oppressed a community already rocked with appropriate grief and rage.
I should tell you about the “write-in” we went to the next day at a church for high school aged students who were there to talk about what was happening in their city. I should tell you that as well meaning as the organizers were who put the event on, none of them lived in the city. They lived in the suburbs. I should tell you that the kids who were in attendance (about 12 of them) came from private schools and therefore, could not really talk from the inside of things the way 5 year old Meek Meek could. Still, writing is a meditation. It is a balm and a blessing and in that regard what happened in that room was still important.
We went to a barbecue after that being held at the Gilmore Homes where Freddie Gray was arrested. We stood in the exact spot where Freddie was tackled and abused by Baltimore Police where a memorial now announces the birth and death dates of Freddie, spray painted on a brick wall with a halo over Freddie’s name. We met the man who videotaped Freddie’s arrest on that fateful day, who is a part of a group called Cop Watch. We saw Amy Goodman from Democracy Now interviewing the residents too and we ran into three brothers from Ferguson who had also flown in to offer their support. We saw the residents of the Gilmore Homes with their kids who were finger painting, playing touch football and rolling around on tricycles. They talked about Freddie and how they saw him everyday. They talked about a place called Mama’s that had been set on fire; a fire the police claimed was started by gang members but according to residents, was set by the officers themselves. We heard many stories like that.
How the Baltimore Police Department claimed a “group of criminals” set fire to a trash can and then an independent journalist who was on the scene said on twitter that, in fact, the fire was set by a grenade thrown by the Baltimore Police that landed in that trash can, setting it ablaze.
I guess maybe that’s why I have decided to write all of this down. It is the acknowledgement that those in power always describe us as thugs and monsters, looters and thieves, rioters and hoodlums and if we do not challenge that narrative, if we do not stand up and tell our stories, the people in power get to keep killing us and claiming that we deserved it. Without the truth, they get to disappear us, they get to stop us about a tail light and then shoot us in the back, plant evidence and claim we threatened their lives; they get to arrest us because we made eye contact with them, beat us, hogtie us, and then throw us into a police van on our stomachs, unbelted, handcuffed and bruised to be thrashed against a metal partition until our spine is severed. No.
And as long as my heart is beating I will wake up every morning and work long into the night making that the reality for us all. How could I not? I met a five year old and an eleven year old who are willing to do as much. And while I got to get on a plane two days later and leave hell, nothing in me will ever pretend I didn’t see what I saw, know what I know and go back to the convenience of dog parks and manicured lawns and let them stay there and burn.
Dominique Christina, MA, M.Ed
Author, Agitator, Freedom Rider
May 11, 2015
California gets most of the attention in drought news coverage because so much of the state is in exceptional drought—the highest level—but 72 percent of the Western U.S. is experiencing drought conditions, according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor data.
When California’s snowpack assessment showed that the state’s snowpack levels were 6 percent of normal—the lowest ever recorded—it spurred Gov. Brown’s administration to order the first-ever mandatory water restrictions. California’s snowpack levels might be the lowest, but the Golden State is not the only one setting records. A new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) finds that nine states reported record low snowpack. The report states:
The largest snowpack deficits are in record territory for many basins, especially in the Cascades and Sierra Nevada where single-digit percent of normal conditions prevail. Very low snowpacks are reported in most of Washington, all of Oregon, Nevada, California, parts of , much of Idaho, parts of New Mexico, three basins in Wyoming, one basin in Montana and most of Utah.
Only high elevation areas in the Rocky Mountains and Interior Alaska had normal or close to normal snowpack levels. “The only holdouts are higher elevations in the Rockies,” said Garen. “Look at the map and you’ll see that almost everywhere else is red.” Red indicates less than half of the normal snowpack remains. Dark red indicates snowpack levels are less than 25 percent of normal.
