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DIY Resistance: Find Rock Bottom

Many thanks to San Diego Free Press, who first published this article

By Will Falk, Deep Green Resistance

The August San Diego sun was hot. I spread a white blanket on the white concrete floor of a patio behind another mental health hospital, opened the book I asked my mother to bring me – Derrick Jensen’s Dreams, and tried to make myself as comfortable as possible.

The sun beat down and the sweat pooled on my palms. I closed the book not wanting my sweat to blur Jensen’s exploration of the role of the supernatural in resisting this culture of death. I couldn’t focus anyway. I couldn’t forget why I was there.

It was my second suicide attempt in four months.

The worst thing about being an in-patient at a mental health hospital is the way patients are always watched, evaluated, monitored. Patients must sleep with their doors open so an orderly can shine a light on them every half hour to make sure they’re still alive. Patients are required to present their food tray to the nurse after each meal while she takes notes on the leftovers.

I used to wonder what my unfinished beets meant about suicidal ideations or what the fact that I used butter on my roll the night before while eating my roll plain the next night indicated to hospital staff about my mood. Couple this with the fact that many patients are under court orders to comply with their doctors’ directions and the fishbowl effect is intensified.

Setting the book aside, I looked around the hospital patio. I was the only one outside. Visitation was still hours away and the heat discouraged my fellow patients from venturing out-of-doors. A few plastic tables were set up with umbrellas, but I was not interested in finding shade. The sun, at least, is honest in his watchfulness and he had a specific role to play. He was going to sweat some answers out of me – answers I was incapable of finding on my own.

After a few hours, thoroughly drenched in sweat and finally smelling like a human again, I followed the shadows forming in the afternoon sunlight. They led me to piles of stones in a rock garden. And that’s when I realized what these suicide attempts were really all about. Rocks. Rock bottom.

Through my two suicide attempts, I had finally succeeded in scraping my life clean of the death that was drowning me. Lounging in my new concrete couch next to those harsh, but beautifully real stones in the rock garden, I sensed the strength of my position. I was broke. I had no job. I was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. I was in a strange city thousands of miles from my closest friends and hundreds of miles from family. I needed the permission of my doctors to be released from the hospital. In short, I had nothing. Nothing, except for the most important possession of all – nothing to lose.

I am not sure if it was the medication, my own dehydration, or that fucking flashlight sweeping across my face every half hour that contributed to the vividness of my dreams that night, but I am sure I thoroughly confused my doctors because they increased the dosage of my anti-depressant to levels that made my spine tighten and my ears ring. And, just for good measure, when the nurse came with my pills that night she checked under my tongue to make sure I swallowed them.

***
rock bottom path It’s been 13 months since the sun and stones helped me make sense of my two suicide attempts. I have not tried to kill myself since. This is not to say that I’m completely recovered. I still think about suicide. Suicide is a smooth-voiced monster lurking just below the surface of still, warm waters.

I’ve made rock bottom my home.

I am still broke. Right now, I have nine voicemails on my phone from debt collectors seeking their student loan interest and money for the ambulance rides I never consented to (could not consent to) after my suicide attempts. I do not know where I am going to sleep from week to week. I am in a strange country now, thousands of miles from friends and family.

Sometimes, just before bed, when I grow weary of the day, the old whispers start up again. “Wouldn’t it be nice not to wake up to all the anxiety tomorrow?” “Aren’t you so arrogant, Will, thinking you make any difference in this world?” “The guilt could just fade away with a few small actions…”

The sun and stones continue to help me, though. So much of the therapeutic process for the mentally ill involves learning to accept emotions, learning to sit with disquiet. In the mornings after particularly bad nights, I find a rock under the sun. They remind me that part of existing at rock bottom requires some vulnerability to the darknesses that make me who I am. They remind me of the strength that has been required to reject a life of material comfort for a life of resistance. They remind me that with this strength I can laugh at the seductions of suicide. Laughing at suicide removes the poison, and I can accept my suicidal thoughts as a guide like the reassuring feeling of rock walls within a wanderer’s reach in the pitch black of a cave.

I’ve made rock bottom my home. I like it here. From rock bottom, I thank my suicidal thoughts for what they’ve taught me. Everything is better than suicide. Living with the anxiety that can accompany activism is better than suicide. Having uncomfortable conversations with family about personal finances is better than suicide. Losing romantic partners over your choice for activism is better than suicide. Going to jail for defending the land is better than suicide.

It was suicide that taught me how to confront death. I survived. Twice. In surviving, I learned the power that exists in a life in full, mature contemplation of death. I have chosen death twice. It was not hard. I am not afraid of death by another’s hand after facing death at my own. I will die, but not yet. There’s too much to do.

I thank the sun and the stones for being my companions through the darkness.

***

Acclaimed poet Ken Saro-Wiwa

As a member of the most privileged class in the world – white, heterosexual male – I cannot speak for the experiences of the oppressed. I do, however, think that many of the world’s most successful resistance movements were spawned from the hardest of rock bottoms.

One of my favorite examples of resistance is currently embodied in the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).

MEND has successfully cut Nigeria’s oil production by 30% through direct attacks on oil infrastructure and oil workers. While so many of us in the environmental movement are fighting rear-guard battles that resemble armies in full-fledged retreat with our limited actions protecting this or that piece of land or trying to defend against one destructive project leaving dozens of others to ravage our communities, we look more often than not like fleeing soldiers simply trying to grab as many supplies as possible in our arms to make it just a few more days. MEND, on the other hand, has taken the offensive and struck critical blows to the fossil fuel industry.

The history of resistance in the Niger Delta shows how terrible things got before people took up arms against corporations and government. With their backs against the wall in the realest sense, MEND has shown the world that a few dedicated resisters with very few resources can bring the world’s most powerful corporations to the bargaining table.

An estimated 1.5 millions tons of oil has spilled in the Niger Delta over the last fifty years. This is equivalent to close to one “Exxon-Valdez” spill in the Niger River every single year.

Meanwhile, there are 27 million people living in the Niger Delta with close to 75% of those people relying on fishing and subsistence farming to feed themselves. Beginning in 1990, Nigerian soldiers backed by financing from Royal Dutch Shell (Shell) and supported by Shell’s own paramilitary forces have conducted massive, deadly raids on oil resisters amongst the Ogoni people.

Perhaps the most well known atrocity at the hands of the Nigerian government and Shell, was the 1995 hangings of nine non-violent Ogoni leaders including the internationally acclaimed poet Ken Saro-Wiwa by a specially created military tribunal.

Viewed in this light, MEND’s resistance was predicated on survival – rock bottom, indeed.

***
stones So far, my writing in this Do-It-Yourself Resistance series has focused on the emotional and spiritual conditions that I believe would-be resisters must find as they begin their path to saving the world.

I urge you to fall in love with life, to recover your empathy, to understand that the struggle involves profound, but conquerable grief, and then to embrace the urgency that accompanies opening your heart to love, empathy, and grief. The first few essays merely point out the first steps I see on the path towards a life devoted to serious resistance.

Emotions and spirituality are, of course, important but they will not stop the dominant culture from murdering what’s left of the world. Our prayers will not stop Monsanto. Really, really stirring emotional accounts of suicidal experiences will not affect the material conditions producing widespread depression in this culture. This late in the game, our only salvation will come through real, tangible action in the real, tangible world.

I once sardonically directed readers to boil their debit cards and to try to eat them to demonstrate the unreality of bank accounts. The same holds true for emotions. You will die of thirst very quickly if you drink only love and empathy.

In the upcoming installments of the series I will begin to focus on practicalities through the lens of my personal experiences. There are lifestyle steps that I think help to free people to take direct action in the struggle to save life on the planet. I hesitate to prescribe specifics, but I think there are some general choices resisters can make to free their money, time, and energy for tangible action. In the weeks to come, I will explore topics such as family life, financial considerations for activists with a special emphasis on student loans, and even the possibilities of romance in a life devoted to resistance (resistance is sexy!).

Underneath my suggestions is the rock bottom. Live there. Get comfortable sleeping with stones.

The truest existential freedom exists when they can take nothing else from you. When you personally have nothing to lose, you have everything to gain.

And, the truth is, as members of natural communities we are losing our ability to feed ourselves, we are losing access to drinkable water, we are losing clean air to breathe, we are losing our human and non-human friends at staggering rates. We are losing everything and, if we delay any longer, there will be nothing to gain.

Browse Will Falk’s DIY Resistance series at the Deep Green Resistance Blog

How to Stop Off Road Vehicles, Part 2

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By Michael Carter, Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition

Don’t miss How to Stop Off Road Vehicles, Part 1

Crushed desert tortoise in the Desert Tortoise Natural Area in the Mojave desert. Photo by Kristine Berry, Environment News Service

Law enforcement has been so ineffective in preventing illegal ORV use that citizens are usually left to face the problem on their own. Stopping ORVs isn’t easy, but short of an end to gasoline—which we can’t wait for—impacts will continue to worsen if there’s no intervention. In remote areas like the Mojave Desert and Colorado Plateau, where would-be activists are scattered and overwhelmed and the police are essentially powerless and blasé, all strategies for stopping ORVs involve active and sustained effort. Here are a few:

Pressure law enforcement to do their jobs. Carry a camera with you always, and photograph illegal activity, if at all possible getting clear images of license plates. Document the time, place, and circumstances. Bring it to the attention of both the local and federal police, if on federal land. Be polite but persistent.

