Hundreds Gather at Oak Flat to Fight for Sacred Apache Land

By Lee Allen, Indian Country Media Network 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. ...

February 12, 2015 · 6 min · deepgreenresistance4corners

Book Review: This Changes Everything

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. ...

February 8, 2015 · 5 min · deepgreenresistance4corners

The Modern COINTELPRO and How To Fight It

Editor’s Note: this first appeared on Dissident Voice, June 7th, 2014 Crowdsourcing Repression by Max Wilbert 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 ...

January 31, 2015 · 14 min · deepgreenresistance4corners

Help Save the Castle Rock Mall Prairie Dogs

By Deep Green Resistance Colorado The ‘Nation’s Biggest Mall’, planned for Douglas County, Colorado, would kill one of the largest prairie dog colonies on Colorado’s Front Range. Currently, Alberta Development LLC is in charge of the construction and annihilation of this prairie dog colony, which is critical to the plains’ biodiversity and long-range health. Alberta Development is planning on eradicating 40 acres of the prairie dogs on or around the second week of February. We may not be able to halt construction, but we can at least relocate as many of the prairie dogs as possible. We need to find willing landowners to take on 100 acres of prairie dogs. ...

January 29, 2015 · 1 min · deepgreenresistance4corners

The ‘Nation’s Biggest Mall’ in Colorado Will Destroy One of the Largest Prairie Dog Colonies on Colorado’s Front Range

Editor’s Note: This first appeared on Deep Green Resistance Colorado’s website. by Bellmeadow, Deep Green Resistance Member Recently I heard news that our county (Douglas) was getting one of the nation’s biggest malls. The news simultaneously sunk my heart and angered me. Why the hell do we need another mall? To consume the world? Then my mind raced to the location of the mall, and the prairie dogs that live there. I had been worried about this colony before, about the strong possibility that the remaining colonies comprising hundreds of prairie dogs would be destroyed for some kind of development. After all, a Lowe’s store, an outlet mall, a housing project, and a tire store had occupied their territory and had already killed thousands of these dogs in the name of “development.” And this was the final solution for the 3,000 to 8,000 remaining burrows: complete annihilation of the prairie dogs for a shopping mall set to cover 170 acres in concrete. ...

January 27, 2015 · 10 min · deepgreenresistance4corners

How to Organize: 15 Points

By Max Wilbert, Deep Green Resistance Seattle A good friend recently reminded me that there is a big difference between activism and organizing. Activism is to be involved at some level in political struggle; organizing is to make that struggle effective by planning for success. Organizing requires attention to the smallest details and the broadest overview. It takes a great deal of strategic thinking, critical self-evaluation, people skills, and persistence. Organizing is hard. None of us are born with the skills needed for effective organizing; we have to pick them up as we go. All we have is us, and so many of us are tied up with families, jobs, and other responsibilities. But if we’re going to win struggles for social and environmental justice, we need more organizers. ...

January 16, 2015 · 4 min · deepgreenresistance4corners

Washington Post: Proposed Oak Flat copper mine debate

By Kari Lydersen Special to The Washington Post When former miner Roy Chavez heard about plans to develop the nation’s largest copper mine near Superior, Ariz., he thought it might be the salvation of the economically struggling town where he’d grown up and served as mayor. But as he learned more about the proposal to tap an ore body more than 7,000 feet deep with a method known as “block cave” mining, he changed his mind. Now he fears that the project would be environmentally destructive and limit Superior’s ability to develop tourism and other industries. ...

January 14, 2015 · 6 min · deepgreenresistance4corners

President Obama signs land exchange into law signaling new phase in the protection of Oak Flat

By the Arizona Mining Reform Coalition On December 19, 2014, President Obama signed the National defense Authorization Act into law. The bill contained the Oak Flat land exchange. This particular version of the land exchange was the 13th since the bill was first introduced in Congress by convicted former Congressman, Rick Renzi in 2005. Senator Flake, who previously worked for Rio Tinto at their uranium mine (co-owned by the Iranian government) in Namibia, acknowledged what we all knew, the bill could not pass the US Congress on its own merits. ...

January 9, 2015 · 3 min · deepgreenresistance4corners

Arizona copper mine will hurt tribes and the environment

By James Anaya, for AZ Central James Anaya: Rio Tinto should make some lands off limits to mining and abandon the project if it can’t gain local support. (Photo: Rebecca Allen) Congress recently authorized an exchange of land so the multinational giant Rio Tinto can proceed with its Resolution Copper Mine project in eastern Arizona. The land to be conveyed to the company was taken from the Apache people more than a century ago, but Apache today continue to claim strong cultural and religious ties to the land. ...

December 31, 2014 · 3 min · deepgreenresistance4corners

Questioning allegiance to renewables

Editor’s Note: This originally appeared on Deep Green Resistance UK’s web page. Thanks to Norris Thomlinson for posting. Deep Green Resistance recently posted a new set of FAQs on the main website, addressing the myths of Green Technology & Renewable Energy. In that same vein, here’s a first-hand observation of the impacts of supposedly “clean” wind turbines on a Scottish forest fragmented by the machines and their access roads. The article makes clear the stark choice we face: industrialism or life. ...

December 28, 2014 · 2 min · deepgreenresistance4corners