And not only is the snowpack drastically reduced in many states, but it’s melting earlier now, too. “Almost all of the West Coast continues to have record low snowpack,” said David Garen, a hydrologist for USDA’s National Resources Conservation Service. “March was warm and dry in most of the West; as a result, snow is melting earlier than usual.”
Historically, April 1 is the peak snowpack. But this year, the peak came earlier because there was very little snow accumulation in March and much of the existing snow had already melted. Streamflow will be reduced even sooner in spring and summer, leaving reservoirs—already well below average in many areas—that much more depleted, the report finds. As of April 1, reservoir levels are below average in at least five western states: Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah,” according to Reuters. That doesn’t include California, which NASA scientist Jay Famiglietti said has about a year’s supply of water in its reservoirs.
Editor’s Note: This video, PROTECT OAK FLAT: SAVING APACHE SACRED GROUNDS, was produced by Paper Rocket Productions on Vimeo. This is the accompanying text, also by Paper Rocket Productions:
For nearly a decade, Resolution Copper Mining, a subsidiary of British-Australian mining conglomerate Rio Tinto, had unsuccessfully sought ownership of Oak Flat Campground.
Yet, on December 19, 2014, with the help of Senator John McCain, the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act of 2013 resurfaced within the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and was successfully passed by the Senate and signed off by President Obama .
The new legislation will open up Oak Flat for copper mining.
As part of the deal, Resolution Copper will swap roughly 7.8 square miles of land scattered across Arizona for roughly 3.8 square miles of Tonto National Forest, which includes Oak Flat.
Resolution Copper is required to work with the U.S. Forest Service to do an environmental impact study, however, they are guaranteed to get the land, regardless of what the study shows.
Also, the company has chosen a cheaper method of extraction called block cave mining. The aftermath of the mining will result in a crater two miles wide and up to 1,000 feet deep, destroying the surface of the land as well as generate nearly a cubic mile of mine waste.
Protect Sacred Sites
Special Thanks to:
Wendsler Nosie Sr.
John Mendez
Naelyn Pike
And all our Apache and Diné Relatives
Ahé éhé
By
Members of the Paiute nation living in northeastern Nevada are angry after the Forest Service clearcut more than 70 acres of pine nuts trees that have been used by the tribe for thousands of years, until the modern day.
According to the Forest Service, the trees were cut “by mistake” as part of a federal plan to improve habitat for the Sage Grouse (a story that Deep Green Resistance Great Basin has previously covered). Tribal members disagree, stating that clearcutting these forests will not help the Sage Grouse and should not be done without consultation and approval from the native people.
Here at Deep Green Resistance, we are all too aware of the long history of “destruction disguised as restoration.” It’s a pattern that the Forest Service has been guilty of in the past, when it has used the cover-story of “forest health” to justify extensive clearcutting — including cutting old growth forests — in the Pacific Northwest.
More information about this situation is documented in the book Strangely Like War by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, which begins with a quote from the logging industry:
“It was strangely like war. They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only making lumber but liberating the land from the trees.”
— Murray Morgan, 1955
Dewey and others in the Paiute Nation protests group have set up a website,www.Tubape.org, to address the issue further. Here is an excerpt from the website:
“The local Tribal governments and Indigenous people of Nevada and California are aware of the Carson City District resource management plans to conserve, enhance, and/or restore habitats to provide for the long-term viability of the Greater Sage-grouse Bi-state Distinct Population Segment. This action is needed to address the recent ‘warranted, but precluded’ Endangered Species Act (ESA) finding from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) by addressing needed changes in the management and conservation of the Bi-state Distinct Population Segment habitats within the project area to support overall greater sage-grouse population management objectives within the states of Nevada and California.
“However, we disagree with your proposed action and request that you CEASE and DESIST immediately! Your agency’s are destroying our fishing, hunting and gathering sites as well as sacred sites within the Sweetwater Range and all areas within your DEIS. We have pictures and video’s taken by tribal members from the local areas. We demand that you comply with National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that specifically states your agency is legally bound to comply with Executive Order 13175 and your Trust Responsibility to the Tribes.