Physically close illegal trails. This can be surprisingly effective. Adopt an area and close off illegal trails with rocks, logs, whatever is handy and doesn’t further disturb the land. ORVers will keep trying to use the trail, but continued discouragement might eventually work.

Physically close legal trails. Similar to the last category, people may choose to carry out underground actions that close legal routes.[1] There must be a strict firewall between aboveground and underground activists: people or groups choosing to use underground tactics should not engage in aboveground actions, and vice versa.[2]

Close and reclaim established, authorized routes through administrative and legal channels. It’s the open roads that draw ORVs deeper into land they can then illegally violate, so every closed road is particularly helpful. This, too, takes a long and sustained effort. One helpful organization is Wildlands CPR (Now Wild Earth Guardians),[3] but don’t expect any non-profit group to have the resources to do the job for you. If you love the land you live in, be prepared to fight for it—a simple solution of hard, dedicated effort. Organize with those who agree with you, and fight.

Coyote Canyon Revisited

Private landowners neighboring Coyote Canyon in southeast Utah fought the originally illegal ORV use of the canyon, and tried to stop the BLM from sanctioning it. They pleaded with the public via every venue they could think of to write letters to the BLM opposing the move, yet ORV interests grossly outnumbered the effort. Fewer than ten opponents to the trail even bothered writing letters, and when the decision to open the canyon to ORVs was made the BLM didn’t even bother notifying the respondents, a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

Otherwise, however, the agency had prepared its documents thoroughly and neighbors were advised that a legal challenge probably wouldn’t have been effective. Although the BLM offered a number of concessions—the trail is only open Friday and Saturday to registered users, from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., among other restrictions—the agency legitimized crime, rewarding criminals with the sacrifice of another dwindling scrap of feral public land.

The Coyote Canyon example highlights several reasons why so few are willing to protect the land, and why they’re losing so badly. One is fear of reprisals from enemies (such as intentional trespass and vandalism of property, already an issue for neighbors of Coyote Canyon). Another is a reasonable assumption that their efforts will be ineffective—though of course making no effort will certainly be ineffective. Yet people tend to accept whatever situation they’re given. It’s uncommon to question an established arrangement, whatever it may be, and if one continues to question it life gets more uncomfortable. A resister will always face ridicule, accusations of poor mental, emotional and social adjustment, eventual ostracizing and occasionally murder. Yet social changes demand challenges to established practice.

When the BLM announced their decision to open Coyote Canyon to oil spills, noise, litter, piles of shit and soiled rags of toilet paper, almost everyone who was asked to help offered only a passing moment of sympathy. Not “what can I do,” not “what are our options,” but “that’s too bad.” It’s no wonder fights like this are frequently lost, when reactions are so feeble.

Industry and recreation groups, by contrast, are well organized and ready to rush to their own common cause. The right wing tends to be more accepting of orders; the boss says jump, they ask how high. They have something tangible they’re working for, a thing they like doing, a righteous maintenance of their privilege—such as driving anywhere they want. They stand to gain something where resistance stands only to prevent something—at least in situations like Coyote Canyon, where no comparable force opposes them.

Decades of unchecked off road vehicle use have led to severe erosion at Dove Springs. Photo by Jim Rose, Environment News Service

Decades of unchecked off road vehicle use have led to severe erosion at Dove Springs, Mojave Desert. Photo by Jim Rose, Environment News Service

Fighting Back

Resistance is tough. It means making one’s self unpopular, a hard thing to do among those who’ve been taught their whole lives that popularity is everything. Organizing can provide the possibility of overcoming our fear of reprisal, of ridicule, and of failure; it’s the only chance at effectively confronting injustices. Those who wish to prevent agency actions like the Coyote Canyon trail, or to promote re-localization of food production—any defensive or restorative action—can become an effective force if they work together, consistently and reliably supporting one another. Many progressives have been bled off by dogmas of non-confrontation, by intoxicating feel-good-ness, and by the idea that individualism is of primary importance. They’ve become lazy, fatalistic, and cynical; committed, organized struggle seems to be the sorry lot of desperately poor people in faraway places.

The examples that we have of committed resistance movements often are of desperately poor people, immediately threatened by the activities of rich and powerful enemies. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta is one good example, and so are the more than 130 First Nations governments in western Canada that have gathered against the tar-sands Enbridge Northern Gateway Project and the Kinder Morgan pipeline and tanker projects.[4] We who are in a position to protect the land mostly lack the ability to respond, to turn our empathy for places like Coyote Canyon into action.

The situation at the frontiers of wild land is desperate, too. Wealth and privilege let us pretend it isn’t, because we get food from supermarket shelves and water from a tap. We see little or no connection between the health of the land and our own well-being. Public land use is an issue that can be influenced relatively easily—unlike, say, racism—because land managers so routinely ignore or violate laws and effective tactics usually have to do with citizen enforcement. But environmentalists continue to lose, partly because exploiters have miscast conflict as user-group obstruction—framing the terms of the debate to ridicule love of the wild world, separating its fate from human fate. By allowing this, would-be activists surrender the land and leave the future to sadists and imbeciles.

The destruction of the planet, however easy it is to ignore, will catch up with us all. The civilized economies that steal from the poor to give to the rich will eventually end. They need to consume limited resources to exist and those resources—fossil fuels, topsoil—will not last forever. When this happens, we will again depend upon the land to sustain us. If that land is stripped of its capacity to sustain life by industry, agriculture, and recreation, then there will be nowhere else to go, and nothing to do but wage war and starve.

Abuse of the land is now normalized by faith in nonexistent frontiers (of renewable energy and electric cars, for example) and by misguided tolerance. Naming abuse—the destruction of the land in the name of fun or individualistic pursuits and the destruction of our selves by abusive people and systems—is often portrayed as abusive in itself. This is outrageous and infuriating, but should be expected.

Though it is far less damaging than industry and agriculture, the evidence for ORV destruction is well documented and easy to come by. It’s not even really contested by ORVers themselves. Those of us determined to stop this behavior face the same problem law enforcement does: the damage is so widespread and difficult to regulate that there’s little anyone can do. But there’s also a serious lack of activists with effective tactics and a coherent strategy to follow through on. This doesn’t mean, though, that we should back down.

At the Jawbone Canyon riding area, rain brings a slurry of mud off steep slopes denuded of vegetation, burying plants and animals below. Photo by Howard Wilshire, Environment News Service

At the Jawbone Canyon riding area, rain brings a slurry of mud off steep slopes denuded of vegetation, burying plants and animals below. Mojave Desert. Photo by Howard Wilshire, Environment News Service

Identifying with the Real World

Once on Cedar Mesa, in Southeast Utah, I watched an ORV intentionally veer to crush a dozing snake. The reptile churned and writhed in the machine’s track, dead or near dead as its nerves popped and struggled and ran down. I went to it, to witness its pointless death. A thick and handsome bull snake, it spent its last moments bleeding out in the dust. Why? Why do this? What drives this sick, stupid behavior? Why does our culture hate every living thing?

I lifted the snake into the sage and blackbrush so it could at least die in its home. “If they can’t evolve to get out of the way,” someone once told me about road killed animals, “then that’s their problem.” Of course, not evolving to changing conditions is what causes extinction. There’s little doubt that our culture will not voluntarily evolve to halt the worsening conditions that industry and recreation are creating on the planet. So how does anyone fight activity like this? How do we stop deforestation, global warming, ocean acidification? And given those immense problems, is ORV land abuse something to focus limited energy and resources on?

In addition to the suggestions made in these articles, activists can develop tactics and strategies and their way forward will eventually become clear. With hard work and determination a chance of winning would almost certainly emerge. But in a world of Keystone XL pipelines and epidemic levels of fracking, is the effort worth it? If you caretake a few acres of land, blocking travel and pulling weeds, how much does it matter if you stop, or get distracted, or die? If those acres are again immediately vulnerable, is your effort a waste?

Few things anger me more that seeing wanton destruction for fun. I wonder, though, if this is an unhelpful distraction. It’s easy to get angry at something so obviously disrespecting of the land. In terms of permanent impacts, though, industry is much worse, and the scale of destruction is enormous. Of course what runs it is oil. Always this—the temporary, illusory power locked in a liquid hydrocarbon, driving ORVs, factory fishing trawlers, factory farms, and industrial agriculture. It’s warming the atmosphere and leading us to a horribly impoverished future, where most of us will be unable to afford the lifestyle we’ve been subjected and addicted to, let alone find enough to eat.

