deep green resistance: strategy to save the planet

[miss pixie]

 

taken from website: http://deepgreenresistance.org/

 

Deep Green Resistance is an analysis, a strategy, and a movement being born — the only movement of its kind.



 

As an analysis, it reveals the last 10,000 years of human history–the rise and dominance of civilization–as the culture of death that is now threatening every living being on Earth.

 

As a strategy, it critiques ineffective lifestyle actions and explains their inevitable failure to stop the destruction of people, species, and the planet. In contrast, DGR offers a concrete plan for how to stop that destruction.

 

As an aboveground movement, just now taking its first steps, Deep Green Resistance is based on this analysis and implementing this strategy. And we’re recruiting.

 

No more ineffective actions – piecemeal, reactive, and sad. No more feel-good, magical-thinking, navel-gazing, consumer-based, capitalist-approved denial and dead ends.

 

The goal of DGR is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. This will require defending and rebuilding just and sustainable human communities nestled inside repaired and restored landbases. This is a vast undertaking but it needs to be said: it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.

 

DGR’s strategy involves two separate parts of the movement – an aboveground and an underground. The aboveground works for sustainable, just, and participatory institutions, and assists the frontline activists with loyalty and material support. And In any resistance scenario, the underground dismantles the strategic infrastructure of power. This is a basic tactic of both militaries and insurgents the world over for the simple reason that it works. But such actions alone are never a sufficient strategy for achieving a just outcome. This means that any strategy aiming for a just future must include a call to build direct democracies based on human rights and sustainable material cultures. Which means that the different branches of resistance movements must work in tandem: the aboveground and belowground, the militants and the nonviolent, the frontline activists and the cultural workers. We need it all.

 

And we need courage. The word “courage” comes from the same root as coeur, the French word for heart. We need all the courage of which the human heart is capable, forged into both weapon and shield to defend what is left of this planet. And the lifeblood of courage is, of course, love.

So while DGR is about fighting back, in the end this movement is about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love. They need your heart because they are disappearing, slipping into that longest night of extinction, and the resistance is nowhere in sight. We will have to build that resistance from whatever comes to hand: whispers and prayers, history and dreams, from our bravest words and braver actions. It will be hard, there will be a cost, and in too many implacable dawns it will seem impossible. But we will have to do it anyway. So gather your heart and join with every living being. With love as our First Cause, how can we fail?

 

Want more? Here’s the strategy:

[Roger Hicks]

"I look forward, obviously not in my lifetime, to a truly civilised civilisation . . "

Rupert, If we are ever to achieve this, we must first recognise and develop an understanding of the perverted Darwinian nature of civilisation as it has arisen and developed thus far, as a human environment which the state then facilitates the self-exploitation of, to the advantage of power, wealth, talent and now, paradoxically - because they serve as clients to some of the former - the "disadvantaged".

[Alan Durant]

Hi Roger,

"an overreaction" to the holocaust? I fail to see how one could overreact.

You talk of race and ethnicity and link it with national identity, surely not the same thing. As I asked before who decides who is and who isn't whatever  and how. Perhaps more to the point why. If some one doesn't fit your criteria what then?

I don't often defend governments but surely promotion of the idea of people living together and not prejudging each other based on stereotypes is not a bad thing.

You talk about tribes. What about class as a tribe, or age, or gender, or level of education, occupation, location, hobbies........

My uncle was a pigeon fancier and it was the first question he asked anyone, "do ye fly lad". I've a mate who's a drummer, he likes people who like music etc.

Why do you wan to be in a tribe? The rest of the tribe might think you don't fit in.

I must say I don't agree with anything you say below (or is it above?) and I don't see the point of what your driving at. If your happily identified with your tribe and living with them then what? Aren't there more important questions?

Best  Alan

Roger Hicks said:

Hi Alan, 

“. . what do you mean current state ideology is the exact opposite of Nazi ideology? Which state who what? Also what national ethnic base?”