You have intentionally destroyed our Pine trees (Tu’ba’pe) forests in Sweetwater (Pehabe Paa’a), Desert Creek (Pazeeta Nahu Gwaytu), Sand Canyon (Kiba Mobegwaytu), the territory of the Paiute (Numu) people and all of the Pinenut (Tu’ba’pe) trees and cedar (Wapi) trees in the Great Basin.”
Read more at www.tubape.org
Local news coverage in the Reno Gazette-Journal:http://www.rgj.com/videos/news/2015/02/07/23049559/
We will continue to post information about this struggle.
As the morning sun rose high enough to burn off the chilly overnight temperatures, mesquite fires scattered throughout the Oak Flats Campground offered a warm welcome to a special day for Arizona’s San Carlos Apache tribe.
Michael Paul Hill/Facebook
Protesters gathered for a day of spiritual succor at Oak Flat, the sacred Apache site that was all but handed over to Resolution Copper in the latest must-pass federal defense-spending bill.
Some 300 tribal members and supporters from across the country had gathered to protest the infringement of traditional Apache holy lands. There were Chippewa, Navajo, Lumbi, Pauite, Havasupai, and representatives of the National American Indian Movement and the National American Indian Veterans group, as well as non-indigenous supporters representing myriad concerns including those of environmentalists and other lovers of nature. All were furious at Congress’s sneaky transfer of sacred Apache land to a mining company and vowing to do what they could to see that it didn’t happen.
“What was once a struggle to protect our most sacred site is now a battle,” said San Carlos Apache Tribal Chairman Terry Rambler, organizer of the grassroots movement aimed at stopping transfer of hundreds of acres of ceremonial land to those who would dig a mile-wide hole in the ground in a search for copper.
RELATED: San Carlos Apache Would Get Biggest Shaft Ever in Copper Mine Land Swap
San Carlos Apache Leader Seeks Senate Defeat of Copper Mine on Sacred Land
Arizona’s Apache Tribe represents a culturally rich society with heritage tied to Mother Earth. As a people, they extend a Hon Dah welcome greeting to all who wish to share their culture and history. But now they are fighting to keep their holy lands culturally sacrosanct.
“Our homelands continue to be taken away,” said former San Carlos Chairman Wendsler Nosie Sr., decrying what he termed the dirty way in which a land-swap rider had been attached to a must-pass bill that sailed through Congress and was signed into law by President Barack Obama. The amended legislation, with the support of Arizona Senator John McCain, was “an action that constitutes a holy war, where tribes must stand in unity and fight to the very end,” according to Nosie.
The legislation that the former chairman termed “the greatest sin of the world” is the Southeast Arizona Land Exchange and Conservation Act, which gives a 2,400-acre tribally sacred site to a global mining entity, Resolution Copper, that wants to destroy its natural state with a massive mine intended to extract an ore body located 7,000 feet below ground level. That ground is hallowed to the Apache peoples whose reservation border is just east of the proposed mine at Oak Flat, home to Indigenous Peoples since prehistoric times, a place where acorns and medicinal herbs are gathered and coming-of-age ceremonies are held.
Kicked off by earlier protests in both Tucson and outside Senator McCain’s Phoenix office, the multi-pronged awareness approach to mitigate the potential fate of Oak Flat picked up momentum via a two-day, 44-mile, march from the San Carlos tribal headquarters and culminated in a weekend-long Gathering of Nations Holy Ground Ceremony, “A Spiritual Journey to a Sacred Unity,” at Oak Flat.
Following a holy ground blessing, the morning was filled with traditional, cultural and religious dances, with Rambler dancing and Wendsler joining the group of drummers. The weekend of solidarity was epitomized by guest speaker and activist preacher John Mendez.