Remove the oil and the engines stop, and a besieged biosphere can begin to heal. This is part of the strategy that Deep Green Resistance has proposed.[5] But in the meanwhile…ORVs, just one part of the picture, continue to cut apart what little wild life remains, the last seed bank of evolution as we’ll ever know it. The momentum of established civilized practice is now enormous—seemingly unstoppable—and its terminal is in global destruction, the eradication of all complex life. Challenge to this system is so psychologically and practically difficult that most of us ignore it.

Fighting for the real, wild world can begin with the understanding that humans are not everything, and that the fate of the world is ultimately our fate. It is much different to fight for your own beloved family than for a rocky canyon you’ll never visit. We progressives like to talk about how hatred of “other” races cannot be tolerated (not that much is ever done about that). But we hardly ever extend this principle to the non-human world—constant victim of our culture’s violence—because we’ve been conditioned to believe that humans are all that matter. The loons, the snakes, the too-slow creatures smeared across the roads and ground under rubber tires into the dirt, they and the people yet to come who won’t be able to live as we have because the oil is gone—none of them will care about our abstract, self-indulgent moral wrestling. That is the wall that human supremacy has built around us; it must be torn down.

Imagine again that an occupying culture, whose every act is force and theft, was destroying the means of your survival. Imagine them extracting fuel to use the world as a playground. Of course, it is not enough to stop them from driving their toys in every possible place. To survive in the long term we must also stop the extraction, the root of the problem, and eliminate the fuel for destruction. We must reclaim our adult responsibilities and stand up to defend the land where we live, knowing that until oil extraction and consumption is ended, there will always be a new group of occupiers finding new ways to destroy the land.

Endnotes

[1] Foreman, Dave. Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. Tucson: Ned Ludd Books, 1987, 89-109.

[2] Security Culture: A Handbook for Activists (PDF)

[3] “Resources,” Wild Earth Guardians, accessed July 13, 2014, http://www.wildlandscpr.org

[4] Carrie Saxifrage, “How the Enbridge Pipeline Issue Unified Northern BC,” The Vancouver Observer, February 13, 2012, http://www.vancouverobserver.com/politics/2012/02/13/nation-building-how-enbridge-pipeline-issue-unified-northern-bc

“Interior First Nations Pipeline Ban,” Dogwood Initiative, You Tube, December 2, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G5KtqPSW8Q

Carrie Saxifrage, “No Oil Pipeline Here: Enbridge Northern Gateway Joint Review Panel in Smithers finds 100% opposition,” The Vancouver Observer, January 17, 2012, http://www.vancouverobserver.com/sustainability/2012/01/17/enbridge-northern-gateway-joint-review-panel-smithers-finds-100-opposition

[5] “Decisive Ecological Warfare,” Deep Green Resistance, accessed August 28, 2014, http://deepgreenresistance.org/en/deep-green-resistance-strategy/decisive-ecological-warfare

Deep Green Resistance – Liberal vs Radical Part 3 of 3

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Don’t miss Liberal vs Radical part one and part two.

(Video captions available in English, Russian, Portuguese. Contact us if you would like to translate this or other Deep Green Resistance videos to another language.)

Video Transcript:

Once people realize that bad things are happening most of us are called to action. I would say these are the four main categories of response.

The take home point here, if you remember nothing else from this, is that all four of these categories can be either liberal or radical.

None of them are inherently liberal or radical. It depends how we use them. They all have strategic strengths, they all have strategic failings. So it depends what we want to do with them.

This is the realization to which radicalism brings you. My two favorite people again.

Social change requires force. Why? Because it’s not a mistake out of which the powerful can be educated. Don’t misunderstand me that when I say “force”, that does not have to equal violence. Whether or not to wage your struggle using violence or nonviolence is a decision that comes way later, way down the pike.

Nonviolence is a very elegant political technique if it is understood and used properly. I don’t think that it is being used properly on the left right now but this is not a division between violence and nonviolence. It is only to recognize that power is not a mistake, I mean, not unless you’re a liberal.

Again, if you want to be a liberal, great, if that’s the framework that works for you, it’s your decision. I mean really, some of my best friends, right?

[Lierre Keith and audience laugh]

Back to our categories.

The first one is legal, for obvious reasons. A lot of activist groups really focus on making legal changes to the social power. And, to quote Catharine MacKinnon, “Law organizes power”, so it makes sense that a lot of us will sort of gravitate to that. The trick is we got to do that as radicals and not as liberals.

Basic question: Does this initiative, whatever it is, does it redefine power? Not just who’s at the top of the pyramid, but does it actually redefine power? Does it take power away from the powerful and redistribute it such that we all have some control over the material conditions? That would make it a radical action. But a lot of people, they give up on the legal stuff, or it doesn’t appeal for whatever reason.

Direct action, also tried and true. You can totally bypass the legislative arena and get a lot done. Usually that’s some kind of civil disobedience. It can be letter writing, petitioning, some kind of pressure but it really kicks into gear when you hit them economically.

Great example is the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was not a legal campaign, it was “we’re going to hit them economically”, and they did. They brought the bus company to their knees and made them stop segregating the buses. So it can be very effective.

Your basic insurrection would be another good example of direct action. That covers a lot of ground from very liberal things to very successful movements on up to really profound change.

Number three is withdrawal. Now this is a tricky one. The main difference between withdrawal as a successful strategy and withdrawal as a failed strategy is whether that withdrawal is seen as adequate in itself or whether it’s seen as necessary, connected to a larger political struggle. And that distinction hinges exactly on the difference between liberal and radical. Because issues of identification and loyalty are crucial to resistance movements but they’re not enough because your emotional state is not actually what’s going to create political change.

The withdrawal has to go beyond the intellectual, beyond the emotional, beyond the psychological. It’s got to include a goal, actually winning justice by withdrawing.

Withdrawal may give solace but ultimately it will change nothing. Living in a rarefied bubble-world of the already converted is a very poor substitute for freedom and it will not save our planet.

This is Gene Sharp, who I think is marvelous, and you should go to the library, get every book he’s ever written, keep you busy for a year. He makes a very similar point. The people who he calls “utopians” I would call “withdrawalists”.

They’re often especially sensitive to the evils of the world, they crave certainty and purity, they reject the evil as firmly as possible, they don’t want to have any compromise, and they await this new world, which will come into being by either an act of God, a change in human spirit, autonomous changes in conditions, some kind of spontaneous upheaval… but all of these are beyond deliberate human control.

The most serious weakness of this response to the problem of this world is not the broad vision or the commitment of the people who believe in it. The weakness is that these believers have no effective way to reach the society of their dreams. That about sums up my youth.

[L.K. and audience laugh]

I’ve heard the phrase “secular millennialism” and that’s exactly what he’s getting at.

So the left has these vague notions that our actions will inspire others, that even more vaguely these will accumulate into some kind of meaningful social change, or kick off a spontaneous insurrection.

There’s a nonviolent version which is usually lifestyle stuff like diet. There’s the more militant actions like the Weather Underground. Those are the two poles of secular millenialism. Change will happen because it MUST or because the Great Turning narrative says it will, or because the fires of our righteous rage will make it be so.

Given that revolution is not actually inevitable, I think we would be wise to understand the basic principle of resistance. “Dislodging injustice requires”, in the words of Andrea Dworkin, “organized political resistance”.

This brings us to the next category which is spirituality.

Withdrawalists’ stance is usually based on despair but it’s an answer that relies on faith, not on strategy. Which is to say, it’s an emotional response, an emotional solution, and it’s not a material solution. This merges right into Millenarianism.

Millenarianism is any religious movement that predicts the collapse of the world order as we know it, to be replaced by this wonderful time of justice and whatnot. There are lots of examples across history of desperate people taking this up. I highly recommend reading up on this.

Much of the left has been infected by this kind of thinking. We’re going to meditate to stop global warming, we’re going to orgasm our way to peace…

If all else fails, which it will, December 2012 is coming up, right? How many of these have we lived through? I’m 46, I think I’ve lived through 4? Every 10 years there’s another one, right? It’s not going to happen.

The worst examples in history that we know of: the Xhosa Cattle Killing Cult. The Xhosa are cattle-herding people in eastern South Africa. In the 1700s there’s various colonial invasions, displacement, genocide, war, all these horrors. By 1854 there’s this terrible lung disease and a whole bunch of the cattle die so the people are just incredibly vulnerable at this point, and somebody has a vision.

A teenage girl has a vision, and the vision is, if we kill all the cattle, destroy all our food stocks, even our cooking pots, everything, then this great thing will happen. The dead are going to return, the food supplies will just spring up overnight, there’s going to be gigantic cattle that you’ve never even seen before, they’re so big, and the spirit warriors will drive the British out and we will have our land again.

This vision starts to spread, everybody starts having visions, it’s just like this mass visioning is happening everywhere.

People believe it, more people believe it, they start killing the cattle. At some point so many cattle are killed that the carrion birds can’t even keep up with it. There’s so many corpses rotting in the sun. 400,000 beasts are slaughtered by the end of this.

