REMINDER: This Sunday, November 22nd, join us for a live streaming event— Drawing the Line: Stopping the Murder of the Planet—featuring Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Chris Hedges, and grassroots activists from around the world.

The event will begin at 1pm Pacific (2100 UTC) and will be live streamed at https://givebutter.com/deepgreen.

Event Schedule

This Sunday, we ask: where do you draw the line? What is the threshold at which you will fight for the living planet? And how shall we fight?

The organization Deep Green Resistance has existed for nearly a decade, since the book was released in 2011. For this piece, we look at four different answers to the question: “What is Deep Green Resistance?”

Ben Warner: What is Deep Green Resistance?

DGR is survival. We want to survive and we want the rest of the living work to survive too. You wanna live right?

Right now life is barely surviving. Right now the living world is being exterminated. What’s exterminating it? A group of people who live in densely populated, ever-expanding colonies. They get their food and other resources, most of which they don’t actually need, from far away places. Do you think they care about the other living beings in these places? Do you think they consider the damage their resource extraction does? Many of them don’t know about it because they can’t see it, some of them are too busy living to even think about it and the rest are too busy making money to stop it. So agriculture, mining and other forms of resource extraction continue destroying habitat, poisoning land and killing our kin.

U.S. Marine Corps veteran Vince Emanuele offers the reader a systemic analysis of the culture of war, it’s purpose, and the destruction it leaves behind.

by Vince Emanuele / Counterpunch

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”  Ernest Hemingway

In this article, Jeremy Hance describes ongoing concerns regarding collapsing insect populations.

By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay

• In June 2019, in response to media outcry and alarm over a supposed ongoing global “ Insect Apocalypse,” Mongabay published a thorough four-part survey on the state of the world’s insect species and their populations.
• In four, in-depth stories, science writer Jeremy Hance interviewed 24 leading entomologists and other scientists on six continents and working in 12 nations to get their expert views on the rate of insect decline in Europe, the U.S., and especially the tropics, including Latin America, Africa, and Australia.
• Now, 16 months later, Hance reaches out to seven of those scientists to see what’s new. He finds much bad news: butterflies in Ohio declining by 2% per year, 94% of wild bee interactions with native plants lost in New England, and grasshopper abundance falling by 30% in a protected Kansas grassland over 20 years.
• Scientists say such losses aren’t surprising; what’s alarming is our inaction. One researcher concludes: “ Real insect conservation would mean conserving large whole ecosystems both from the point source attacks, AND the overall blanket of climate change and six billion more people on the planet than there should be.”

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the heart of a what was increasingly a global lockdown, the rains finally came to East Africa. They came after several years of drought and less-than-stellar rainy seasons. And with these rains, came the insects, says Dino Joseph Martins, the executive director of the Mpala Research Center. “There’s been this beautiful flash of butterflies and everybody’s with their families or at home, or trying to entertain their kids that are not in school, and looking at things in the garden or going on walks,” Martins said in August.

by Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo / Talking Wings Collective

Oct 9th, 2020, Movimiento por la Defensa de la Sierra, Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico

Five thousand acres of cloud forest are currently being threatened in Coatepec, Veracruz, Mexico. This land is, at present, being held by squatters, who, with the backing of local politicians, have claimed to be the forest’s rightful owners. They displaced dozens of families and are threatening one of Mexico’s most vital ecosystems. These 5,000 acres of land contain three municipal parks and one archeological site.  While the land’s original stewards and forest protectors are engaged in a legal battle with the “invaders,” the deforestation of this fragile ecosystem has already commenced. This act of environmental devastation has wide political/economic ramifications. If you control Coatepec’s mountains, you control the subsistence and livelihood of millions.

In this piece, originally published in Counterpunch, George Wuerthner examines previous successful conservation movements, and describes what we can learn from them.

We do not want those whose first impulse is to compromise. We want no straddlers, for, in the past, they have surrendered too much good wilderness and primeval areas which should never have been lost.

– Bob Marshall on the founding of the Wilderness Society

By George Wuerthner / Counterpunch

Industrial civilization is killing the planet, and it’s not good for human beings either. But how can we live without it? We are dependent and addicted.

In this episode of The Green Flame, we ask what comes after industrial civilization and speak with Michel Jacobi, is an ecologist working in western Ukraine to preserve pastoral traditions and revive rare threatened breeds, including the ancient Carpathian water buffalo. He talks about using the animals as allies, in restoring the health of the land. Mitchel considers working with local people key to restoring the health of the land.

This article is based on communication from a comrade in the Negros province of the Philippines. There is ongoing destruction of the natural world in this area due to road construction, a planned airport, and clearing of the rainforest. The people on the front lines, being most affected, are calling for international solidarity and support.

On October the 18th this year, the first direct action regarding the Northern Negros National Park was taken by a group of concerned people. Food Not Bombs Bacolod Volunteers and concerned citizens have started a campaign to raise awareness about the ongoing destruction of the rainforest in the Negros area of the Philippines. The group has begun disseminating information to ensure other know about the ongoing harm being caused and to stand firmly IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE FOREST.

Fairy Creek Blockade: defending old growth forests on unceded Pacheedaht territory

by Reuben Garbanzo, on Lekwungen territory

Joshua Wright, is a seventeen year old film-maker from Olympia, Washington with an irrepressible passion for protecting the last remaining old-growth temperate rainforests; and has handy access to a state-of-the-art digital mapping program that allows him to track and monitor industrial logging activities in near-real time. In early August, this year, he gave heads up to Vancouver island grassroots forest activists to a road-building crew subcontracted to Surrey-based tenure-holder of TFL 46, Teal Jones, cresting the ridge into the old-growth Yellow Cedar headwaters of Ada’itsx/ Fairy Creek watershed, the last unlogged tributary of the San Juan River system, unceded Pacheedaht territory, near Port Renfrew.

In this piece, Max talks about revenge porn and deepfakes as a new form of pornography. Pornography has always been a tool for the subjugation of women by patriarchy. The article further relates subjugation of women to the subjugation of the natural world.

By Max Wilbert

Our culture is a culture of violation, a culture of breaking boundaries: the boundaries of women, of children, of forests, of oceans, of the living planet itself, even of the atom and the gene.