“What the system doesn’t know, what Resolution Copper doesn’t know, is there is nothing that can break our spirit and keep us from moving forward to victory,” Mendez told the assembled. “This is a protracted struggle, but if we stay true to task, we will win. A single flame can start a large fire, and we’ve created a fire that cannot be extinguished.”
The Apache struggle has become part of the ongoing battle worldwide for Indigenous Peoples protecting sites that are sacred to them because of the places’ importance to both spiritual and physical survival.
“This issue is among the many challenges the Apache people face in trying to protect their way of life,” Chairman Rambler told Indian Country Today. “At the heart of it is freedom of religion, the ability to pray within an environment created for the Apache. Not a manmade church, but like our ancestors have believed since time immemorial, praying in an environment that our creator god gave us. At the heart of this is where Apaches go to pray—and the best way for that to continue to happen is to keep this place from becoming private land.”
RELATED: San Carlos Apache Leader: ‘What Was a Struggle to Protect Our Most Sacred Site Is Now a Battle’
Yavapai-Apache Chairman: ‘Oak Flat Holy Sites are Central to Apache Spiritual Beliefs’
Spiritual Unity Can Save Sacred Apache Land From Mining
Despite Obama’s signature on the measure, the administration has expressed displeasure as to how the legislation flew under the radar to become law.
“I am profoundly disappointed with the provision of the bill that has no regard for lands considered sacred by nearby Indian tribes,” said U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell.
The passage has created numerous schisms.
“The nearly decade-long fight over access to the federally protected land has ignited a feud that has split families and ended lifelong friendships,” the Los Angeles Times noted.
It also has united those who oppose Rambler, and the ongoing, nearly 10-year-old struggle has garnered support from more than 500 tribes, many who face similar situations with mining or development proposed in areas that other Native Americans consider holy. If this can happen to the Apache nation, it can happen to any other nation was the general feeling.
“We have a similar situation with an effort to build a tramway down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon,” said Lorenzo Robbins, a Navajo from Northern Arizona.
“We’re fighting a strong battle to protect Mother Earth from uranium mining,” said Uqalla, a member of the Havasupai tribe. “The responsibility of all indigenous spiritual carriers is to protect the earth.”
Rambler, welcoming the support, said it is indeed everyone’s battle.
“We must stand together and fight,” Rambler said. “We’re drawing a line in the sand on this one. We’re against this specific project because it’s going to desecrate and destroy this whole area and the Apache way of life we are accustomed to.
“This gathering and our direction in the future is to keep an awareness of the situation in the public mind, in the mind of Congress, and to let everyone know this issue is not going to go away,” Rambler said. “We need to stay on top of it every day to make sure our voices are heard. We’re praying to our creator god, asking him to guide us throughout this whole process so that we can win in the end and preserve what he created for us.”
Video: What Resolution Copper Wants to Inflict on Apache Sacred Land
Editor’s Note: This first appeared on Deep Green Resistance News Service
By Kim Hill / Deep Green Resistance Australia
Naomi Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything, is based on the premise that capitalism is the cause of the climate crisis, and to avert catastrophe, capitalism must go. The proposed solution is a mass movement that will win with arguments that undermine the capitalist system by making it morally unacceptable.
This premise has many flaws. It fails to acknowledge the roots of capitalism and climate change, seeing them as independent issues that can be transformed without taking action to address the underlying causes. Climate change cannot be avoided by building more infrastructure and reforming the economy, as is suggested in the book. The climate crisis is merely a symptom of a deeper crisis, and superficial solutions that act on the symptoms will only make the situation worse. Human-induced climate change started thousands of years ago with the advent of land clearing and agriculture, long before capitalism came into being. The root cause—a culture that values domination of people and land, and the social and physical structures created by this culture—needs to be addressed for any action on capitalism or climate to be effective.