The first deadline comes, does anything happen? One guess… no.

And of course the unbelievers are blamed. This is always where it ends with this kind of millenialism. It’s YOUR fault ’cause you didn’t believe it. So the very last cattle have to be killed.

A few people are hanging on, “nah, I’m just going to keep this one cow for some milk”. You can’t do it. So every last cattle has to be killed.

So, what happens? Mass starvation ensues. All its attendant atrocities and horrors, people ate corpses, people ate grass, people ate their children. I mean it’s just absolute hell. The population at one point was 105,000 and it collapses to 26,000 people, a lot whom had to escape into cities ’cause they were just starving in the countryside.

150 years of imperialism could not defeat the Xhosa but 2 years of millennial fever almost did.

So, bad example.

The Boxer Rebellion is another one, just as horrible. They called themselves the Righteous Harmony Society. This was a religious society in northern China that was absolutely a response to the Opium Wars and British Imperialism. You get why people are desperate.

They did martial arts, diet and prayer and they believed they’d be given the power to fly if they did this. And absolutely, they had special garments, protection against bullets and swords. You find that theme a lot. You’re going to wear this special garment and they won’t be able to kill you.

There was going to be an army of spirit soldiers that was going to arrive to save the day and drive out the British. They never appeared. The entire thing ends in complete disaster for China. Very evil stuff. How the British responded was just appalling.

Anyway, two examples and it is really worth, I think, knowing more about this because I just see these tendencies all the time and it’s not going to end well for us either.

Divine intervention has never yet stopped a system of unjust power across the entire sweep of human history. As a political strategy it is a complete failure and we really need to get over this one.

This is not in any way to dismiss the role of spirituality in a resistance movement. Spirituality is so often the core of any culture, and it is often the cradle of the resistance movement.

A lot of people talk about the black churches as the beginning of the Civil Right Movement, the Anti-Apartheid Movement also, the churches play this huge role. All across the world you can find how the Tibetans and the Buddhism, how this all comes together. It gives people incredible dignity and strength, you can get yourself respect through your spiritual practice. It absolutely helps communities stay together under really brutal conditions, helps set community norms.

All that is incredibly important. My point, really, is that faith is not a political strategy.

The only miracle we’re going to get is us.

Don’t miss Liberal vs Radical part two.

Watch more DGR videos: http://youtube.com/user/DeepGreenResistance.

DIY Resistance: Develop a Sense of Urgency

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Many thanks to San Diego Free Press, who first published this article

By Will Falk, Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition

shawnee-indian-tecumseh We are losing badly. The dominant culture is destroying what is left of the world and, right now, our resistance is simply ineffective. I cannot pretend to know exactly how we’re going to turn things around and stop the madness. But, I do believe we must develop a profound sense of urgency.

Wherever we look we’re met with the horror that should produce the necessary urgency. Look to the oceans and you’ll find that the coral reefs are dying. Zooplankton, forming the base of the oceanic food chain, have declined 70% over the last 40 years.

Look to the climate and you’ll find we’re boiling the world to death. Even mainstream scientists are predicting a 6 degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures by the end of the century.

Look to the animals and you’ll find 50% of all species disappearing. Look to the forests and you’ll find between 8 and 16 billion trees being cut down a year.

It’s as if the dominant culture sees the future and is holding the most macabre going-out-of-business sale imaginable complete with the advertisement “Everything must go.”

The statistics I include here are tiny snapshots of the immensity of the problem. The eradication of life in the oceans will be devastating for all of us. Climate change will cook the rich and poor alike. All humans need the oxygen lost through deforestation. So, why is it that more of us are not dropping everything to join the resistance? While we feel the tremors in the foundations of life on earth threatening to bury us all in ash and rubble, why are so many still hesitating to fight for their own survival?

***

One answer is privilege. As a white heterosexual man, I am a member of the most privileged class the world has ever known. I know how powerful the seductions of privilege can be. So much is given to me through the dumb luck of my genetic heritage. The gifts are maintained through a Faustian bargain requiring that I remain willing to deny the suffering of others and silent about the total collapse forming the devil’s due.

What gifts have I been given? I am given an almost total freedom from fear of rape. I am given a choice in religions where patriarchal gods reassure me that the world was made for me. I am given so-called natural resources to use for my civilized progress. I am given women’s bodies to use for my sexual satisfaction. I am given serenity in the knowledge that – whenever I choose to give up this resistance business – I can fade back into my privileged status. I am given the confidence that comes with looking like the most powerful men in the world.

Worst of all, I am given a version of history and a vision of the future that says things have always been – and will always be – this way. Only, we know that things have not always been this way. We know that a civilized, patriarchal violation imperative is destroying the world for everyone – men, women, and non-humans alike.

In the previous installments of this Do-It-Yourself: Resistance series, I wrote that my path to resistance involved falling in love with the world, developing empathy for all forms of life, and then learning to manage the grief that affects the heart made vulnerable by love and empathy. Love and empathy demonstrate that it is my responsibility as a white heterosexual man to step beyond the comfortable walls of my privilege and into the chilly, but star-filled night where our brothers and sisters dwell in reality. Our brothers and sisters are in mortal danger.

Privilege encourages complacency. For the privileged engaged in resistance, privilege gives the sense that there is still time. Privilege allows us time to engage in things like “spiritual preparation” or “finding myself” or “getting my shit together.” Thousands of species are extinct. 100 more went extinct today. 95% of American old growth forests are gone. 250 trees are cut down a second around the world. Millions of women have survived rape. One in four will be raped in her lifetime. Another one in four will fend off rape attempts.

We must develop a profound sense of urgency to stem this destructive tide. The time given to us by privilege is an illusion. There is no time for oppressed peoples and endangered species. We are in the middle of the fastest mass extinction event the world has ever seen.

Feel that for a moment. Test your heart’s ability to conceive the desperation bound to extinction. Whole species are gone. Whole nations of beings are removed from the world. Whole strands in the web of life have dissolved. Forever. If our resistance is going to be effective, we must act decisively and we must act now.

***

We are losing badly. The good news is the oppressed are fighting back.

The Unist’ot’en Clan of the grassroots Wet’suwet’en maintain a camp physically in the path of proposed pipelines routes over their unceded traditional territories in so-called British Columbia.

Lakota Sioux warriors vow they will be dead or in prison before they allow the Keystone XL pipeline to pass over their lands.

The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger River Delta (MEND) is engaged in armed militant resistance to genocide and ecocide in Nigeria warning the oil industry to “Leave our land or die in it.”

The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) states enough is enough and declares war on the Mexican state.

Sharks continue their attacks on underwater cables and have caused widespread disruptions of internet service.

The common thread tying these resistance groups is an honest acceptance of the urgency facing us. Resisters have been begging us for urgency for centuries. Things keep getting worse because not enough of us are answering their calls.

The EZLN’s Declaration of War recognized, “…we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food nor education. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect our political representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor is there peace nor justice for ourselves and our children” before characterizing their declaration as “our last hope.” When will we internalize the EZLN’s truth that hope is in its dying throes?

Olowan Martinez said about the Lakota resistance to pipelines, “When they get rid of the Lakota, the earth isn’t too far behind. Our people believe the Lakota is the earth.” When will we see ourselves as the earth and love ourselves enough to fight for our own survival?

Finally, the great Shawnee chief Tecumseh in his “Plea to the Choctaws and Chickasaws” to fight the Americans in the spring of 1811 issued warnings that have never been more true. Tecumseh said, “Think not…that you can remain passive and indifferent to the common danger and escape the common fate. Your people, too, will soon be as falling leaves and scattering clouds before their blighting breath. You, too, will be driven away from your native land and ancient domains as leaves are driven before the wintry storms.” When will we recognize our common danger and common fate?

For too long, too many have refused to develop the urgency we need to resist effectively. Resist, and resist now. Tecumseh’s warning will come true for all of us if we delay. It is time we refuse to be leaves in the storm.

Browse Will Falk’s DIY Resistance series at the Deep Green Resistance Blog

DIY Resistance: Beat the Grief

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Many thanks to San Diego Free Press, who first published this article

By Will Falk, Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition

Surviving into adulthood in this destructive culture comes with a deep familiarity of loss.

We lose loved ones to environmentally-induced diseases like most forms of cancer, to the diseases of civilization like diabetes, and to actions previously almost unheard of in our original communities like suicide and patriarchal violence.

We lose the grasslands, forests, beaches, and riverbeds – words once synonymous with the homes our ancestors dwelled in so comfortably – to the murderous march of progress. We lose our memories, our stories, and thus, our identities, to the culturally homogenizing processes of colonization. We lose our sense of safety while men at staggering rates rape women and people of color are gunned down by police in the streets and bombed by soldiers in their homes.

