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

4. Deep Green Resistance requires repair of the planet

This principle has the built-in prerequisite, of course, of stopping the destruction. Burning fossil fuels has to stop. Likewise, industrial logging, fishing, and agriculture have to stop. Denmark and New Zealand, for instance, have outlawed coal plants—there’s no reason the rest of the world can’t follow.

Stopping the destruction requires an honest look at the culture that a true solar economy can support. We need a new story, but we don’t need fairy tales, and the bread crumbs of windfarms and biofuels will not lead us home.

The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘ The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Find the rest of Will’s journey with the Ohio River here.

The Ohio River first spoke to me through my grandfather.

I was at my parents’ house in Castle Rock, Colorado. It was August, 2017 and my mother’s aging parents were visiting as part of their last major trip away from their Owensboro, Kentucky home. I was scrambling to finish a draft of the first document we filed in a federal lawsuit seeking rights for a major ecosystem, the Colorado River, and my grandfather asked me what I was working on.

Excerpted from the book Deep Green Resistance — Chapter 15: Our Best Hope by Lierre Keith. Featured image: Felix Mittermeier via Unsplash

3. Deep Green Resistance must be multilevel.

There is work to be done—desperately important work—aboveground and underground, in the legal sphere and the economic realm, locally and internationally. We must not be divided by a diversionary split between radicalism and reformism. One more time: the most militant strategy is not always the most radical or the most effective. The divide between militance and nonviolence does not have to destroy the possibility of joint action. People of conscience can disagree. They can also respectfully choose to work in different arenas requiring different tactics. I can think of no scenario in which a program to provide school cafeterias with food straight from local, grass-based farms would be advanced by explosives. In contrast, a project to save the salmon would do well to consider such an option.

Blockade Musings on Patcheedaht Unceded Territory

By Esther Muirhead

Winding my way from Lake Cowichan to Port Renfrew, the ravages of continuous clearcuts on steeply sloped mountains, magnified the sun’s rays bouncing off rocky mirrors of ravaged lands, like water hitting a hot frying pan. Driving up the mountain to (Renfrew) River Blockade, stopping road-building on the east side of Fairy Creek, the ominous logging roads carved into mountains and the large machinery scattered about, I wondered what planet I was on. Once at the blockade, and walking into a replica of a 200 million year old rainforest ecosystem, I took a deep breath and wept. Did you know that 200 million years ago, coniferous forests almost went extinct as a result of the evolutionary advancement of flowering trees that came to dominate the earth? The conifers retreated to the margins of the planet where a small number of species managed to maintain a foothold by adapting to extremely harsh conditions. Along the northwest coast of “Canada” is the only region where the conifers retain their former glory, revolving in and out of 10 thousand year cycles to create globally rare ecosystems. They are able to grow throughout the long winters and since they use water more efficiently than flowering plants they also thrive during the dry summer months. The result is a living organism so rich and so productive that temperate forest biomass is easily four times as great as that of any area in the tropics. Within the crown of a single conifer, is found as many as 1500 animal and plant species.

In this article Mike Shanahan describes how the denial of extinction crisis ignores widespread, scientific evidence.

Featured Image: Ross Sokolovski via Unsplash

• There’s a growing refusal by some groups to acknowledge the ongoing global extinction crisis being driven by human actions, conservation scientists say.
• These views are pushed by many of the same people who also downplay the impacts of climate change, and go against the actual evidence of widespread species population declines and recent extinctions.
• Scientists say this phenomenon will likely spike again this week, since a major Convention on Biological Diversity report is due to be released.
• The authors of a new report on extinction denial advise experts to proactively challenge its occurrence, and present the “cold hard scientific facts.”

Biodiversity scientists are being urged to “fight the creeping rise of extinction denial” that has spread from fringe blogs to influential media outlets and even into a U.S. Congressional hearing. The call to arms came in a paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution last month by Alexander Lees, senior lecturer in conservation biology at Manchester Metropolitan University, and colleagues . “Many of the same individuals that routinely seek to downplay the impacts of climate change have written articles understating the biodiversity loss crisis,” Lees says . “Denialists have sought to obfuscate the magnitude of both extinctions and loss of bio-abundance.”

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

2. Deep Green Resistance embraces the necessity of political struggle.

DGR is not a liberal movement. Oppression is not a mistake, and changing individual hearts and minds is not a viable strategy. Political struggle must happen on every level and in every arena if we’re to avert the worst ecological disasters and create a culture worth the name. By political struggle, I mean specifically institutional change, whether by reform or replacement or both. It’s institutions that shape those hearts and minds. A project of individual change would take lifetimes, if it worked at all. The individual has never been the target of any liberation movement for the simple reason that it’s not a feasible strategy, as our previous chapters have explained.

As the book Deep Green Resistance reminds us, there are certain aspects of collapse that are positive (declining oil demand, for example) and others that are negative (e.g., rising patriarchal, racist elements). This piece from Vince Emanuele  argues that individualist survivalism is often an anti-social response to the social problems we are facing, and that we must organize as communities to survive.

Guns, Land, and Chickens Won’t Save You

by Vincent Emanuele / Counterpunch

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

Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

—G. K. Chesterton

The IRA had Sinn Fein. The abolition movement had the Underground Railroad, Nat Turner and John Brown, and Bloody Kansas. The suffragists had organizations that lobbied and educated, and then the militant WSPU that burned down train stations and blew up golf courses. The original American patriots had printers and farmers and weavers of homespun domestic cloth, and also Sons of Liberty who were willing to bodily shut down the court system. The civil rights movement had the redefinition of blackness in the Harlem Renaissance and the stability, dignity, and community spirit of the Pullman porters, and then four college students willing to sit down at a lunch counter and face the angry mob. The examples are everywhere across history. A radical movement grows from a culture of resistance, like a seed from soil. And just like soils must have the cradling roots and protective cover of plants, without the actual resistance, no community will win justice or human rights against an oppressive system.

‘Ecological Disaster on Massive Scale’: Hundreds of Thousands of Dead Migratory Birds in Southwest Linked to Wildfires, Climate Crisis

“The fact that we’re finding hundreds of these birds dying, just kind of falling out of the sky is extremely alarming.”

by Julia Conley

A combination of factors—all related to the climate crisis—is believed to be behind one of the largest mass bird die-off events in recent memory in the Southwest, according to biologists. Scientists say thousands of dead migratory birds have been found across states including New Mexico, Texas, and Colorado in recent weeks as the American West faces wildfires that have burned through millions of acres in matter of days.

This episode of The Green Flame podcast focuses on the proposed Batoka Gorge Dam on the Zambezi River on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, just downstream from the world-famous Victoria Falls.

Max Wilbert interviews Monga, who has lived by the Zambezi River and is active in environmental issues and factors that impact on underprivilidged people in Zambia, and Marie-Louise Killet, a member of the group " Save the Zambezi River" which is opposing the Batoka Gorge project. The third guest is Rebecca Wildbear, a river and soul guide, who helps people tune into the mysteries of life and live with earth communities, dreams and their own wild nature.