History

Editor’s note: This first appeared on Great Basin Water Network’s Water Gab newsletter. Read Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition’s analysis of the proposed SNWA groundwater pipeline project here. Nevada’s Great Basin consists of pinion and juniper covered mountain ranges that run North/ South like wooly worms with long, wide, mostly arid valleys in between. However, Spring Valley is an exception. Traveling East/West on Hwy 50, one will notice that the floor of Spring Valley is tree covered. These trees, Rocky Mountain Junipers, were pushed there by Ice Age conditions. Their root system is very shallow. Consequently the trees are in extreme danger from groundwater drawdown from the Southern Nevada Water Authority groundwater pipeline and exportation project. ...

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

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

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

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

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

By Max Wilbert, Deep Green Resistance In June 1988, climatologist and NASA scientist James Hansen stood before the Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the United States Senate. The temperature was a sweltering 98 degrees. “The earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements,” Hansen said. “The global warming now is large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect… Our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves.” ...

Editor’s Note: Though this article is newly published today on the Deep Green Resistance News Service, we will be re-publishing the Time is Short series every couple of days along with other regular news and articles, so please subscribe and watch for updates. By Norris Thomlinson / Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i To most of us with no military experience, the Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy (DEW) of Deep Green Resistance can seem abstract. The aboveground efforts of rebuilding local food systems, local economies, and local decision making are straight-forward and well known to citizens engaged in any sort of social justice or environmental activity. More confrontational public direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience are familiar to most activists, from historical examples of women’s suffrage and civil rights movements to modern fights like the tar sands blockade and the Unis’tot’en Camp. However, the crucial underground role of directly attacking critical infrastructure, though it sounds exciting in theory, has little grounding in our daily experience or even in the history we’ve learned. ...

Don’t miss Liberal vs Radical part one and part two. [youtube &w=640&h=390] (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. ...

Many thanks to San Diego Free Press, who transcribed and first published the original handwritten manuscript. Will Falk, Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition May 19, 2014 Not all worldviews are created equal. I thought this as I sat listening to Mel, a Wet’suwet’en man, explain the ideas behind the establishment of the Unist’ot’en Camp. It was lunch on my first day of the camp. The sun was strong and the few dozen visitors to the camp gathered in a clearing surrounded by tall pines. The quick-flowing clear-voiced Morice River flowed next to our gathering place, ice cold from its glacial source not far away. ...