 Following WW2 there was an understandable overreaction to the horrors of Nazi racial ideology, as well as to the injustice and inhumanity of Jim Crow and Apartheid, which resulted in an attitude of race and ethnic origins being of no social or political importance whatsoever, especially in respect to national identity, despite their manifest importance for any deep and meaningful sense of personal and group e.g. national, identity.

It was an overreaction which should have been relaxed in order to accommodate the importance of race and ethnic origins as the natural basis of group, i.e. national (as opposed to state) identity, but it wasn't allowed too. The state, needing to claim our sense of tribal and national identity for its mercenary self*, opportunistically consolidated this overreaction in its extreme, “anti-racist” form, making it a moral imperative to demonise, suppress and deny (even to oneself) the importance of race and ethnic origins for one's sense of personal and group, i.e. national, identity.

We've gone from one (racist) extreme, to another (anti-racist) extreme, which forces us to deny the importance of race altogether (under pain of being branded a "racist"). It now represents an ideology which is used as a spurious moral high ground to great power-political advantage, just as Church ideology was in medieval Europe, or Marxism in Soviet Russia.

A multi-ethnic state which derives its legitimacy from posing as a nation, must deny and suppress the importance of ethnicity for national identity.

 

* With the advent of civilisation, man's intra-tribal and extra-tribal environments, which we evolved to respond to (emotionally and behaviourally) very differently, were conflated and confounded, with the state posing as our nation (intra and inter-tribal environment), while at the same time facilitating society's self-exploitation (mainly to the advantage of the rich, powerful and "talented") as an extra-tribal environment.

[Alan Durant]

Hi Rupert

I kind of agree with much you say. My worry is most people don't realise there is a problem. If we want to preserve the best elements of civilisation we need to understand what is going wrong and try and fix it. The collapse of Capitalism could well take us all with it.

I'd have to dig through about half a meter of snow to plant in February.

Best  Alan
Rupert Cathles said:

The end of us? Personally I think we have hardly begun yet. Didn't Gandhi reply to the quesion of what he thought of civilisation that it would be a good idea? I think that the problem with civilisation has always been that once it has been established people think it will last forever without being rigorously maintained. Luxury leads to laziness and complaisancy, and with very few people bothering to participate in the best that civilised culture has to offer, not the luxurious trappings but the heart of it, literate culture and the classical arts of good living, then it collapses. I don't think that the rise and fall of civilisations is repetitive but that at each rise we go a little further; a very slow and painful process but a very worthwhile one to my mind. I look forward, obviously not in my lifetime, to a truly civilised civilisation, not as idealistic wishful thinking but a hard-won belief in the very long process of life, which will only happen if people strive for it even when the situation seems hopeless. About 70,000 years ago we survived the Toba super-volcano eruption; and we have managed to learn to live even in the Arctic without metal tools, so I think that materially we can survive the coming crisis; what we need is the moral and spiritual strength to believe in our longterm future. Sorry if this is starting to sound like a rant, but I'm very passionate about our survival!

By the way, I forgot to say that parsnips stand the best chance of germination if you plant them early, say in Febuary.

Alan Durant said:

Hi Rupert,

you can't follow it, I'm taking part and half the time I can't follow it. Hope your right about the end of the world (meaning more the end of us than anything) and I think its right to keep trying. Unfortunately many people expect something to pop up to save us and think they don't have to do anything.

Sorry if the babble was incoherent I'll try harder to babble coherently.

Lets not get into that whole Parsnip civilisation debate.

Best  Alan
Rupert Cathles said:

Er, am I missing something? An ancient temple site in Turkey, champagne, whisky and a Hungarian toast .... World's coming to an end, why not chatter incoherently? (Smile; I'm just saying I find these discussions hard to follow). The world was coming to an end at the end of the last Ice Age and we created civilisation, for good and ill. I'll drink to the chance that something equally spectacular will come out of this current End of the World.

