Deep Green Resistance
Systems of Oppression - Gail Dines
Tolerance for Oppression
If you’re interested in Joining or Starting a Deep Green Resistance Action Group, read on and make your choice.
Aboveground Work of Deep Green Resistance (DGR) Action Groups
Introduction
We recognize that DGR will never become a mainstream movement within any industrial nation. But our aim is not to build a mass movement or to change consciousness on a broad scale. Our goal is to stop the destruction of our planet while there is still something left alive.
The fight to save life on this planet requires the work of both aboveground and underground groups. These groups will complement each other’s efforts without having direct contact. For aboveground groups, there is critical work to be done within the boundaries of the law. This work ranges from immediate actions that confront power and disrupt industrial destruction, to long-term efforts that aim to ensure the growth of a multi-generational grassroots movement.
Goals of the DGR Aboveground Movement
The primary goal of the DGR aboveground movement is to shift the political conditions in the dominant culture broadly enough that the dismantling of industrial civilization will succeed in time to save the planet and all of its species.
Toward that end, we need to create a worldwide culture of resistance consisting of thousands of DGR Action Groups. The initial phase is igniting and building that culture of resistance.
A culture of resistance is not a mere alternative for alienated dissidents. Instead, it consciously embraces its purpose as the cradle of a resistance movement. It exists to encourage and promote organized political resistance, nurturing the will to fight. It helps people break their psychological identification with the oppressive system and create a new identity based on self-respect and solidarity. It offers the emotional support of a functioning community that believes in resistance as well as an intellectually vibrant atmosphere that encourages analysis, discussion, and the development of political consciousness. It produces cultural products like poems, songs, and art that create a mythic matrix organized around the theme of resistance. It builds the new institutions that will take over as the corrupt ones come down. And it provides loyalty and material support to the aboveground frontline resisters and political prisoners.
The movement’s first goal is to have fifty DGR Action Groups in North America by 2012. Tripling that number is the goal for the following year, and having 25,000 North American supporters by 2016 will give DGR the support network needed to sustain this movement into the coming decades.
We propose that DGR Action Groups attempt the following:
1. Engage in direct action campaigns using tactics based on nonviolent civil disobedience to protect ecosystems and species and to disrupt the core institutions of industrial civilization.
2. Make DGR known to its target audience through movement-building work:
· Build awareness of and support for DGR principles and strategies across the environmental and social justice movements.
· Ally with organizations that have overlapping goals.
· Garner acceptance of DGR amongst prominent groups and individuals.
3. Shift public opinion toward supporting an underground that exists or may come to exist.
4. Facilitate the transfer of allegiance and material sustenance from the dominant socio-economic system to the land and all who live there.
Starting A DGR Action Group
The following are the steps for forming a DGR Action Group.
1. Read Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet and other books from DGR-I’s (DGR International, aka the international coordinating office) reading list. Make sure everyone who wants to form the initial group agrees with DGR as a strategy.
2. Choose a representative to be the regional contact. This person must agree to adhere to the DGR Statement of Principles and Code of Conduct to initiate a relationship with the coordinating office. They will then receive educational materials, recruiting information, and contacts for others in their region.
3. All members of the DGR Action Group must also agree to adhere to the Statement of Principles and Code of Conduct. All DGR Action Groups are autonomous as long as their actions fall within the framework of the Statement of Principles and Code of Conduct.
4. All members should read the security culture documents and commit to adhering to security culture practices. A security culture training is required as soon as possible after forming a group and periodically conducted again as new members join.
5. Familiarize yourselves with the materials from the coordinating office. They have information packets on everything from methods of effective organizing to ideas on staying alert to oppressive behaviors within your group.
First Steps: The Initial Work of DGR Action Groups
1. Promote
· Develop promotional materials/events about DGR for your area. The coordinating office has a general DGR flyer, along with other materials, in the info packet to support you. Distribute materials online and in local venues.
· Set up an information/discussion session on DGR or hold a discussion group to read the DGR book or portions of the DGR website.
· Speak, flyer or table at environmental and social justice events
· Organize a screening of the film End:Civ.