I’ve long been baffled by the climate movement. When 200 species a day are being made extinct, oceans and rivers being drained of fish and all life, unpolluted drinking water being largely a thing of the past, and nutritious food being almost inaccessible, is climate really where we should focus our attention? It seems a distraction, a ‘look, what’s that in the sky?’ from those that seek to profit from taking away everything that sustains life on the only planet we have. By directing our thoughts, discussions and actions towards gases in the upper atmosphere and hotly debated theories, rather than immediate needs for basic survival of all living beings, those in power are leading us astray from forming a resistance movement that could ensure the continuation of life on Earth.
This book is a tangle of contradictions. An attempt to unravel the contradictions and understand the thinking behind these arguments is what drew me in to reading it, but in the end I was left confused, with a jumble of mismatched ideas, vague goals, and proposals to continue with the same disjointed tactics that have never worked in the past.
This Changes Everything advocates for socialism, then explores why socialism won’t stop fossil fuel extraction. It is against capitalism, yet insists ‘there is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy’. Renewable energy is promoted as an alternative, yet the objections of people whose land and livelihoods are destroyed by these developments is acknowledged and respected. The book promotes the rights of indigenous people to live on their land in traditional ways, and at the same time claims they need jobs and development. It sees the extraction and burning of fossil fuels as the main cause of the climate crisis, yet recommends solutions that require more of the same. It supports economic development while opposing economic growth. It says that ‘compromised, palatable-to-conservative solutions don’t work’ yet is selling exactly that.
One chapter is devoted to promoting divestment from fossil fuel companies, even though this is openly acknowledged to have no economic effect. Apparently it will ‘bankrupt their reputation’ rather than actually bankrupt them. This strategy is unlikely to work, as corporations spend millions on PR campaigns, and control the media, so anyone outside this system will struggle to have any real effect on their reputations. And corporations are powered by money, not morals, so moral campaigns on their own can’t shut down a company. And if they did, this targeting of specific companies, rather than the entire economic system, will only create space for others to take their place.
Another chapter explains why ‘green billionaires’ won’t save us, which seems unnecessary in a book arguing for dismantling capitalism—of course more capitalism won’t help. Strangely, Klein is disappointed that Virgin CEO Richard Branson, despite investing many millions of dollars to invent or discover a ‘miracle fuel’ to power his ever-expanding airline, did not achieve this impossible goal. What difference would it make if he had been successful? Whatever this fuel might be, it would still need to be extracted from somewhere, and burned. Unless money really can buy a genuine religious miracle, and even then, the airline industry requires massive amounts of land, mining and manufacturing, and a globalised economy. If fuel costs were not a limitation, these industrial processes would expand more quickly, destroying everyone and everything in their path. A miracle fuel still leaves us with a culture of travelling the world at jet speed, rather than a localised culture of dialogue and relationship with nature. This is the disconnected thinking that comes from engaging with climate as an isolated issue.
The book concludes with a call for a nonviolent mass movement, and ‘trillions [of dollars] to pay for zero-carbon, disaster-ready societal transformations.’ The requested transformations are a transition to renewable energy, and building more infrastructure. These won’t stop capitalism or climate change, and would make the situation worse. A mass movement would require a mass of people who both share these goals and believe that a mass movement is the way to reach them. Given the compromised and conflicted goals, and the corporate influence on the climate movement recently, this is unlikely to happen.
Mass movements using only moral arguments have never changed systems of power in the past. The global Occupy movement is a recent example. While a great deal was achieved, the capitalist system is still with us, and it will take more than peaceful demonstrations to take it down. The infrastructure of capitalism needs to be physically dismantled, using a diversity of tactics, and the culture of domination that legitimises extraction and exploitation must be confronted, and replaced with land-based cultures that value relationship with all living beings.
Image modified from original art by Mark Gould: http://theartofannihilation.com/this-changes-nothing-why-the-peoples-climate-march-guarantees-climate-catastrophe-2/
Editor’s Note: this first appeared on Dissident Voice, June 7th, 2014
Let’s Be Honest
Despite the seeming popularity of environmental and social justice work in the modern world, we’re not winning. We’re losing. In fact, we’re losing really badly.1
Why is that?