By the way, I've been growing parsnips for many years, with varying degrees of success, and I'm not convinced germination has anything to do with a fine tilth. Sometimes they just refuse to germinate. A fine tilth helps but to quite a depth because if they encounter stones then the roots split, creating a parsnip from

Rupert Cathles said:

Er, am I missing something? An ancient temple site in Turkey, champagne, whisky and a Hungarian toast .... World's coming to an end, why not chatter incoherently? (Smile; I'm just saying I find these discussions hard to follow). The world was coming to an end at the end of the last Ice Age and we created civilisation, for good and ill. I'll drink to the chance that something equally spectacular will come out of this current End of the World.

By the way, I've been growing parsnips for many years, with varying degrees of success, and I'm not convinced germination has anything to do with a fine tilth. Sometimes they just refuse to germinate. A fine tilth helps but to quite a depth because if they encounter stones then the roots split, creating a parsnip from which you can harvest very little flesh.  Often it looks like you have a fine parsnip but when you take it up there's not much to it. Tricky vegetables but well worth the effort to my mind. A bit like civilisation.

 

which you can harvest very little flesh.  Often it looks like you have a fine parsnip but when you take it up there's not much to it. Tricky vegetables but well worth the effort to my mind. A bit like civilisation.

 

[Alan Durant]

Thanks Wolfbird,

I really liked that. Take Care.

 

Best  Alan
wolfbird said:

"My uncle was a pigeon fancier and it was the first question he asked anyone, "do ye fly lad". I've a mate who's a drummer, he likes people who like music etc."

 

http://www.playingforchange.com/episodes/47/Gimme_Shelter

[Roger Hicks]

"I fail to see how one could overreact [to the holocaust]."

By insisting that race and ethnicity don't matter, when they manifestly do matter, for most individual's sense of personal and group (and thus national) identity, then suppressing this by deeming it to be "racist", i.e. evil, and expecting everyone to identify with the multi-ethnic state as their nation.

"Who decides [the criteria for national identity]?"

At the moment the STATE decides, and imposes them on everyone, as it has always done. I think the individual should be free to decide. Which will mean that the state can no long pose as a NATION, presuming to represent a single PEOPLE.

Instead of allowing ourselves to be organised as sheeple (as a human resource and market), from the top down, by the state and capital, as we are now, and always have been in the past, we should start organising OURSELVES, peacefully and grass-roots democratically, as human beings and people, from the bottom up, into genuine tribes and nations. All we will continue to need the STATE for is to enforce, when need be, the rule of law and none violence between different tribes and nations. 

The choice, as I see it, is between the top-down statism and capitalism we have now, and grass-roots democratic multi-national socialism (not to be confused with Nazism, which some unthinking or power-politically motivated morons, of course, will insist on doing), and which, of course, we have to develop, because it's never been done, or even attempted, before.

[Alan Durant]

Hi Roger,

Lost my reply so I'll just say why do you care about all this. Please look back and answer some of my questions, whatever they were.

Alan

[Alan Durant]

Still like it!

 Best Alan
wolfbird said:

"My uncle was a pigeon fancier and it was the first question he asked anyone, "do ye fly lad". I've a mate who's a drummer, he likes people who like music etc."

 

http://www.playingforchange.com/episodes/47/Gimme_Shelter

[Douglas Strang]

Yes please Roger,

 

Why are you so insistent on the importance of ethnicity? I'm a Scot and I'm rather fond of the best aspects of Scottish culture (and ashamed of the worst); is that anything to do with my DNA? Apparently, in addition to Scots, I have Irish and French ancestry; which 'tribe' would that place me in?

 

As the folksinger Dick Gaughan wonderfully put it, 'we're a mongrel nation', as are most, and I celebrate that.

 

Social and geographical division based purely on ethnicity has been the root cause of so much horror. Is that really what you want to return to?

 

Surely instead, like the parsnips, we should enjoy the benefits of 'hybrid vigour'!

 

Dougie

 

Alan Durant said:

Hi Roger,

Lost my reply so I'll just say why do you care about all this. Please look back and answer some of my questions, whatever they were.