Losing so much, we live in a perpetual state of grief. In my first two installments of this Do-It-Yourself Resistance series, I wrote that resistance begins with love and empathy. Falling in love and opening to the channels of empathy makes you vulnerable to the excruciating grief following loss. Grief is painful as resistance is painful.

Much of what I’ve read about grief focuses on the way grief comes from a single incident of loss. Common events leading to grief include the death of a loved one, divorce, or the loss of financial stability. By now, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief are well known. Kubler-Ross studied patients facing the singular event of a terminal illness diagnosis and generalized grief into five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Many have found this explanation helpful in working through a single incident of grief.

But, the deeper you become involved in resistance, the deeper you fall in love, the deeper you allow empathy to seep into your heart, the more you will be exposed to event after event after traumatizing event leading to grief. The question becomes: How do we learn to live with perpetual grief? Once tired and bloodied, how do we withstand the body blows this culture will continue to deliver?

***

As a child, I had one dream for my future: I wanted to play linebacker for the University of Notre Dame football team. In many ways, I couldn’t help it. My father went to Notre Dame and walked-on the football team his freshman year for the legendary coach, Ara Parseghian, before leaving the team to focus on his academics.

I was born almost a month prematurely and was a tiny baby weighing in at 5 pounds, 5 ounces. The first pictures of me are in Notre Dame pajamas. I was so small that my dad could hold my head in his palm, drape my legs over his forearm, and rock me to sleep in the exact same way a football player tucks away the ball.

I was – and still am – a sensitive child, often being swept away in the sadness I feel around me. I was – and still am – reckless with my body. I climbed trees, jumped off staircases, ran radio flyer wagons down steep hills, and routinely experienced the need to fearlessly examine every square inch of poison ivy patches. Often, when I was hurt – emotionally or physically – my dad would patiently let me shed some tears before he asked me, “Would linebackers at Notre Dame cry?”

Hearing this, I would stick out my chin, wipe the tears off my cheeks with the back of my hand, and try to grin.

***

As it turns out, I was not good enough to play linebacker at Notre Dame. Notre Dame, of course, is one of the premier college football programs in the nation. I did, however, end up playing linebacker at a smaller college – the University of Dayton.

In American football, linebackers exist to for one purpose, and one purpose only, to find who is carrying the ball for the other team, and to tackle that player. Linebackers have a reputation for both physical and mental toughness. Physically, they must throw their bodies in the way of blockers much heavier than them. Mentally, they must possess a desire to hunt down the opposing ball carrier.

Reflecting on my college football career a few years ago with my dad, resulted in one of the proudest moments of my life and also taught me an important lesson in my path to engaging in active resistance of the dominant culture.

My dad was asking what some of my old teammates were up to and we were talking about Paddy McCormick, an academic All-American guard, my old roommate, med-school graduate, now doctor, and a dear friend. I told him about the time a group of my teammates and I were discussing who they hated hitting with on the team, and Paddy – to my and most everyone’s surprise – said, “Falk. Hands down. The kid always hits you squarely in the face with his head and you get that shaky feeling for a few plays afterwards. And he just keeps doing it.”

I was laughing, but my dad got quiet and with tears in his eyes – my dad never cries – said, “I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, Will, you’re much tougher than I ever could be. You played football with a single-minded focus I’ve never seen before.”

***

I was neither particularly fast, nor particularly strong, especially compared to most Division 1 college linebackers. I was certainly not the best linebacker to ever don the red helmet for the Dayton Flyers, I wasn’t even one of the best linebackers on our team. But, I was known for my dogged recklessness. I had to do something better than most players, so I became really good at leading with my helmet, throwing my body into the path of blockers, and then getting up and doing it all over again for the next play.

No one believes me, but some of the most serene moments I’ve ever experienced have come on the football field in the middle of a game with thousands of screaming fans. Lining up four yards from five three-hundred pound men coming to take my head off in the seconds before the ball was snapped signaling the start of a football play produced profound stillness for me.

In my memory, I study the knuckles of the man in his stance in front of me. White knuckles with his weight pressing forward means the next is a running play. Red knuckles with weight leaning backwards means the next is a passing play. I peer into the eyes of the quarterback. A glance at the end to my left forecasts where the ball is going.

The ball is snapped. The man in front of me steps with his left foot; I step to mirror him with my right. I see the flash of brown leather as the quarterback hands the ball off. I see a hole open in front of me. I accelerate to the hole as a blocker steps in front of me. I dip my shoulder, raise my head, and our helmets crack together. My ears ring, but I keep my feet going. I force my way past as the ball carrier arrives. He jukes right, but I don’t buy it. He decides to go with power trying to run me over. The crown of my helmet lifts up under his chinstrap. I run my hips into the air and in a moment we’re rolling over each other on the turf.

For a moment, I feel the scream in my neck and shoulders, the gash on my shin where I get stepped on in the pile of bodies, and my arms are bleeding from rubbing on the artificial turf. My head vibrates from the latest in a long list of collisions. Everything hurts. I want to crawl to the sideline, soak in an ice bath, and take copious amounts of painkillers. But, the whistle blows, the crowd has exploded, and I pop up to do it all again. I have a job to do for my coaches and for my teammates. I have to tackle the ball carrier.

A single-minded focus pushes me through the pain and I continue to do this until the game is over and we’ve won.

***

One way I’ve come to understand my suicide attempts is through understanding my own grief. In those moments of despair leading me to attempt to kill myself, part of what I felt was a profound sense of loss.

As a young man facing a future dominated by student loan debt and countless hours chained to a desk in an office trying to dig myself out, I lost the possibility of a happy future. As a young public defender, watching client after client dragged away to prison, I lost a belief in justice. As a member of natural communities, I lost friends to the long night of species extinction. As a being defined by my relationships to every thing around me, I lost myself in the perpetual poisoning of water, the perversion of sunshine through the deterioration of the ozone layer, and the eradication of inch by precious inch of life giving topsoil.

In those moments where suicide seemed my only option, grief was drowning me. If you’re in love with life and you allow yourself to feel the emotions of others, it is impossible to avoid grief. Every living thing is under attack. More and more of the world burns with each passing second. Denying it only works for a short time. Giving into the grief completely might lead you down the same suicidal paths I tread.

Do not walk those paths. Resist. We are strong enough – you and I. Resist. It will be difficult. We will lose brothers and sisters on the way. Grief will grab our hearts so strongly sometimes we may feel like slipping away into that comfortable slumber of death. But, we must resist. If we develop a single-minded focus – the single-minded focus on defending life – we will shake off the grief. We will pull ourselves up off the turf and we will win.

Browse Will Falk’s DIY Resistance series at the Deep Green Resistance Blog

The Decision to Die, The Decision to Kill

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By Will Falk, Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition

It is long past time we honestly assessed our capacity for violence. Violence – unconscionable violence many seem unconscious of – rages on around us. I write “unconscionable” because what other word describes the images of Palestinian children on hospital beds with half their heads caved in? I write “unconscious” because how many of us actively sit in the despair these images produce?

Within violence there are two extremes: the decision to die and the decision to kill. The decision to die and the decision to kill can be as easy as deciding what to have for dinner. For the wolf, the decision to kill and the decision what to have for dinner are literally the same. For the moose hunted by the wolf, the decision to die becomes the decision to be dinner. For the moose, the decision to die means sacrificing her body to the sacred cycle so that life may continue.

It is becoming increasingly clear the dominant culture must be stopped. The more effective we become resisting, the more violence will be visited upon us. Will we be strong enough to decide to die for a better world? Will we be strong enough to decide to kill for a better world? If this sounds too extreme, then I ask you: what decisions were faced by Tecumseh, Nat Turner, Crazy Horse, Denmark Vesey, and Padráic Pearse when they picked up rifles and hatchets to meet bullets and swords?

***

I experienced the decision to die and the decision to kill simultaneously the two times I tried to commit suicide. I am compelled to write about my suicide attempts because in what was designed to produce my own death, I produced new life. And, in the process of healing, I see that I am privy to experiential wisdom that most never will be. I’m not saying that anyone should visit the dark places I have, but now that I have returned from those dark places I feel a responsibility to describe what I’ve seen.

The decision to die came slowly. It began during my senior year in college. The reality that I borrowed $90,000 to pay for my education started to sink in. I saw my future draining away while I was inevitably chained to jobs to make enough money to pay off my loans. I wanted to be a literature professor spending my life reading, researching, and writing about the stories that shape the world, but somehow I let myself be convinced that the best way to pay off my loans was to take out another $120,000 to go to law school.

From the moment I settled on going to law school, my decision to die solidified as I stuffed the messages of protest my heart sent me deeper and deeper into a hole dug by my own denial. I hated law school. I sensed the deep contradiction inhering to the practice of law. Lawyers are supposed to practice justice, but I read case after case of the United States endorsing genocide through Federal Indian law policy, genocide through upholding slavery, patriarchy through a concentrated attack on the bodies of women, and the constant destruction of natural communities in the name of “progress,” “the economy,” and “development of natural resources.”

