Back in the early ’80s, I was traveling as a peace activist against the MX through what I called the “Deep West” — the three states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Something about the still untamed wildness of the place and the way it shapes those who live there held me spellbound.
Now I come across another Deep label, and it rings true.
And BTW: it often pays to read comment sections, like, for example, those under an article from truthout on student debt (soon to be reposted here). That’s how I found the website for Deep Green Resistance. The manner in which the language on its home page integrated mind and heart and soul blew me away.
First, here’s their blurb about the book and its authors:
Deep Green Resistance
Strategy to Save the Planet
by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen
For years, Derrick Jensen has asked his audiences, “Do you think this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life?” No one ever says yes.
Deep Green Resistance starts where the environmental movement leaves off: industrial civilization is incompatible with life. Technology can’t fix it, and shopping—no matter how green—won’t stop it. To save this planet, we need a serious resistance movement that can bring down the industrial economy. Deep Green Resistance evaluates strategic options for resistance, from nonviolence to guerrilla warfare, and the conditions required for those options to be successful.
It provides an exploration of organizational structures, recruitment, security, and target selection for both aboveground and underground* action. Deep Green Resistance also discusses a culture of resistance and the crucial support role that it can play.
Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win
Aric McBay is a writer, activist, and small-scale organic farmer living in Ontario, Canada. His first book was Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Grid crash. His most recent book is What We Leave Behind, co-written with Derrick Jensen.
Lierre Keith is a writer, small-scale farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of two novels, as well as The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. She’s been arrested six times. She lives in Humboldt County, California.
Hailed as the philosopher poet of the environmental movement, Derrick Jensen is author of fifteen books, including Endgame Volumes 1 and 2, What We Leave Behind, and A Language Older Than Words.
A.K. And next, here’s what the DGR is about.
What is Deep Green Resistance?
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? Read an excerpt of the book Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet.
*Note: We are strictly an aboveground movement. We will not answer questions regarding anyone’s personal desire to be in or form an underground. We do this for the security of all involved with Deep Green Resistance.
I think if you dig a little deeper you will like it a lot less.
Can you speak more freely on this subject? Or perhaps email me? arkcrone@gmail.com
They have a really creepy cult like e-mail list where you have to go through some type of hazing ritual in order to join where you are made to feel bad about whatever type of “privilege” you have enjoyed. You have to read all this stuff and agree to a doctrinal statement, its very hierarchical. So then you get some kind of probationary status and then if you ever critique or criticize anything Derrick has written you are immediately banned.
I perused to book. A pirated copy is available for free online. Its basically just marxism and 1970’s feminism. So if you love Marxism and think it should be ruled by an elite Vanguard and that all individuality is merely socially constructed and that there is no such thing as free will and that you should surrender to the Borg in order to “save the salmon” than the book is great. If not, not so much.
Also every website that critiques the book gets the same posters defending it using the same talking points. They sic you.
I notice you didn’t reply. I’ll just say, you seem to understand false flag operations. Well, here we have an organization writing a book seeking to openly recruit people to do violence against the state. I’ll leave it at that.
I didn’t reply, however it sure made me think. And that day I also happened upon a website about the community of Damanhur (damanhurinsideout.wordpress.com) that also made me think. Still thinking. Want to correspond privately?
OK, cool. You can e-mail me. I love your blog by the way!
I’ve seen freerangeorganichuman make these statements elsewhere on the net and they are grossly exaggerated. The e-mail list he/she was referring to is the Derrick Jensen forum which was created as a place to discuss the ideas written in Endgame and other books written by Derrick in a safe environment without worrying about trolls constantly distracting folks from the conversation. New users on the forum are asked to answer a questionnaire in order for the forum admins to weed out the trolls. I’m very surprised that freerangeorganichuman has spent so much time criticizing a book that he/she hasn’t even read in it’s entirety. I’d also like to point out that the Deep Green Resistance resistance organization is committed to non-violence. You’d now that if you’d read the website. I seriously wonder why freerangeorganichuman has spent so much time trying to spread mis-information about DGR, Derrick, Aric, Lierre, etc.