· Have Derrick, Lierre, and/or Aric interviewed by local media to publicize your group
2. Protect
Choose a creek, river, or other natural area to care for, restore, and protect. Do this on a regular basis.
3. Build
Find existing local groups that have some overlap with DGR goals and strategies and support them. Don’t waste energy trying to create something that already exists in your area.
Our primary allies should be groups fighting for indigenous rights. If indigenous groups in your area are radical and are demanding the right to live in traditional ways on traditional lands, take instructions from them. They are the ones with knowledge (even if fragmented) of how to live sustainably in your bioregion.
Other groups who may make good allies:
· Women s defense (like San Francisco Women Against Rape)
· Eco-defense (Buffalo Field Campaign and Rising Tide)
· Eco/social justice groups (GreenAction)
· Anti-racist groups (Justice for Oscar Grant/United for Equality & Affirmative Action Legal Defense Fund)
· Anti-corporate groups (Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund)
· Transition Town groups and pro-autonomy groups (The Second Vermont Republic)
Consider approaching select national organizations that have mission statements that align with DGR principles. You’ll need to weigh the potential benefits against the energy and time needed to make change in large organizations.
4. Speak
Do interviews on the radio (or start your own radio stations), write columns for newspapers (or start your own papers), or create a zine or website to promote your DGR group and DGR principles. Speaking in public about DGR can be difficult. In preparation, group members should regularly practice public speaking. It’s particularly useful to stage mock Q & A sessions to simulate real dialogue.
5. Fund
Fundraising should be a regular activity for an action group. This money can be used internally for local programs or channeled to other organizations.
6. Support
Do regular support for political prisoners. Establish ongoing correspondences with prisoners, keep them connected to the outer world, and help them in whatever ways you can. Additional work includes fundraising for legal defense, sending books, and attending trials.
Long-Term Work of DGR Action Groups
Some DGR groups will need to take on the next level of movement building, political organizing, and community defense work. Depending on their location, community make-up and skills, groups may need to diversify their work significantly.
1. Plan
Decide on the primary tasks to protect your landbase: what or who is destroying the place where you live? How can you stop them? And how can the destruction be repaired? Create a Bioregional Action Plan (BAP) outlining this work.
Don’t lose sight of the primary purpose: Does your BAP begin to dismantle the core institutions of industrial civilization that are assaulting the life systems of the planet? These core institutions are primarily agriculture, energy (oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear), extractive industries (mining, logging, commercial fishing), and power structures (corporations, military, government). One community might decide to transition to local food systems while confronting industrial agriculture and corporate domination of food systems in their area. Others might start a campaign to shut down refineries and pipelines through civil disobedience and legal challenges. Others may take on ending corporate personhood in their municipality, and then attempt a phased-in ban on new businesses that aren’t local, human-scale, and non-extractive cottage industries.
Crucial to a BAP is determining the carrying capacity for your bioregion in its current weakened condition and what it would be if returned to a pre-civilized state. Lay out a plan for a transition from an urban- or agriculture-dominated landscape to restored land with biotic communities of perennial polycultures and their animal cohorts.
2. Educate
Hold regular forums and teach-ins to explain the A to B transition from an extractive economy to a life-affirming society. This education is going to have to be relentless. Find ways to offer support to your community in combination with these meetings. What would make it more possible for people of all means to attend? Carpools, food, childcare, and friendship go a long way.
3. Activate
Confront the forces that are destroying your community. Coordinate campaigns to dismantle their power. These actions must not be symbolic but instead have a material impact to stop the destruction and institute true justice for all living creatures. Actions can include lobbying, demonstrations, and civil disobedience coordinated into a serious political and economic force. Run for public office on a DGR platform or on issues like autonomy, direct democracy, the abolishment of corporate personhood, or stopping the destruction of the commons. The right wing has been highly successful at winning public offices and our side can’t afford to withdraw. Take over the governing institutions and make them accountable to your community and your planet. Consider forming a true people’s militia to defend your community.