Then, I became a public defender. The hole of denial I dug to bury my heart in simply was not big enough. My emotions – left to fester in their hole – seeped out to infect my body with a profound weariness. Each time I accepted my own powerlessness in the face of the system, each time I walked into a jail to sit with someone who should not have been held there, and each time I watched the face of a client being dragged to prison, my heart pumped out its poison. The poison spread into my limbs making my every move a struggle upstream against a strong current. The poison spread into my mind until it became impossible to see a future inhabited by anything other than the clinging, gray fog of numbness.

Finally, I made the decision to die.

The only person I’ve ever tried to kill is myself. It wasn’t hard. I even looked myself in the eye – my reflection in the mirror – as I ground a couple sleeping pills with the butt of a knife into a fine powder. I watched my hands as they stopped shaking for the first time in days to shape the powder into tidy, straight lines. I noticed the way the cowlick over my forehead conveniently fell out of the way as I bent to snort the lines. I even enjoyed the taste of the tap water as I drank down the twenty-odd pills and put on my pajamas before crawling into bed losing consciousness.

In my desperation, the decision to kill was that easy.

I survived the suicide attempts in a physical sense and I am very grateful. Parts of me, however, did not survive. I killed the last vestiges of my desires for financial and social comforts. I killed my self-doubt that I was capable of embracing an actively resistant lifestyle. I killed my denial that my heart truly knows what’s best for me.

In so many ways, I was left for dead – and it was the best thing to ever happen to me because I know how untouchable a dead person can be. Giving up on everything but the defense of those I love makes me more effective than I could ever have imagined.

***

I was recently part of a discussion about the practice of tree spiking. Tree spiking is a tactic used by land defenders to protect forests from logging. The tactic involves hiding a long nail – called a spike – in the trunks of trees. Typically, logging companies are alerted to the possibility of spikes in a proposed cut, so loggers are aware of the risks they’re taking. If the blade of a saw strikes the nail it can break the saw or cause the saw to careen off possibly injuring or even killing the logger or mill worker. Bad profit margins in spiked forests and pressure from logging unions to protect loggers make corporations reluctant to log in areas where tree spiking has occurred. In short, tree spiking can be an effective way to combat deforestation.

Many people are outraged that land defenders would consider a tactic that might lead to the injury of fellow humans. They remind advocates of tree spiking that many loggers have no choice in their profession. Tree spiking detractors ask advocates if they aren’t just occupying a place of privilege when they place a logger’s body in jeopardy through spiking. Detractors accuse advocates of being just like our corporate enemies if we even consider placing a human in physical harm’s way. And, as if this should end all debate of the efficacy of tree spiking, they ask, “Isn’t tree spiking violent?”

Imagine a logging operation. The spray of living flesh coats the loggers’ arms and chests and sticks to their beards in the form of saw dust. Behind the loggers is a stack of dozens of dead tree corpses. These trees were stretching their green nettled arms towards the sky in celebration of the sun’s warmth just moments before. Underneath the tree, in the soil and crawling up the trees’ skin, a whole network of mycelium was busily shuffling nutrients from strong, healthy trees to young or sickly trees in the community. In the tops of the trees, families of swallows have built their mud nests against the trunks. Many of these nests, full of chicks with wings not quite ready, are crushed as the trees collapse to the ground.

Then, a logger hits a spike. His saw careens off the nail. Maybe the saw strikes him and he is cut and bleeding. Maybe the cut is so bad he must be rushed to the hospital. Maybe the cut is so bad he dies. In any case, the logging stops – if even just for the time it takes to remove the injured logger.

When I imagine this logging operation and listen to people urging advocates of direct action tactics like tree spiking to think of the loggers that may be hurt or to disregard any option that involves violence, I cannot help but ask: What about the trees? What about the mycelia networks living in mutual relationship with tree roots? What about the chicks living in the treetops?

***

I am growing impatient. We are losing and losing badly.

Just this morning, I looked at a list of extinct species. West African black rhinoceroses will never again cause the earth to shake under their heavy tread. Pyrenean ibexes will never again dance their sure-footed way through the mountains of France and Spain. Sea minks will never again glide through the green foams along the coasts of Maine and New Brunswick.

What would these animals ask us if they were still around to communicate? Would they ask us to hesitate in the face of their total extermination, or would they ask us to help them survive?

It’s not just extinction either. The best-case estimate for old growth forest in the United States is that we’ve lost 95% since the arrival of Europeans on this continent. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization says that 22-44 million trees are cut down per day around the world, or 916,000 trees cut down per hour, or 15,000 trees cut down per minute, or 250 trees cut down per second.

How many CEOs, politicians, or loggers have been cut down by land defenders? Any? A few? A fraction of the 250 living trees felled around the world in one second?

I need to be explicitly clear. I am not calling for wanton violence. I am simply asking those of us who love life on the planet enough to be engaged in active resistance not to remove tools from the table.

We must think about the negative impact of any action taken, but we must also remember that every second that passes means more trees felled, more forests eradicated, more topsoil spent, more water rendered incapable of sustaining life, more air poisoned, more species extinct, and more peoples killed and displaced. We must understand that the destruction that builds with every passing second brings us closer and closer to our own extinction.

***

Our own violence was long ago determined for us. The decision to die and the decision to kill are made through our complicity in this genocidal and ecocidal system daily. To think that we can somehow keep our hands clean ignores that they have been soaking in blood for centuries. There’s not one square inch of soil on this continent that has not been affected by the perpetual shedding of indigenous blood by the dominant culture. The comforts of civilization come to us greased in the human tallow of oppressed workers around the world, come to us over mangled corpses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine, come to us through the psychic theft perpetrated by a world view trying to tell us that all of this is how it should be.

We are animals. Just like the relationship between the wolf and the moose, we must kill to survive and we must die so that others may live. We can choose to kill as the wolf does – carefully selecting a sick or weak moose to sustain the pack – or we can kill indiscriminately dropping napalm, bouncing betties, and carpet bombs. We can recognize that we are already killers, or we can hide in our comforts and deny the violent reality surrounding us.

There are those who for a number of valid reasons are not willing to engage in direct actions like sabotage or tree spiking because they might be deemed violent. I would encourage those who reject violence in all forms to consider whether they are willing to accept life-threatening violence on their own bodies. If you cannot do violence, are you willing to take violence? Can you place your body between the bombs and the bombs’ targets?

Rachel Corrie was smashed to death under an Israeli bulldozer in 2003 when she acted to stop the destruction of a Palestinian home in Gaza

We have seen what will happen to even non-violent resistors who effectively impede business as usual. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Rachel Corrie was smashed to death under an Israeli bulldozer in 2003 when she acted to stop the destruction of a Palestinian home in Gaza. Ken Saro-Wiwa, a poet no less, was hung by the Nigerian government. These non-violent resistors all demand that we ask: Can you make the decision to die?

There are others who believe that we need to stop the dominant culture from destroying everything and are willing to consider a variety of tactics. I cannot take the place of your heart in your own journey towards understanding your limits. I can, however, tell you that as someone who has made the decision to die and the decision to kill before, I do not believe it makes you evil, wrong, or even any different from the rest of us.

We are all engaged in violence. Some are willing to take it, but will not engage in violence. Some are willing to give violence. It is time we decide our capacity for violence. Time is short. How we channel this violence will determine our very survival.

References:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Wildlife/2009/0102/earthtalk-how-threatened-are-us-old-growth-forests

ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/008/A0400E/A0400E00.pdf

Earth At Risk 2014: The Justice and Sustainability Conference

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By Fertile Ground Environmental Institute

This November, some of the world’s preeminent strategists in environmental defense, social justice, and grassroots activism will come together to share their insights and speak toward ONE goal: crafting game-changing responses to address the converging crises we face.

Species extinction, racism, sexual warfare, deforestation, global warming, corruption — all stem from the same root.

For too long environmentalism has hinged on conformity to capitalism and the status quo. For too long social justice work has capitulated to this profoundly abusive culture.

We may live on an EARTH AT RISK – but with this great challenge comes a GREAT OPPORTUNITY. This is your struggle, whether you acknowledge it or not. Will you sit on the sidelines as the world burns?

Join this global conversation and know that lines have been drawn.

For more information: http://www.fertilegroundinstitute.org/earth-at-risk-2014.html

Lessons from Unist’ot’en Camp: Is Your Integrity Intact?

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Many thanks to San Diego Free Press, who first published this manuscript.

Will Falk, Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition

Resistance is often lonely.

I learn about loneliness waking up on a cold, hard storage room floor at 3 AM in a new friend’s house after a nightmare involving confronting all my old co-workers in the Kenosha, Wisconsin State Public Defender’s Office, hanging my head again in defeat and shame as I explain that I will never come back to work there. I stare at the ceiling asking myself just how in the hell I ended up in Victoria, British Columbia to stop the spread of fossil fuels in Canada.

