Greenwashing

Big NGOs—Greenpeace, 350.org, Avaaz, and so on—play an important role in maintaining capitalism and the status quo. These organizations protect the industrial economy and distract us from real solutions. By focusing on technological solutions (which destroy the planet, and are also lucrative industries for green businesspeople), divestment (which also represents a major investment opportunity, and which doesn’t actually slow or stop the burning of fossil fuels), and the commodification of nature through programs like REDD and the concept of “ecosystem services,” mainstream NGOs actually defend the economic system that is killing the planet. ...

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. ...

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 interview with our dear friend and fellow DGR member Kourtney Mitchell was recently featured in Counterpunch. by VINCENT EMANUELE Kourtney Mitchell is a writer and activist currently living in northeast Georgia, United States. He sits on the steering committee for Deep Green Resistance and the national board of directors for Veterans for Peace. Co-author of The Enemy in Blue: The Renatta Frazier Story, he has been involved in social justice activism for eight years. Kourtney is currently AWOL from the Georgia Army National Guard. ...

Two passionate environmentalists discuss the merits and issues of “Alternative Energy” technologies. They argue that it is not the path to a secure and sustainable future, that it threatens human rights, and that it is the wrong path for morally-conscious environmentalists. Topics discussed include the alternative energy industry, community-scale implementation, environmental complications of alternative technologies, and more. This talk was given at PIELC (Public Interest Environmental Law Conference) in 2014 in Eugene, OR. ...