Dgr-Writing-&Amp;-Analysis

When the will of the people spells demise for the planet By Derrick Jensen / Deep Green Resistance The United States is not a democracy. It is more accurate to say we live in a plutocracy — a government of, by, and for the wealthy — or more accurate still, a kleptocracy — a government that has as its primary organizing principle theft, from the poor, from the land, from the future. Yet somehow we still often publicly speak and act as though we do live in a democracy. ...

Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin Pinyon cones Photo by Katie Fite After two months of struggling to write anything coherent about pinyon-juniper forests, I was on the verge of giving up. Members of the group I am campaigning with to stop pinyon-juniper deforestation began brainstorming about applying for grants to support the campaign. Many of the grants they discovered required us to demonstrate that pinyon-juniper deforestation harmed wildlife populations, poisoned water supplies, or had a tangible effect on human populations. ...

Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin Photo by Max Wilbert Public lands ranching is destroying the Western United States. It has pushed native plant species to the brink of extinction. It causes soil to erode so quickly the land cannot keep up. Livestock are poisoning and depleting water supplies, killing perennial stream flows, and making it increasingly difficult for surface water to accumulate. Stockmen and the animals they raise have devastated populations of iconic American animals like bison, elk, pronghorn, and sage-grouse. Ranchers, ever jealous of the trees their stock cannot eat, encourage the clear-cutting of forests. ...

In the Great Basin, refugees beget refugees. European settlers who physically performed the most destructive jobs were in many cases refugees from war and economic crisis in their homelands. My ancestors, the Irish, endured centuries of British domination and a wave of Irish fled starvation when the Great Famine struck Ireland a few years before the Great Basin was settled. Many Irish were involved in building railroads and in mining in Nevada. Richer European settlers – the mining bosses and ranch owners – possessed too much capital to be thought of as refugees in the traditional sense, but they demonstrated a certain spiritual disease produced by the belief that humans can safely take more from the land than the land freely gives. ...

This article, from Will Falk of DGR Great Basin (and photographed by Max Wilbert), looks further at the issue Piñon Pine and Juniper forest destruction that is rapidly becoming a campaign focus of DGR members and allies in the region. “Standing in a pinyon-juniper forest on a high slope above Cave Valley not far from Ely, Nevada, I am lost in an ancient vision. It is a vision born under sublime skies stretching above wide, flat valleys bounded by the dramatic mountains of the Great Basin. The vision grows with the rising flames of morning in the east. The night was cold, but clear, and the sun brings a welcome warmth. When the sun crests the mountains, red and orange clouds stream across the sky while shadows pull back from the valley floor to reveal pronghorn antelope dancing through the sage brush. A few ridge lines away, the clatter of talus accompanies the movement of bighorn sheep. The slap and crack of bighorn rams clashing their heads together echoes through the valley.” ...

The Castle Rock Prairie Dogs are Gone: Open Letter from an Exile By Jennifer Murnan, DGR Colorado I wore this shirt, long-sleeved, multi-patterned, funky, well tailored hand-me-down for almost every day I worked on the prairie dog relocation at the “Promenade” site in Castle Rock Colorado. The “Promenade” site was only that in the avaricious life-sucking minds of the capitalist pig developers. The “site” was really a scrap of prairie community, a last survivor already lacerated by monstrous earth movers, surrounded by apartments, highway, box stores, a mall, parking lots—anti-life. ...

Editors note: this article from Deep Green Resistance member and slam poet world champ Dominique Christina was published recently in the wake of the latest mass shooting in Virginia. In the piece, Dominique reflects on the media treatment of different cases: they make the killing of white people into tragedies (which they are), but don’t do the same to the killings of black women and men. Instead, these killings are fetishized and viewed over and over again without consideration for the family and friends of the victims. This is not a new tradition in America; lynchings were often public events in the South. Bring your kids, bring a picnic. It’s a sensation, and it reflects how white supremacy is still the ruling law of this land, and how people of color are still not viewed as fully human inside this system. We invite you to read Dominique’s piece and reflect on her words. ...

Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance co-founder, recently wrote one of the most powerful articles that we have read in a long, long time. Her piece, titled The Girls and the Grasses, is like poetry. We invite you to read it here: Link: http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015/08/25/lierre-keith-the-girls-and-the-grasses/ – Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International writes about the colonial and racist origins of the “conservation” movement. His organization helps push an alternate perspective. ...

Against All Mining: The Kennecott Mine Must Be Stopped This is an excerpt from an early draft of a forthcoming book about how “green technology” and “renewable energy” will not save the planet. One of the largest copper mines in the world is the Kennecott Bingham Canyon Mine, which is just outside Salt Lake City in the Oquirrh Mountains. Flying into the city, you can see the mine from a long way off: a 2.5 mile wide pit dug more than half a mile into the root of the mountains. ...

Will Falk is a Deep Green Resistance member who has spent much of the past year assisting indigenous resistance movements at the Unist’ot’en Camp and, more recently, on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. In this article, he speaks to the dangerous powers that come from the science of the dominant culture (civilization). Many view the debate surrounding the Thirty Meter Telescope’s proposed construction on Mauna Kea and Kanaka Maolis’ opposition to it as fundamentally a question of science versus culture. On the benign end, the word “science” has come to connote something close to cool and objective rationality – nothing more nor less than a collection of knowledge to be used in man’s (isn’t it always “man’s”?) noble aim to transcend nature. More malevolently, however, pitting science against indigenous culture is nothing more than insidious racism. This racism operates on the often unchallenged claim that science is an inherently western way of knowing and therefore superior to indigenous ways of knowing. ...