I learn about loneliness watching the supply of my daily anti-depressants dwindle in the bottom of the orange pill bottle. I’m too embarrassed to ask how I would go about refilling my prescription. I’m confused about whether I even want to re-fill it after forgetting to take my medications for a few days and feeling the welcome return of swift, spontaneous emotions welling up to heat my body like a touch of whiskey on a winter day.

I learn about loneliness when I unexpectedly run into the ex-partner I left in San Diego to come to Unist’ot’en Camp after close to 3 years together while making my bus transfer in downtown Victoria. The unlikeliness of this encounter sinks in and I look around for friends who understood the relationship to help me laugh about it. Obviously, those friends are not here.

I learn about loneliness sitting in a living room on a foggy, rainy night with people I just met gazing across the Salish Sea south from Vancouver Island. Two beautiful American women are singing American folk songs while I look at America from Canada and ponder the meaning of home. There’s a mandolin hanging on the wall next to me that reads “Made in Kentucky” and I think of my Kentucky-born, Kentucky-raised mother. I miss her. I miss hearing southern accents. I think of my father teasing my mother about her accent all while developing his own southern accent from decades of loving my mother. I miss my father.

I learn about loneliness as I realize that spending too much time pitying myself for my loneliness while the world burns is a luxury the world cannot afford. Then, I learn I’m lonely for a world where I can sit with my melancholia for as long as I wish.

I’m lonely for a world that isn’t burning.

***
A few nights ago, I sat in a crowd gathered for a Unist’ot’en Camp fundraiser in the Fernwood neighborhood of Victoria listening to Unist’ot’en spokesperson Freda Huson and her husband, a Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief, Toghestiy speak about the mission of the Camp.

I spent the few days before helping to prepare for the fundraiser. I was tired from moving tables, loading vans, and riding my loaner bike all over Victoria hanging posters on telephone poles and in coffee shops. As so often happens to me in large gatherings of people who seem to all know each other, but who don’t know me, I was feeling very lonely. I wanted to share hugs with people I’d hugged before. I wanted to talk about football – American football in this time of the World Cup – with someone, anyone.

It was in this emotional place that Toghestiy’s words found me. He talked about the Camp volunteers who had turned their back on mainstream middle-class lifestyles to make their way off-the-grid to Unist’ot’en Camp. He explained how recently Camp volunteers woke in the early morning before dawn to the sound of a low-flying helicopter. Helicopters often try to land equipment and men on Wet’suwet’en land to establish work camps to begin pipeline construction. They jumped in a pick-up and took off down a forestry road to chase the helicopter off.

Toghestiy told a story about an indigenous friend who was called to the offices of a pipeline corporation so they could offer her a job and ask her to encourage support for the projects with her people. The woman took a drum to the office and beat it every time a pipeline executive tried to speak until they realized her answer was, “No.”

Toghestiy then told the story of his grandfather. Toghestiy was raised on the cultural lessons of his late grandparents – Madeek and Sa’itne. Toghestiy’s grandfather – also a hereditary chief – held an illegal open-air feast for his people. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Toghestiy’s grandfather in the middle of the feast and held him in jail for several months. As soon as Toghestiy’s grandfather was released from jail, he gathered his people together to finish the feast. It was through actions and stories like these that Toghestiy was taught that a hereditary chief has a responsibility to ensure there is always something for his people and their future generations.

Finally, Toghestiy described the genocidal processes that are destroying First Nations. What began with murder and rape at the time of European first contact and carried on through the forcible removal of indigenous children from their families to residential schools for cultural whitewashing is perpetuated by the continual dispossession of First Nations land, the slashing of government aid programs, and a nearly complete unemployment rate in many First Nations communities. Unist’ot’en Camp stands in resistance to genocide. The Camp offers indigenous people and the world a glimpse into the power and humility of traditional Wet’suwet’en ways of living while physically blocking the spread of destructive fossil fuels.

Then, Toghestiy said, “These stories are about integrity. Corporations and the government think they can buy our integrity with the right price, but my integrity cannot be bought or sold. I want to ask everyone who is not resisting, ‘Is your integrity intact?’”
***

Is your integrity intact?

It is a simple and direct question. Integrity means being honest and having strong moral principles. In a world where many of us claim to be concerned for the future of our children, it means stopping the forces that will make their future a living hell. In a world where most of us claim to love life and at least some other living beings, it means protecting what we love. In a world threatened with annihilation by economic development and colonialism, it means everything.

We all must answer Toghestiy’s question for ourselves. First, each one of us must decide what to base our moral foundation upon. I encourage you to base your morality on the natural world because without the natural world nothing is possible. The most delicious food you’ve ever tasted comes from a functioning soil system. The most enjoyable learning experience you’ve ever gone through is only possible because your brain is housed in natural minerals (your skull) and nourished with physical nutrients (remember that delicious food?). The best glass of wine you’ve ever had starts with clean water. The most incredible sex you’ve ever experienced would never have happened without the clean air you and your partner shared in those magical moments.

Choosing to base our morality on reality is not enough, though. Regardless of what we say or think or say we think, integrity is demonstrated by action. It’s as simple as my father’s favorite adage, “It’s not what you say. It’s what you do.” Honesty is only proven through honest actions. You honestly love trees? Stop them from being deforested. You honestly love salmon? Knock down the dams keeping them from reaching their spawning beds. You honestly love your children? Ensure that they have a livable future.

This is what integrity looks like.

***
Answering Toghestiy’s question myself has given me the strength I need to overcome the loneliness that so often accompanies resistance because it gives me the articulation I need to remember why I am willing to face loneliness to keep resisting.

Why am I willing to feel loneliness? To keep my integrity intact.

The dominant culture works very hard and very well at nullifying resistance. It pushes capitalism on us to force us to work most of our waking hours to buy food and shelter. It pushes colonialism on indigenous peoples because the dominant culture simply cannot tolerate that there are – and always have been – better ways to live. It offers us money, alcohol, drugs, pornography, television, meaningless vacations, and so-called “security” to encourage us to accept or ignore or deny these terrible arrangements of power.

I could sell my integrity, of course. You could, too. They’re offering some very attractive signing bonuses. I could give up on the pipelines resistance up here and come back to friends and family to alleviate my loneliness. I could use my law degree and legal experience to make a more than comfortable living to salve the feelings of financial insecurity I often feel. I could allow myself to be seduced by the smiling face and feel good ethic of a bourgeois existence that says that being nice, maximizing personal happiness, and spending quality time with friends and family is the ultimate goal of life.

But, I won’t and I hope you won’t, either. My integrity is not for sale. I want my integrity to be intact.

Browse Will Falk’s Unis’tot’en Camp series at the Deep Green Resistance Blog

Deep Green Resistance – Liberal vs Radical Part 2 of 3

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Watch part one and part three.

(Video captions available in English, Russian, Portuguese. Contact us if you would like to translate this or other Deep Green Resistance videos to another language.)

Video Transcript:

People withstand oppression using 3 psychological methods: denial, accommodation, and consent. So if they had but known they were slaves.

Anyone on the receiving end of domination learns early in life to stay in line or risk the consequences. And those consequences only have to be applied once in awhile to be effective. From that point forward the traumatized psyche will police itself.

We have a saying in the battered women’s movement, “One beating a year will keep a woman down” so once in awhile is all it takes. Any show of resistance is met on the continuum that starts with derision, social derision, all the way across to violence, including murder, and that’s how oppression works. We end up consenting.

But resistance does happen, somehow. Despite everything people WILL insist on their humanity.

Here is “tank-man”. I love this. We still don’t know this man’s name, we don’t know if he’s alive, but he did this.

[Male voice from audience: ] No, he was killed.

[Lierre Keith:] He was killed?

[Male voice from audience mumbles something in agreement]

[Lierre Keith:] They’re pretty sure he was killed? ‘Cause he WAS pulled out of the street but they don’t know whether it was by police or whether it was by other citizens who were trying to save him ’cause they were like, “he’s going to get murdered” and so they dragged him out, yeah…

[Man in audience mumbles:] …killed.

[Lierre Keith:]…killed, yeah. It’s a big mystery, we’re not quite sure what happened to him in the end but he said “over my dead body”, that’s quite clear. And frankly that’s what we all need to be doing, right? In one way or another.

The final difference is the approach to justice. With power being invisible on the liberal side, justice is therefore served by adhering to these moral principles that are abstract.

For radicals justice cannot be blind. Domination will only be dismantled by taking away the rights of the powerful and redistributing those rights to the rest of us. So you’re going to have to name the harm and then think up a specific redress and then go ahead and do it.
By having it be blind it means that you’re really only supporting the powers that be that are already in place.

One really great example of this is: there’s a famous sex discrimination case, it was a class action case against Sears and Roebuck. Women came forward, had a whole bunch of stories about how they were being denied promotions, and whatnot, at Sears. This was heard by a federal court. One of the problems was that women weren’t getting maternity leave. They were being discriminated against ’cause they don’t have maternity leave.
The court denied all their claims. For women, this is a huge loss. WalMart is doing the same thing now. It has not changed in 30 years.