Alan

[Roger Hicks]

"Why are you so insistent on the importance of ethnicity?"

Because it is fundamental to my (and, I would have thought, to any deep and meaningful) sense of personal and group, i.e. national, identity. 

The very notion of a "multi-ethnic nation", which most western democracies now claim or assume themselves to be, although they attempt to disguise it behind the more ambiguous term "multi-cultural", is an oxymoronic absurdity, ethnic being derived from Greek, ETHNOS, itself meaning a NATION.

It is not "racist" to identify with ones own race, people, or nation, although that is precisely what the STATE, in pursuit of its power-political goals wants us all to believe.

I don't harbour any racist feelings towards people of different ethnicity to my own, but neither do I identify with them as belonging to my nation. Personal and individual relationships are a completely different matter, but you can only have a very limited number of such relationships. When you identify with your nation, it's with millions of strangers. That's when race and ethnicity matter - certainly to me, and I'm sure, if they are honest about it, to most people.

If we are going to organise OURSELVES, peacefully and grass-roots democratically into genuine communities and nations, which I believe is what we urgently need to do, rather than continuing to allow the state and capital to do it for us, from the top down, thereby getting us into the hopeless mess we are in (which the Dark Mountain Project is a response to), ethnicity, being the natural basis of nationhood, will be, I am sure, not the only, but certainly one of the main criteria most people will freely choose; which, of course, is why the state seeks to demonise it as "racist", i.e. evil. Because the last thing the STATE wants is for us to organise ourselves and challenge its claim to be our nation. In the past it as always suppressed such attempts at self-organisation with force. In our democracy that wouldn't be so easy, so it turns to moral intimidation instead, based on the liberal-fascist/statist ideology (not coincidentally, the exact but equally extreme opposite of Nazi racial ideology) that race and ethnic origins are of no social or political importance, except to evil "racists", like the Nazis.

Britain I see as proprietary, mercenary and now multi-ethnic/multi-national STATE, which has always posed as our NATION, in order to legitimise itself, the authority and power of its government and institutions, for the purpose of facilitating society's self-exploitation, to the advantage of power wealth, privilege and now, of course, "talent", and even, paradoxically, because they serve as clients to some of the aforementioned, the "disadvantaged". It is the perverted Darwinian nature of the STATE which is the underlying cause of all our existential problems. We have to straighten it out, its Darwinian nature, and direct it consciously along more rational, humane and sustainable lines.

My natural NATION I see as being "ethnic European", my TRIBE, "native English". Those who want to identify with multi-ethnic Britain as their nation, should, of course, be free to do so, and I will respect them as such (not least, since I will have friends and family amongst them) - provided that I and others, who want to define our own nations, are not forced, as we are now, to join them. 

If it comes to civil war (which I hope can be avoided) it will not be between nations or ethnic groups, but between NATIONALISTS and STATISTS.

[Roger Hicks]

I was still in the process of editing my last post, when I was prevented from making any more changes. The final sentence should read as follows:

If it comes to civil war (which I hope can be avoided) it will not be between nations or ethnic groups, but between rational NATIONALISTS (the goodies) and wicked STATISTS (the baddies).

You don't recognise the threat of civil war, Wolfbird . . . ? You think that native Europeans are simply going sit back and watch themselves become an ethnic minority on their own continent (Britain's indigenous, i.e. ethnic European, population was recently predicted, and widely reported, to become an ethnic minority in about 50 years time)?

There is a real  danger that the pendulum will swing back to the opposite extreme from whence it came, from today's liberal, "anti-racist" fascism back to Nazi-style racist fascism, perhaps without any actual war. By recognising the importance of race and ethnic origins, which liberal fascism is currently forcing us to deny and suppress, and finding ways to accommodate it, I hope we can avoid this even more than I hope we can avoid civil war between rational nationalists and dumb statists.

[Alan Durant]

One of us is confused Roger I suppose it might be me.

As a suggestion how about doing away with Nations. Then we can just get on with being people, problem solved.

