Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet

194 Pages·2012·1.54 MB·English

by  Derrick Jensen

Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet
Edited by Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith © 2013 Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith ISBN: 978-1-60486-674-2
LCCN: 2012913623
This edition copyright ©2013 PM Press All rights reserved.
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Contents
Derrick Jensen
William Catton Jr.
Jane Caputi
Riki Ott
Nora Barrows-Friedman
Gail Dines
Thomas Linzey
Waziyatawin
Lierre Keith
Stephanie McMillan
Aric McBay
Arundhati Roy
Q&A with Arundhati Roy and Derrick Jensen
About the Participants
Introduction by Derrick Jensen
“This collection of discussions is about the shift in strategy and
tactics that has to happen if we want to build an effective
resistance. It is about putting our bodies and our lives between
the industrial system and life on the planet. It is about fighting
back.”
The dominant culture is killing the planet. It is long past time that those of us
who care about life on earth begin to take the actions necessary to stop
civilization from destroying every living being.
By now we all know the statistics and trends: 90 percent of the large fish in
the oceans are gone, 97 percent of native forests have been destroyed, as have 98
percent of native grasslands. There is ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton
in the oceans. Amphibian populations are collapsing, migratory songbird
populations are collapsing, mollusk populations are collapsing, fish populations
are collapsing, and so on. Have you noticed that you don’t have to clean your
windshield nearly as often as you used to? Even insect populations are collapsing.
Two hundred species are driven extinct each and every day.
This culture destroys landbases. That’s what it does. Iraq used to have cedar
forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground. One of the first written
myths of this culture is about Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq
to build a great city. The Arabian Peninsula used to be oak savannah. The Near
East was heavily forested. We’ve all heard of the cedars of Lebanon. Greece was
heavily forested. North Africa was heavily forested. This culture destroys
landbases, and it won’t stop doing so because we ask nicely. We don’t live in a
democracy. Think about it: do governments better serve corporations or living
beings? Do judicial systems hold CEOs accountable for their destructive, often
murderous acts?
Here are a couple of riddles that aren’t very funny. Question: What do you
get when you cross a long drug habit, a quick temper, and a gun? Answer: Two
life terms for murder, earliest release date 2026. Question: What do you get when
you cross two nation states, a large corporation, forty tons of poison, and at least
eight thousand dead human beings? Answer: Retirement with full pay and
benefits. That’s what happened to Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide,
which caused the mass murder at Bhopal.
Here’s another way to say this: What do you call someone who conspires to
put poison in the subways of Tokyo? You call him a terrorist and you put him in
prison for life. What do you call someone who conspires to put poison in the
groundwater of the United States? You call him Dick Cheney. Or oil and gas
man, or fracker. Do the rich face the same judicial system as you or I? Does life
on earth have as much standing in a court as does a corporation? We all know
the answers to those questions. And we know in our bones, if not always our
heads, that this culture won’t undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a
sane and sustainable way of living.
If you care about life on the planet and if you believe the culture won’t
voluntarily cease to destroy it, how does that belief affect your methods of
resistance? Most of us don’t know because most of us don’t talk about it.
At the Earth at Risk conferences of 2011 and 2012, leading environmental
activists and thinkers gathered to talk about it. This collection of discussions
from those days is about the shift in strategy and tactics that has to happen if we
want to build an effective resistance. It is about putting our bodies and our lives
between the industrial system and life on the planet. It is about fighting back.
Those who inherit whatever is left of the world once this culture has been
stopped, whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the
efforts of brave women and men resisting in alliance with the natural world, are
going to judge us by the health of the landbase, by what we leave behind. They’re
not going to care how you or I lived our lives, how hard we tried, or whether we
were nice people. They’re not going to care whether we were violent or
nonviolent. They’re not going to care whether we grieve the murder of the
planet. They’re not going to care whether we were enlightened or not
enlightened.
They’re not going to care what sort of excuses we had to not act. I’m too
stressed to think about it. It’s too big and scary. I’m too busy. Those in power will
kill me if I act against them. If I fight back, I run the risk of becoming like they are.
But I recycled. You can substitute any of a thousand other excuses we’ve all heard
too many times.
Those who come after us are 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 whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all.
They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books. They’re not going to care
whether we had compassion for the CEOs and politicians running the deathly
economy. They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the
water.
Every new study reveals that global warming is happening far more quickly
than was previously anticipated. Scientists are now suggesting the real possibility
of billions of human beings being killed off by what some are calling a “climate
Holocaust.” A recently released study suggests an increase in temperature of 16
degrees Celsius, or about 30 degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2100. We’re not