Dgr-Writing-&Amp;-Analysis

A recent article in the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound describes legislation to make shipping fossil fuels through the Salish Sea safer. It’s all about tug boats and the speed of ships and modeling risk. At no point in the discussion–either in the article, or in the legislature–is there any mention of whether it is sane or just to be shipping any fossil fuels through the Salish Sea, given the catastrophic devastation that would occur if there is a major spill, and given the catastrophic devastation that will occur when those fossil fuels are burned or turned into plastic. ...

Seattle is the “cutting edge” of hyper-modern industrially-outsourced capitalism. This is why, despite having the most progressive city government of any big city in the country, Seattle has been unable to address a crisis of homelessness or pass taxes on big corporations. The liberal, progressive culture of Seattle will never provide real solutions to the problems of capitalism and industrial civilization. Despite any claims to the contrary, Seattle is an oligarchy run by the rich, for the rich. The city was created as an imperial outpost of a society hellbent on logging all the old growth forest and stealing all the land from the indigenous inhabitants. Today, it has morphed from primarily a lumber and salmon extraction site to a central managerial site for global techno-capitalism. ...

Here at Deep Green Resistance, we have been censured and attacked for believing that women are female and men are male. The fact that disagreeing with basic biology, millions of years of human evolution, and our own lived experience is politically dangerous is reflective of what our society has come to. It is not considered acceptable to go against mainstream dogma. And currently, mainstream dogma is erasing the entire concept of woman, in favor of amorphous “self-definition” which could harm or eliminate every single sex-based protection women have fought for. ...

By Max Wilbert In 2015, I wrote a story alleging that Cliff Mass, a Professor in the Atmospheric Sciences Department at the University of Washington and something of a regional weather celebrity, is “a dangerous new breed of climate skeptic.” In the article, I wrote that: “Cliff Mass is convinced that anthropogenic global warming is not a big problem, at least not now. He has made a theme of downplaying the role of global warming in extreme weather events, and in exposing what he calls “overzealousness” in the scientific, media, and activist community.” ...

THE SITUATION Our world is in crisis. Species extinction, topsoil loss, deforestation, rising seas, ocean acidification, global warming. It’s no exaggeration to say that the dominant culture is killing the planet. At the same time, societies around the world are staggeringly unjust. Neocolonialism builds up empires on the backs of indigenous peoples, sweatshop workers, unpaid and underpaid women, and the bodies of our nonhuman kin. FALSE SOLUTIONS We do not trust electoral politics, NGOs/non-profits, or foundations. Change must come from the grassroots, but the masses can be led astray. False solutions abound in the of vague reforms, half-measures, and technologies that only strengthen empire. ...

Editors note: in the wake of the Seattle Police Department killing of pregnant black woman Charleena Lyles, we decided to republish an excerpt of this brilliant essay by DGR member Kourtney Andar. ---- On June 28, 1964, Malcolm X gave a speech at the Founding Rally of the Organization for Afro-American Unity (OAAU) at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. In the speech, he stated what became his most famous quote: ...

Trump’s election has sabotaged any prospect of reigning in the global warming crisis by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance – On Tuesday night, the American people decided to elect Donald J. Trump, a billionaire business mogul and reality TV star who has been accused of raping or otherwise sexually assaulting twenty-three women, who has called for banning immigration to the United States, and who has built a campaign on virulent racism. ...

The planet needs commandos It wasn’t until the 1940’s that what we think of as the “commando” or special forces units were standardized by the British Army. With the goal of disrupting German forces in western France and later in the Mediterranean and North Africa, the first commando units were modeled on small groups of Arab fighters who had great success pinning down much larger British Army units during the uprisings in Palestine in the 1930’s. ...

By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance If fear is the mind killer, guilt is the heart killer. Experiencing guilt creates a wound. The wound is healed when the behavior producing the guilt is rectified. The scar that forms over the wound serves as a reminder to guide future behavior. Living in a state of perpetual guilt, however, prevents the wound from ever healing. The wound festers. The guilt swells until it becomes an infection of empathy. The infected person devotes all her energy to coping with the constant pain of guilt. She spends all her time hunched over the wound, seeking to alleviate the pain. Focused on the wound like this, she cannot look beyond herself. A cycle develops. The guilt grows and becomes ever more painful. The pain strangles the infected’s capacity for empathy. Eventually, the infected loses her ability to act from a genuine concern for others and only acts to avoid the pain of more guilt. ...

Here is an average morning inside of this culture.First, you wake up on top of a foam mattress offgassing toxic VOCs that will not biodegrade in 10,000 years. You sit up and put on your clothes — all with tags reading “Bangladesh” and “Puerto Rico” and “Dominican Republic.” These clothes were made by virtual slaves.You walk downstairs and fill a glass with water from the tap. The water comes from a local river that was dammed 127 years ago. Ever since, native species in the watershed have been in decline. You drink the water.You pour yourself a bowl of cereal. The cereal is made of wheat and corn grown in what was once the tallgrass prairie of the eastern Great Plains. Ninety nine percent of that habitat – millions of acres – was plowed and utterly destroyed to grow those crops. The soil is gone now; your meal is only possible through fossil fuel fertilizers. ...