4. Network
Eventually, DGR Action Groups will become part of a larger, international DGR Network. This network can begin thinking and planning nationally and internationally.
Relationship with Militant Underground Resistance
One of the Action Groups’ primary purposes is to create favorable public opinion for a DGR underground that exists or may come to exist, by promoting the DGR strategy, explaining the value of a DGR underground, and publicizing DGR underground actions through the DGR Underground Press Office.
The DGR Underground Press Office is a legal, aboveground news service dedicated to publicizing the actions of a DGR underground that exists or may come to exist.
The Press Office receives anonymous news from a DGR underground and distributes it. They have no direct contact with a DGR underground.
Statement of Responsibility and Association
Deep Green Resistance aboveground individuals, the authors of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet, members of DGR Action Groups, and members of the DGR movement as a whole, are not responsible for any actions other than their own personal actions.
All DGR groups and their members are required to adhere to the
Statement of Principles and Code of Conduct in order to call themselves Deep Green Resistance. Any aboveground person or group calling themselves DGR and acting against the Statement of Principles and Code of Conduct do not have the support, collaboration, consent, or approval, of DGR or anyone associated with DGR and will not be allowed to call themselves DGR.
Any underground individuals or groups and their actions, if they exist or come to exist, represent only themselves. No DGR aboveground group or individual knows, or wants to know, anyone or any group that is underground or wants to know about any underground actions before they happen. No DGR aboveground group or individual wants to be involved with any underground actions in any way. For everyone’s safety, aboveground people need to avoid anyone who advocates underground actions.
To all those who love and struggle for this planet: An Invitation
Deep Green Resistance is for those who can’t wait anymore.
A few hundred people, well-trained and organized, have reduced the oil output of Nigeria by a third. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, MEND, has said to the oil industry, ” Leave our land while you can or die in it.” The vast majority of people in the US have more resources individually than all of MEND put together when they started. Resistance is not just theoretically possible. It is happening now. The only question is, will we join them?
MEND stopped 1/3 of Nigeria s oil production. Why haven’t activists here accomplished that? Why keep using tactics that have not stopped the destruction and leaves the planet at the point of biotic collapse? For all our precious, hard fought victories, we are losing this war, horribly, painfully, and almost completely.
Were out of soil, were out of species, and were out of time. Catastrophic climate change has begun. The only thing that matters now is being effective. Anything else is unconscionable, suicidal, and insane. Deep Green Resistance invites you to consider a new strategy that involves the use of effective aboveground and underground tactics. DGR s strategy was developed by evaluating strategic options for resistance from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare. It is time to build a serious resistance movement that can bring down the industrial economy. Effective resistance is possible:
If you care about life on this planet, and if you believe this culture won’t voluntarily cease to destroy it, how does that belief affect your methods of resistance?
Most people don’t know, because most people don’t talk about it. Some are too afraid of being called terrorists by those who are murdering the planet. Some believe using the same tactics that have not worked for the last forty years - whether it be protests or petitions, collaboration with corporations, or window breaking will magically start being effective. Some think a technological solution will appear to make it all go away. Some have pinned their hopes on lifestyle changes, and its corollary, personal change, as if individual behaviors can dismantle systemic problems. And finally, some just have hope - the groundless, amorphous belief that allows us to keep “living” these lives while all around us and inside us the destruction grows exponentially. The hard truth is none of this has or will work, ever. Yet these represent the majority of our efforts to save the Earth.
Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped are going to judge us by the health of the landbase, by what we leave behind.
They’re not going to care how we lived our lives. They’re not going to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were nice people.
They’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent.
They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet.
They’re not going to care what sort of excuses we had to not act.
They’re not going to care how simply we lived.
They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see.
They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy.
They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water.
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Environmentalists fight as hard as we can to protect the places we love, using the tools of the system the best that we can. Yet we do not do the most important thing of all: we do not question the existence of this death culture. We do not question the existence of an economic and social system that is working the world to death, that is starving it to death, that is imprisoning it, that is torturing it. We never question the logic that leads inevitably to clearcuts, murdered oceans, loss of topsoil, dammed rivers, poisoned aquifers.