One reason is because few popular strategies pose real threats to power. That’s not an accident: the rules of social change have been clearly defined by those in power. Either you play by the rules — rules which don’t allow you to win — or you break free of the rules, and face the consequences.
Play By The Rules, or Raise the Stakes
We all know the rules: you’re allowed to vote for either one capitalist or the other, vote with your dollars,2 write petitions (you really should sign this one), you can shop at local businesses, you can eat organic food (if you can afford it), and you can do all kinds of great things!
But if you step outside the box of acceptable activism, you’re asking for trouble. At best, you’ll face ridicule and scorn. But the real heat is reserved for movements that pose real threats. Whether broad-based people’s movements like Occupy or more focused revolutionary threats like the Black Panthers, threats to power break the most important rule they want us to follow: never fight back.
State Tactic #1: Overt Repression
Fighting back – indeed, any real resistance – is sacrilegious to those in power. Their response is often straightforward: a dozen cops slam you to the ground and cuff you; “less-lethal” weapons cover the advance of a line of riot police; the sharp report of SWAT team’s bullets.
This type of overt repression is brutally effective. When faced with jail, serious injury, or even death, most don’t have the courage and the strategy to go on. As we have seen, state violence can behead a movement.
That was the case with Fred Hampton, an up-and-coming Black Panther Party leader in Chicago, Illinois. A talented organizer, Hampton made significant gains for the Panthers in Chicago, working to end violence between rival (mostly black) gangs and building revolutionary alliances with groups like the Young Lords, Students for A Democratic Society, and the Brown Berets. He also contributed to community education work and to the Panther’s free breakfast program.
These activities could not be tolerated by those in power: they knew that a charismatic, strategic thinker like Hampton could be the nucleus of revolution. So, they decided to murder him. On December 4, 1969, an FBI snitch slipped Hampton a sedative. Chicago police and FBI agents entered his home, shot and killed the guard, Mark Clark, and entered Hampton’s room. The cops fired two shots directly into his head as he lay unconscious. He was 21 years old.
The Occupy Movement, at its height, posed a threat to power by making the realities of mass anti-capitalism and discontent visible, and by providing physical focal points for the dissent that spawns revolution. While Occupy had some issues (such as the difficulties of consensus decision-making and generally poor responses to abusive behavior inside camps), the movement was dynamic. It claimed physical space for the messy work of revolution to happen, and represented the locus of a true threat.
The response was predictable: the media assaulted relentlessly, businesses led efforts to change local laws and outlaw encampments, and riot police were called in as the knockout punch. It was a devastating flurry of blows, and the movement hasn’t yet recovered. (Although many of the lessons learned at Occupy may serve us well in the coming years).
State Tactic #2: Covert Repression
Violent repression is glaring. It gets covered in the news, and you can see it on the streets. But other times, repression isn’t so obvious. A recent leaked document from the private security and corporate intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (better known as STRATFOR) contained this illustrative statement:
Most authorities will tolerate a certain amount of activism because it is seen as a way to let off steam. They appease the protesters by letting them think that they are making a difference — as long as the protesters do not pose a threat. But as protest movements grow, authorities will act more aggressively to neutralize the organizers.
The key word is neutralize: it represents a more sophisticated strategy on behalf of power, a set of tactics more insidious than brute force.
Most of us have probably heard about COINTELPRO (shorthand for Counter-Intelligence Program), a covert FBI program officially underway between 1956 and 1971. COINTELPRO mainly targeted socialists and communists, black nationalists, Civil Rights groups, the American Indian Movement, and much of the left, from Quakers to Weathermen. The FBI used four main techniques to undermine, discredit, eliminate, and otherwise neutralize these threats:
How can we become resilient to these threats? Perhaps the first step is to understand them; to internalize the consequences of the tactics being used against us.