The idea of an ethnic European tribe is about as laughable as the idea of native English. Have a look at Wiki concerning ethnic groups in Europe.

I find your arguments disjointed. I would of thought the people best to begin organising with are people of like mind not ethnicity. Come on Roger call a spade a spade whats really worrying you?

Also, I keep asking questions and don't seem to get much in the way of answers?

Also, I haven't noticed many states forcing people into gas chambers for not embracing multiculturalism and there are plenty of people who don't. Parallels like that are ridicules and I wouldn't blame people for being offended.

That's probably the first and last time you'll see me defending Bougouise democracy. For me the bigest problem is Capitalism.
Best  Alan

Roger Hicks said:

"Why are you so insistent on the importance of ethnicity?"

Because it is fundamental to my (and, I would have thought, to any deep and meaningful) sense of personal and group, i.e. national, identity. 

The very notion of a "multi-ethnic nation", which most western democracies now claim or assume themselves to be, although they attempt to disguise it behind the more ambiguous term "multi-cultural", is an oxymoronic absurdity, ethnic being derived from Greek, ETHNOS, itself meaning a NATION.

It is not "racist" to identify with ones own race, people, or nation, although that is precisely what the STATE, in pursuit of its power-political goals wants us all to believe.

I don't harbour any racist feelings towards people of different ethnicity to my own, but neither do I identify with them as belonging to my nation. Personal and individual relationships are a completely different matter, but you can only have a very limited number of such relationships. When you identify with your nation, it's with millions of strangers. That's when race and ethnicity matter - certainly to me, and I'm sure, if they are honest about it, to most people.

If we are going to organise OURSELVES, peacefully and grass-roots democratically into genuine communities and nations, which I believe is what we urgently need to do, rather than continuing to allow the state and capital to do it for us, from the top down, thereby getting us into the hopeless mess we are in (which the Dark Mountain Project is a response to), ethnicity, being the natural basis of nationhood, will be, I am sure, not the only, but certainly one of the main criteria most people will freely choose; which, of course, is why the state seeks to demonise it as "racist", i.e. evil. Because the last thing the STATE wants is for us to organise ourselves and challenge its claim to be our nation. In the past it as always suppressed such attempts at self-organisation with force. In our democracy that wouldn't be so easy, so it turns to moral intimidation instead, based on the liberal-fascist/statist ideology (not coincidentally, the exact but equally extreme opposite of Nazi racial ideology) that race and ethnic origins are of no social or political importance, except to evil "racists", like the Nazis.

Britain I see as proprietary, mercenary and now multi-ethnic/multi-national STATE, which has always posed as our NATION, in order to legitimise itself, the authority and power of its government and institutions, for the purpose of facilitating society's self-exploitation, to the advantage of power wealth, privilege and now, of course, "talent", and even, paradoxically, because they serve as clients to some of the aforementioned, the "disadvantaged". It is the perverted Darwinian nature of the STATE which is the underlying cause of all our existential problems. We have to straighten it out, its Darwinian nature, and direct it consciously along more rational, humane and sustainable lines.

My natural NATION I see as being "ethnic European", my TRIBE, "native English". Those who want to identify with multi-ethnic Britain as their nation, should, of course, be free to do so, and I will respect them as such (not least, since I will have friends and family amongst them) - provided that I and others, who want to define our own nations, are not forced, as we are now, to join them. 

If it comes to civil war (which I hope can be avoided) it will not be between nations or ethnic groups, but between NATIONALISTS and STATISTS.

[Roger Hicks]

". . . how about doing away with Nations. Then we can just get on with being people, problem solved."

Alan, What you are suggesting is that we all belong to just one big tribe, or nation, called humanity.

That is a nativity you share it with millions of others and which liberal-fascism/statism has elevated to a moral imperative.

We are as deeply tribal as we are social animals. To deny this is just plain stupid. We need to organise ourselves into tribes and nations. Otherwise we are not going to survive.

As I keep trying to point out, at the moment we are organised by the state and capital, which is why society is in such a terminal mess.