When most people ask, “How can we stop global warming?” they aren’t really asking what they pretend they’re asking. They are instead asking, “How can we stop global warming without stopping the burning of oil and gas, without stopping the industrial infrastructure, without stopping this omnicidal system?” The answer: you can’t.
Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are already gone. Where is your threshold for resistance? Is it 91 percent? 92? 93? 94? Would you wait till they had killed off 95 percent? 96? 97? 98? 99? How about 100 percent? Would you fight back then?
If salmon could take on human manifestation, what would they do?
What would we do if Nazis had invaded, and they were vacuuming the oceans, scalping native forests, damming every river, changing the climate, and putting carcinogens into every mother’s breast milk, and into the flesh of your children, your lover, your mother, into your own flesh? How much worse would the damage have to get? Would you resist?
If there existed a resistance movement, would you join it?
A Strategy
The strategy of Deep Green Resistance starts by acknowledging the dire circumstances that industrial civilization has created for life on this planet. And that these circumstances should be met with solutions that match the scale of the problems.
This is a vast undertaking but it needs to be said: it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.
Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win.
How? Decisive Ecological Warfare Strategy.
We will describe a possible future in which a hypothetical resistance movement embarks on a strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare.
Decisive Ecological Warfare Strategy
Goals
The ultimate goal of this resistance movement is simply a living planet—a planet not just living, but in recovery, growing more alive and more diverse year after year. A planet on which humans live in equitable and sustainable communities without exploiting the planet or each other.
Given a state of emergency, this translates into a more immediate goal, which is at the heart of this movement’s grand strategy:
Goal 1: To disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization; to thereby remove the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the planet.
This movement’s second goal both depends on and assists the first:
Goal 2: To defend and rebuild just, sustainable, and autonomous human communities, and, as part of that, to assist in the recovery of the land.
To accomplish these goals requires several broad strategies involving large numbers of people in many different organizations, both aboveground and underground. The primary strategies needed in this theoretical scenario include the following:
Strategy A: Engage in direct militant actions against industrial infrastructure, especially energy infrastructure.
Strategy B: Aid and participate in ongoing social and ecological justice struggles; promote equality and undermine exploitation by those in power.
Strategy C: Defend the land and prevent the expansion of industrial logging, mining, construction, and so on, such that more intact land and species will remain when civilization does collapse.
Strategy D: Build and mobilize resistance organizations that will support the above activities, including decentralized training, recruitment, logistical support, and so on.
Strategy E: Rebuild a sustainable subsistence base for human societies (including perennial polycultures for food) and localized democratic communities that uphold human rights.
In this alternate future scenario, Decisive Ecological Warfare has four phases that progress from the near future through the fall of industrial civilization. The first phase is Networking & Mobilization. The second phase is Sabotage & Asymmetric Action. The third phase is Systems Disruption. And the fourth and final phase is Decisive Dismantling of Infrastructure.
Each phase has its own objectives, operational approaches, and organizational requirements. There’s no distinct dividing line between the phases, and different regions progress through the phases at different times. These phases emphasize the role of militant resistance networks. The aboveground building of alternatives and revitalization of human communities happen at the same time. But this does not require the same strategic rigor; rebuilding healthy human communities with a subsistence base must simply happen as fast as possible, everywhere, with timetables and methods suited to the region. This scenario’s militant resisters, on the other hand, need to share some grand strategy to succeed.
Phase I: Networking & Mobilization
Phase II: Sabotage & Asymmetric Action
Phase III: Systems Disruption
Phase IV: Decisive Dismantling of Infrastructure
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Web: http://deepgreenresistance.org
Email: deepgreenresist@gmail.com
Security: http://deepgreenresistance.org/security/
Phone: (406) 748-6347
Deep Green Resistance is the only radical movement of its kind working to stop the destruction of the planet. DGR believes our current civilization needs to be dismantled and replaced by thousands of autonomous cultures that are fully integrated into their local ecosystems. Deep Green Resistance has a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win.
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 aboveground 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 aboveground 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: Decisive Ecological Warfare