The JTRIG Leaks
On February 24 of this year, Glenn Greenwald released an article detailing a secret National Security Agency (NSA) unit called JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). The article, which sheds new light on the tactics used to suppress social movements and threats to power, is worth quoting at length:
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.
It shouldn’t come as a total surprise that those in power use lies, manipulation, false information, fake identities, and “manipulation [of] online discourse” to further their ends. They always fight dirty; it’s what they do. They never fight fair, they can never allow truth to be shown, because to do so would expose their own weakness.
As shown by COINTELPRO, this type of operation is highly effective at neutralizing threats. Snitchjacketing and divisive movement tactics were used widely during the COINTELPRO era, and encouraged activists to break ties, create rivalries, and vie against one another. In many cases, it even led to violence: prominent, good hearted activists would be labeled “snitches” by agents, and would be isolated, shunned, and even killed.
As a friend put it,
“By encouraging horizontal, crowdsourced repression, activists’ focus is shifted safely away from those in power and towards each other.”
Are Activists Targeted?
Some organizations have ideas so revolutionary, so incendiary that they pose a threat all by themselves, simply by existing.
Deep Green Resistance is such a group. If these tactics are being used to neutralize activist groups, then Deep Green Resistance (DGR) seems a prime target. Proudly Luddite in character, DGR believes that the industrial way of life, the soil-destroying process known as agriculture, and the social system called civilization are literally killing the planet – at the rate of 200 species extinctions, 30 million trees, and 100 million tons of CO2 every day. With numbers like that, time is short.
With two key pieces of knowledge, the DGR strategy comes into focus. The first is that global industrial civilization will inevitably collapse under the weight of its own destructiveness. The second is that this collapse isn’t coming soon enough: life on Earth could very well be doomed by the time this collapse stops the accelerating destruction.
With these understandings, DGR advocates for a strategy to pro-actively dismantle industrial civilization. The strategy (which acknowledges that resisters will face fierce opposition from governments, corporations, and those who cling to modern life) calls for direct attacks on critical infrastructure – electric grids, fossil fuel networks, communications, etc. – with one goal: to shut down the global industrial economy. Permanently.
The strategy of direct attacks on infrastructure has been used in countless wars, uprisings, and conflicts because it is extremely effective. The same strategies are taught at military schools and training camps around the planet, and it is for this reason – an effective strategy – that DGR poses a real and serious threat to power. Of course, writing openly about such activities and then taking part in them would be stupid, which is why DGR is an “aboveground” organization. Our work is limited to building a culture of resistance (which is no easy feat: our work spans the range of activities from non-violent resistance to educational campaigns, community organizing, and building alternative systems) and spreading the strategies that we advocate in the hope that clandestine networks can pull off the dirty work in secret.
When I speak to veterans – hard-jawed ex-special forces guys – they say the strategy is good. It’s a real threat.
Threat Met With Backlash
That threat has not gone unanswered. In a somewhat unsurprising twist, given the information we’ve gone over already, DGR’s greatest challenges have not come from the government, at least not overtly. Instead, the biggest challenges have come from radical environmentalists and social justice activists: from those we would expect to be among our supporters and allies. The focal point of the controversy? Gender.
The conflict has a long history and deserves a few hours of discussion and reading, but here is the short version: DGR holds that female-only spaces should be reserved for females. This offends many who believe that male-born individuals (who later come to identify as female) should be allowed access to these spaces. It’s all part of a broader, ongoing disagreement between gender abolitionists (like DGR and others), who see gender as the cultural lattice of women’s oppression, and those who view gender as an identity that is beyond criticism.
(To learn more about the conflict, view Rachel Ivey’s presentation entitled The End of Gender.)
Due to this position, our organization has been blacklisted from speaking at various venues, our organizers have received threats of violence (often sexualized), and our participation in a number of struggles has been blocked – at the expense of the cause at hand.
A Case Study in JTRIG?
