I lay in my bed Waiting for the soft lull of sleep to embrace me To take me to the land where dreams come by I know it won’t come soon I know she faces the blockades Obstacles block her way

I wake up to the low drum of the machine I sleep to the blaring of the neighbor’s TV Every moment in between is as loud as the other The horns of vehicles speeding by The excavators in their pursuit of development Violence on my brothers and sisters The rape of the natural world Does it pierce my ears alone Or is it my heart that suffers more?

Green Flame on Matriarchy with Heide Goettner-Abendroth

This episode of the Green Flame comes to you from Germany. We interview Heide Goettner-Abendroth, philosopher and researcher on culture and society, focused on matriarchal studies.

Heide speaks about her work and offers the listener insight and knowledge into matriarchal society.Heidi has published various books on matriarchal society and culture, and has become the founding mother of Modern Matriarchal Studies. She has a PHD in Philospphy and founded The International Academy for Matriarchal Studies and Matriarchal Spirituality.

This piece comes from the Karuk Tribe, a nation located in what is today northern California and Southern Oregon, along the Klamath River. This piece shares Karuk cultural teachings around socio-ecology. We publish this with gratitide to the Karuk Tribal Department of Natural Resources Pikyav Field Institute, which is currently raising funds to support their land restoration and cultural revitalization initiatives.

Socio-Ecological first vs. Socio-Economic first

by Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources / Pikyav Field Institute

On 14th September 2020, an adolescent woman was brutally raped by multiple men in India. This article examines the gender- and caste-based hierarchies at play in this region, and how it has affected the case.

Woman Dies Due To Injuries Sustained During Rape

by Salonika/ DGR Asia-PacificYet another victim of gang rape has died to injuries inflicted upon her during rape in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India. The woman, who was nineteen years old, died after battling with her injuries for fourteen days.

In this research excerpt, the latest temporally inter-comparable maps of the terrestrial Human Footprint are presented, as well as an assessment of change in human pressure at global, biome, and ecoregional scales. Featured image: Suanmoo via Unsplash

by several authors of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences of the University of Queensland, Australia.

Humans have influenced the terrestrial biosphere for millennia, converting much of Earth’s surface to anthropogenic land uses. Nevertheless, there are still some ecosystems that remain free from significant human pressure, thereby providing crucial habitats for imperilled  species and maintaining the ecosystem processes that underpin planetary life-support systems. As a consequence, calls for the global identification, monitoring, and retention of the remaining lands that are relatively free of direct anthropogenic disturbance are  increasing.

Excerpted from the book Deep Green Resistance — Chapter 15: Our Best Hope by Lierre Keith.

6. Deep Green Resistance recognizes the necessity of militant action.

If we had enough people for a mass movement or enough time to build one, we could shut down the activities that are destroying our planet using only determined human bodies. People armed with nothing but courage ended segregation in the American South and others pulled down the Berlin wall. Enough people could shut down the oil refineries, the coal plants, the relentless horror of the tar sands and strip mines and clear-cuts. In the fall of 2010, French workers went on strike to protest a proposed raise in the retirement age. Protestors used trucks, burning tires, and human chains to blockade fuel depots and close all twelve of France’s oil refineries. The major oil terminal was offline for three weeks, stranding thirty oil tankers. When the government tried to open the country’s emergency reserves, protestors blockaded twenty more terminals. In a few weeks, the whole economy was slowing toward a halt for lack of fuel. Even after fuel trucks were able to access the terminals, it took a few days for the affected gas stations to resume regular business “since transportation and other strikes have tangled each step of the distribution process.” As Jean-Louis Schilansky, president of the French Oil Association said, “We have considerable bottlenecks.”

In this poem taken from her book Dimensions, Shahidah writes about her experience of women; birth, choice of sisters, womankind. Shahidah brings her early life in Pakistan to life for the reader.

Family

by Shahidah Janjua

I was birthed into an intimate space

Shared by two other women.

Into the long view

Telescoping back through the years

Of many severed moments,

Dislocations of time and meaning

From there to here.

I see our intimacy

This piece is a brief excerpt from Brian Doyle’s book " The Plover".  Doyle offers the reader a description of the neverending ebb and flow of life in the Pacific Ocean and human hunger for a ‘story’. Featured image: Big Island, Hawaii via Unsplash

Consider, for a moment, the Pacific Ocean not as a vast waterway, not as a capacious basin for liquid salinity and the uncountable beings therein, nor as a scatter of islands still to this day delightfully not fully and accurately counted, but as a country in and of itself, dressed in bluer clothes than the other illusory entities we call countries, that word being mere epithet and label at best, and occasion and excuse for murder at worst; rather consider the Pacific a tidal continent, some ten thousand miles long and ten thousand miles wide, bordered by ice at its head and feet, by streaming Peru and Palau at its waist; on this continent are the deepest caves, the highest mountains, the loneliest prospects, the emptiest aspects, the densest populations, the most unmarked graves, the least imprint of the greedy primary ape; in this continent are dissolved beings beyond count, their shells and ships and fins and grins; so that the continent, ever in motion, drinks the dead as it sprouts new life; the intimacy of this closer and blunt and naked in Pacifica than anywhere else, by volume; volume being an apt and suitable word to apply to that which is finally neither ocean nor continent but story always in flow, narrative that never pauses, endless ebb and flow, wax and wane, a book with no beginning and no end; from it emerged the first fundament and unto it shall return the shatter of the world that was, the stretch between a page or two of the unimaginable story; but while we are on this page we set forth on journeys, on it and in it, steering by the stars, hoping for something we cannot explain; for thousands of years we said gold and food and land and power and freedom and knowledge and none of those were true even as all were true, as shallow waters; we sail on it and in it because we are starving for story, our greatest hunger, our greatest terror; and we love most what we must have but can never have; and so on we go, west and then west.

Excerpted from the book Deep Green Resistance — Chapter 15: Our Best Hope by Lierre Keith. Featured Image: Women in 1919 Revolution in Egypt via Flickr

5. Deep Green Resistance means repair of human cultures

That repair must, in the words of Andrea Dworkin, be based on “one absolute standard of human dignity.” That starts in a fierce loyalty to everyone’s physical boundaries and sexual integrity. It continues with food, shelter, and health care, and the firm knowledge that our basic needs are secure. And it opens out into a democracy where all people get an equal say in the decisions that affect them. That includes economic as well as political decisions. There’s no point in civic democracy if the economy is hierarchical and the rich can rule through wealth.

A blockade has been launched at the Capitol State Forest, Washington to stop clearcut logging. Learn more about the blockade.

Forest Defenders today have launched a blockade to prevent the clear-cut logging of a 100-year-old forest west of Olympia on the traditional territory of the Chehalis people. The forest, part of the critically endangered Puget Lowland Eco-Region, was auctioned off by the Department of Natural Resources as the “Chameleon Timber Sale” to the Elma based Murphy’s Logging Company. Protesters have set up a blockade preventing road building and logging in one of the largest and most biodiverse units of the timber sale. The site is home to a late-successional Douglas Fir forest (over 100 years since it was last logged), which is gaining old growth characteristics that support endangered wildlife.