Posts

Editor’s Note: This article was first published December 17, 2014, by Deep Green Resistance Colorado. We welcome your comments.by bellmeadowDGR Colorado Contributor I am reading “Against The Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization ” by Richard Manning and it is an amazing book. To begin: I have been thinking a lot lately about the issue of water and the disappearance of water, particularly out here in the Western Occupied territories. When I flew to California recently, I couldn’t help but notice the whole landscape beneath us looked like the surface of Mars, without the mystique. As with the Martian landscape, you could see where all the water used to run. I grimaced at the remnants of lakes that were, only a few years ago, full of water but were now dead or dying, at about 10% capacity. The scene was horrifying, and was compounded by the fact that the whole time we were in the air you could see smog, above the mountaintops, lining the ENTIRE trip. I’m sure the dying lakebeds and smog were unrelated. Even more terrifying than the reverse terraforming was the fact that the hundreds of people on the plane either didn’t pay attention, or care. ...

Editor’s Note: This article was published by the Deep Green Resistance News Service March 27, 2014. We’re republishing the entire Time is Short series, and we welcome your comments. We have had several months to reflect on the life and legacy of Nelson Mandela. Since his death, world leaders have attempted to coopt this legacy. It is especially interesting to see how many who once branded Mandela a terrorist are rushing to pay their respects. [1]His freedom fighter past has been quietly forgotten. Mainstream writers, intellectuals, and politicians prefer to focus on his life after prison. A simple Google search for Mandela is dominated by articles about tolerance and acceptance. ...

Editor’s Note: this article first appeared on the Deep Green Resistance News Service October 22, 2014. By Kourtney Mitchell / Deep Green Resistance I do not have a creative introduction to start this article. I have only the seething rage of a spirit absolutely fed up with a culture that is at war with women, their fervent pleads for solidarity and their righteous actions of self-defense against the monster of male supremacy echoing in my mind. I have only the scenes of men torturing and raping women, filmed for the goal of profit and produced on an industrial scale like a slave trade, an auction where women’s bodies are mutilated and sold for entertainment and sexual gratification, to drive me ever forward to find ways to organize against this barbarity. I have only the cries of my loved ones as they tell of their own abuse and that of others, their wishes to somehow get their murdered or missing friends back from the endless night of death enacted by men who are supposed to be human but instead behave more like demons. ...

By Frank Coughlin, Deep Green Resistance New York Humility. An important word you rarely hear in our culture anymore. Our culture seems to be going in the opposite direction, everything with a superlative. Everything bigger, faster, better, stronger. Everything new, shiny, pretty, expensive. But never humble. “Dude, love that car. It’s so humble.” Yeah, you never hear that. Politically on the left, in the “fight” as we call it, we’re just as guilty. We have a tendency towards ego, self-righteousness, hyper-individualism. We want our movements to be better, stronger, bigger. We want the big social “pop-off”, the “sexy” revolution, perhaps our face on the next generation’s t-shirts. But we never ask for humility. As we near what most scientists predict to be “climate catastrophe”, I’ve been thinking a lot about humility. I recently was able to travel to Chiapas, Mexico to learn about the Zapatista movement. I was there for a month, working with various groups in a human rights capacity. While I was there to provide some type of service, I left with a profound respect for a true revolutionary humility. This essay is not designed to be a complete history of the Zapatista movement, but perhaps it can provide some context. ...

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared on the Deep Green Resistance News Service on April 17, 2013. We are republishing the entire Time is Short series, and invite your comments. By now we should all be familiar with what’s at stake. The horrific statistics—200 species driven extinct daily, every child born with hundreds of toxic chemicals already in their bodies, every living system on the planet in decline—haunt us as we go about our work in a world that refuses to hear, listen, or act on them. After decades of traditional organizing and activist work, we’re beginning to come to terms with the need for a dramatic shift in strategy and tactics, and indeed in how we conceptualize the task before us. ...

By Will Falk, Deep Green Resistance Let’s be clear: The decision not to indict Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown Jr. was inevitable. I do not write this to undermine, in any way, the justifiable rage being expressed around the country. I write this in the hopes that we can accurately diagnose the cancer characterized by the symptoms we have seen - symptoms like the death of another young black man at the hands of a white policeman, the failure of a grand jury to indict that policeman, and a mainstream media determined to paint acts taken in retaliation as somehow too extreme. Once we have accurately diagnosed the cancer, I want us to locate the tumors and remove them. ...

Editor’s Note: The first three installments of the Restoring Sanity series are An Inhuman System, Mental Illness As A Social Construct, and Medicating. By Susan Hyatt and Michael Carter, Deep Green Resistance If you don’t want any more anxiety, get rid of all your intelligence and your creativity which would be a very dull life for all of us. —Rollo May Don’t worry, be happy. —Bobby McFerrin Anxiety is a normal and healthy aspect of human existence. Sören Kierkegaard said, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” an acknowledgment that we always have some choices to make in life. Each choice we make can bring us closer to our objectives, but can also close off other paths. Choosing is both a birth and a death, both being and non-being. This is why we are anxious. Anxiety begins at the time between being, which is what we experience as a result of our choices, and non-being, which is what we give up. Anxiety is part of becoming, of growing and changing. This is what it means to be alive. ...

Editor’s Note: This article originally ran August 8, 2013, in the Deep Green Resistance News Service. We are republishing the entire Time is Short series, and welcome your comments. By Lexy Garza and Rachel Ivey / Deep Green Resistance Humans are storytelling creatures, and our current strategy as a movement is a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. We need to ask whether that story matches up with reality, and with the way social change has happened throughout history. ...

Editor’s Note: This article originally ran July 24, 2013, in the Deep Green Resistance News Service. We are republishing the entire Time is Short series, and welcome your comments. By Lexy Garza and Rachel Ivey, Deep Green Resistance Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This quote by Spanish writer and philosopher George Santayana was posted on the wall in my high school history classroom. The idea, as my history teacher explained, it is that learning about history is vitally important because by knowing and understanding past events, we can actively shape the future. According to my teacher’s view, at least the view he shared with his students, the history in our textbooks is objective, time-tested truth, and nothing more nor less. ...

By Will Falk, Deep Green Resistance Many thanks to San Diego Free Press, who first published this article. The following Editor’s Note is theirs. Editor’s Note: This week SD Free Press will be re-posting past articles relevant to our War and Peace theme. Given that Mary Landrieu (D- Gonna lose her senate seat) is asking for a vote on the XL Pipeline during the lame duck session, we thought this was appropriate. As so often happens, Native Americans are leading the fight to save the world. By Will Falk ...