Much of the anti-DGR rhetoric has been extraordinary, not for passionate political disagreement, but for misinformation and what appears to be COINTELPRO-style divisiveness. Are we the victims of a JTRIG-style smear campaign?
On February 23 of this year, the Earth First! Newswire released an anonymous article attacking Deep Green Resistance. The main subject of the article was the ongoing debate over gender issues.
(Although perhaps debate is the wrong word in this case: Earth First! Newswire has published half a dozen vitriolic pieces attacking DGR. They seem to have an obsession. On the other hand, DGR has never used organizational resources or platforms to publish a negative comment about Earth First.)
Here are a few of the fabrications contained in the February 23 article:
If these claims weren’t so serious, they would be laughable. But lies like this are no laughing matter.
“Crowdsourced Repression”
The timing of these events – the Earth First! Newswire article followed the very next day by Greenwald’s JTRIG article – is ironic. Of course, it made me think: are we the victims of a JTRIG-style character assassination? Or am I drawing conclusions where there are none to be drawn?
The campaigns against DGR do have many of the hallmarks of COINTELPRO-style repression. They are built on a foundation of political differences magnified into divisive hatred through paranoia and the spread of hearsay. In the 1960s and 70s, techniques that seem similar were used to create divisions within groups like the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement.
Ultimately, these movements tore themselves apart in violence and suspicion; the powerful were laughing all the way to the bank. In many cases, we don’t even know if the FBI was involved; what is certain is that the FBI-style tactics – snitchjacketing, rumormongering, the sowing of division and hatred – were being adopted by paranoid activists.
In some ways, the truth doesn’t really matter. Whether these activists were working for the state or not, they served to destroy movements, alliances, and friendships that took decades or generations to build.
I’ll be clear: I don’t mean to claim that the “Letter Collective” (as the anonymous authors of the February 23 article named themselves) are agents of the state. To do so would be a violation of security culture.5 Modern activists seem to have largely forgotten the lessons of COINTELPRO, and I am wary of forgetting those lessons myself. Snitchjacketing is a bad behavior, and we should have no tolerance for it unless there is substantive evidence.
But members of the “Letter Collective”, at the very least, have violated security culture by spreading rumors and unsubstantiated claims of serious misconduct. Good security culture practices preclude this behavior. In the face of JTRIG and the modern surveillance and repression state, careful validation of serious claims is the least that activists can do. Didn’t we learn this lesson in the 60s?
Divide and Conquer
By itself, verifying rumors before spreading them is a poor defense against the repression modern activists face. Instead, we must challenge divisiveness itself: one of the biggest threats to our success.
The 2011 STRATFOR leak included information about corporate strategies to neutralize activist and community movements. Essentially, STRATFOR advocates dividing movements into four character types: radicals, idealists, realists, and opportunists. These camps can then be dealt with summarily:
First, isolate the radicals. Second, “cultivate” the idealists and “educate” them into becoming realists. And finally, co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry.6
This is how movements are neutralized: those who should be allies are divided, infighting becomes rampant, and paranoia rules the roost. To combat these strategies, we must understand the danger they represent and how to counter them.
Fight Repression With Solidarity
We all want to win. We want to end capitalism, reverse ecological collapse, and build a culture in which social justice is fundamental. Many of us have different specific goals or strategies, but we must find similarities, overlaps, and areas where we can work together.
As Bob Ages, commenting on STRATFOR’s divide-and-conquer tactics, put it in a recent piece:
“Our response has to be the opposite; bridging divides, foster mutual understanding and solidarity, stand together come hell or high water.”
Many people across the left share 80% or more of their politics, and yet constructive criticism and mature discussion of disagreements is the exception, not the rule. We need more thoughtful behavior. Don’t spread rumors, don’t tear down other activists, and don’t forget who the real enemy is. Don’t waste your time fighting those who should be your allies – even if they are only partial allies. Let’s disagree, and let our disagreements help us learn more from each other and build alliances.
In the end, that’s our only chance of winning: together.