The part that gets you always is the federal judge then says, “This is not discrimination against women because if men got pregnant too, they also would not have maternity leave.” This is a federal judge. You could not find a more abstract principle. “If men got pregnant…” Men DON’T get pregnant, that’s the point! That’s WHY it’s discrimination against women.

[audience laughs]

So here we’ve been using these words like “oppression”. We haven’t defined this yet.

If you did your reading you will have come across Marilyn Frye. [Oppression is] “…a system of interrelated forces and barriers which reduce, immobilize and mold people who belong to a certain group, and effect their subordination to another group.” Now that is radicalism in one elegant sentence. Oppression is not an attitude, it’s about a system of power. And one of the harms of that system is that is creates subordination in that group. It creates that consent in the oppressed.

The image that she uses is the birdcage. If you are a liberal you’re only going to see random bars. They’re not connected into that interrelated set, right? What keeps that bird in that cage is the fact that all those bars work together. It’s the interrelated forces and barriers. So if you’re a liberal, why is that bird in that cage? Oh I don’t know, there’s nothing keeping that bird in that cage. You don’t see the forces and barriers. It either has to be voluntary, “the bird wants to be in that cage”, or it’s natural, “well it’s just in that bird’s nature to be in that cage”.

We’ve got another word here we should talk about which is “subordination”. We’ve got some very smart people who’ve come before us.

This is Andrea Dworkin, Four Elements of Subordination:

Hierarchy: group on top, group on the bottom. Of course the people on the bottom have a lot fewer rights, resources, blah, blah.

Objectification: some human beings are seen as less than human. In whatever way they are used as objects, they are bought and sold as objects, it’s appropriate to treat them as objects.

Submission: so here we go again. You have to submit in order to survive. And this is always the rock and the hard place that you’re up against when you are being oppressed.
You are objectified and because you then have to submit that’s used as proof that you in fact deserved that oppression or you’re somehow made for that oppression, it doesn’t hurt you when you’re oppressed. But in fact it’s really just the only option you’ve got, if essentially, you don’t want to die.

Finally there’s violence: of course committed by the people on top against the people on the bottom. It’s totally natural, in fact, they have a right to do it. It’s when people start fighting up from the bottom that you’ve got trouble.

All 4 of these elements work together to create this hermetically sealed world, psychologically and politically. Where oppression is normalized and is almost as necessary as air for the whole society to function.

Coming to political consciousness is not a painless task. To overcome that denial, the accommodation, the consent, it means facing the everyday normative cruelty
of the society in which you live, in which millions of people are participating in this.
A lot of them get direct benefits from it, others of them get benefits as bystanders. It’s really hard to face that. It’s also really hard to face your own collusion in your own oppression. It’s not a fun moment.

A friend of mine remembers the first person in her family who ever went to college grew up in really extreme poverty and her first year in college she kind of had a mental breakdown and it was over this one sentence:

She said, “I realized there were rich people and there were poor people and there was a relationship between the two”.

That whole year was just coming to grips with that.

Knowledge of oppression starts from some kind of baseline recognition that subordination is always wrong, that oppression always hurts real people, and that we can do something about it. I would submit that knowledge, and the skills that we acquire in analyzing the situation that we’re in can be emotionally freeing, certainly intellectually freeing and ultimately spiritually freeing. It can give us the kind of courage we need to go forward, so, we gotta do it.

Watch part one and part three.

Watch more DGR videos: http://youtube.com/user/DeepGreenResistance.

Reflecting on Unist’ot’en Camp: Living with Death

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Many thanks to San Diego Free Press, who transcribed and first published the original handwritten manuscript.

Will Falk, Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition

June 20, 2014

There is a trail we all must walk. It begins at birth. It twists and turns through lush forests and barren deserts, under clear, star-filled skies and swollen storm clouds, up steep mountain passes and along lazy sweet-tasting streams. Eventually, we find ourselves approaching the heavy mists of death. Eyesight cannot pierce the mists. Rarely do we hear anything from the other side. We do not know where the trail through the mists leads because the mists of death form impenetrable walls.

I have lain in my own deathbed. Twice.

Through two attempted suicides, my trail slowed as it turned uphill and towards a cliff where the mists had gathered. The tip of my nose pressed into the deep chill. My cheeks were almost frostbitten with the violence I did to myself.

Time slowed and was nearly frozen into a never-ending present. Behind me was the trail of my life and before me was death. The future – as death – was rendered unavailable to me. The future did not exist. This long moment accompanied both my suicide attempts. The present weighed down on me and forced me to face the totality of my life. As consciousness slipped away from me, the last living thoughts I had were, “I am not finished yet.”

***

While I was at Unist’ot’en Camp, I wrote an essay called “Think About Your Future” about how dedicating ourselves to saving what is left of the world is the best action we can take to protect our future. Part of my motivation in writing that essay was to defend young activists from friends and family who try to steer us away from activism by warning us that we’ll need jobs, benefits, and pensions. They try to set us back on the mainstream path by telling us to think about our material future – as if our material future does not depend on a healthy land base.

Since writing that essay, I’ve felt that I left something unsaid. The essay operated partly as a justification for devotion to environmental causes as well as a reminder of the primacy of the natural world. Bank accounts, of course, are meaningless if there is no clean water to drink. What I’ve realized since writing that essay and reflecting on my own experiences is that we do not need to appeal to the future to demand environmental action. All we have to do is look to the here and now. Our future, of course, is being physically and spiritually destroyed. Our chances for survival diminish with each passing day. But, our present is being destroyed too.

200 species a day are going extinct. That’s not in the future. That’s right now. In the time it takes me to write this sentence – about 15 seconds – another woman is battered. Her eye is blackening and her lip is swelling. Right now. 72 acres of rainforest are destroyed every minute. When you finish reading this essay, depending on your speed, another 144, another 216 acres will be gone. 300 hundred tons of topsoil are lost every minute. That’s this minute and the next minute and the next forming a deadly velocity that just keeps picking up speed.

How can we think about the future knowing that all of these atrocities are happening right now?

There’s another reason why appealing to the future might be problematic. What happens, for example, when there is no future to appeal to? What if the near-term human extinction folks are right? University of Arizona Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology Guy McPherson sees human extinction by 2030. Many scientists are predicting an 11 degree Fahrenheit temperature rise by 2100 making the Earth uninhabitable for humans and most other life forms. Then, there’s the merely common sense analysis rooted in the reality that a system based on infinite growth on a finite planet is suicidal.

What do we appeal to when the future becomes so cloudy we cannot conceptualize it?

***

And that brings me to another point I made in “Think About Your Future.” I wrote, “Unfortunately, the dominant culture isn’t just killing itself, it wants to take as many of us down with it as it can. It wants to commit murder-suicide.” Since writing that sentence, and reflecting on my own experiences with suicide, I realized that the lessons I learned in the long moments before what I thought would be my death can be applied to this destructive culture.

We all know the over-used versions of the cliché that says “all we have is now.” I learned on my own deathbed where I deliberately took too many pills to destroy my own future the reality of that statement. When you face the total nothingness of death, when you strain your senses to feel something, anything through those heavy mists of death, when your future is stolen from you, the present really does become all you have. It is precious. You treasure it. You cling to every aspect of it in the hopes that you can coax some spark of the future out of it knowing that a spark could hold the key to your survival.

The dominant culture is hurtling down the trail of life to its own death. As things continue to get worse, those of us aware enough are going to be caught in the long moment before plunging into the chilling mists of our cultural death, our spiritual death, and maybe even our physical death. Perhaps, we are caught in that moment right now.

Sit with that realization for a moment. Be honest. Let it weigh on your heart. Think about your mind slipping away like the sand in an hourglass emptying. Feel the beats of your heart slowing until it cannot push your life-giving blood through your veins. Sense the loss of control in your muscles. First your toes won’t wiggle, your fingers won’t grasp. Then, your legs won’t bend and your arms are asleep. What does this do to you? How does this make you feel? Does it help you love each breath you take just a little more? Does it make your coffee taste better? Will you kiss your lover slower, more deeply tonight? Will you pledge to fight for every single instant of beautiful life you can possibly get your hands on?

***

The good news is there are sparks in our present that can be fanned into the roaring flames of survival. For me, this spark has been provided by the grassroots Wet’suwet’en people – especially Freda Huson and Dini Ze Toghestiy – who are digging in on their homelands at Unist’ot’en Camp to stop pipelines from being built. They are certainly looking out for our future and for our future generations, but Unist’ot’en Camp is also protecting the land right now. If the pipelines cannot ruin their land today, then they may not ruin their land tomorrow. But, if the pipelines ruin their land today, they may be ruining their land for a long time.

It’s not just at Unist’ot’en Camp where the present is being defended. Everywhere you look beautiful things are under attack. Ask yourself what it is you love. Then, fight with everything you’ve got – right here, right now – for your beloved.

Browse Will Falk’s Unis’tot’en Camp series at the Deep Green Resistance Blog