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Protest Against Oppressive Advertising
We’re supporting National Women’s Liberation and Redstockings for an action to raise consciousness about street and workplace harassment, sexist advertising and the connection between them.
Call on men to stop harassing women and to speak up when they see other men harassing women. Let’s call out ad-makers for using imagery that oppresses women and men for falling for it. These ads validate men’s urge to sexualize (and objectify and feel entitled to) women.
We’ll be picketing and handing out flyers in front of American Apparel, a company which is notorious for objectifying women in their advertisements. Come fight with us!
DGR 101 & Foraging in Central Park
Come join DGR NY for a foraging event! We’ll be joining Wildman Steve Brill for one of his epic foraging adventures through Central Park. Come learn about the wild plants that surround us, work to reconnect to nature, and help build a vibrant culture of resistance in NYC.
For more information about foraging: http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/. Suggested donation of $20.
In addition, we’ll be hosting a DGR 101 before the foraging event. Meet us inside the park at 72nd St. and Central Park West at 11 AM. Join a discussion about the reality of the world we face, basic introduction to the DGR strategy, and tactics to create a true resistance movement.g>
Join the event on FB! https://www.facebook.com/events/1644992809055982/
In love, rage, and resistance!
Gulabi Gang Screening & Discussion
If women activists are to be successful, it will be from understanding and utilizing the strategies of other successful resistance movements, led by women, both throughout history and in present time. This success must become the lifeblood of our own movements.
The Pink Sari Gang of India is one such movement. Also known as the Gulabi Gang, this grassroots, 10,000 women-strong, women-led movement in India has developed in response to widespread domestic abuse and other violence against women. These modern day women warriors, wear pink saris, symbolizing strength and arm themselves with bamboo sticks, for weapons. Their fight for social justice on behalf of oppressed and abused women, uses and teaches physical self-defense and empowers women with community outreach efforts in rural India.
Join us for a screening of the documentary revealing their resistance tactics. After the screening we will discuss what we can learn from our sister-warriors in pink saris and how to apply this to sexual violence prevention work in our communities.
Join the event on Facebook!
In love, rage, and resistance<
Introduction to DGR
“Welcome to the struggle of all species yearning to be free. We are the burning rage of this dying planet.”
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.
Come learn about DGR, answer questions and discuss potential tactics and strategies. This time is meant to be informal and to give a brief introduction to DGR as a strategy. The 101 will be the first part of a three-part intro series.
Left Forum: Environmental Collapse and the Need for Resistance
Recent events have certainly shown that these are excitingly terrifying times to live in. With recent upheavals, new forms of oppression, and increasingly powerful pockets of resistance, we wish to add to that global conversation. Come join us at the Left Forum May 29th-May 31st. Be ready to learn about issues, discuss solutions and help create a true culture of resistance.
Let us turn “love into a verb”.
We’ll be facilitating the following discussion session:
Environmental Collapse and the Need for Resistance: Introduction to 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. Come learn about Deep Green Resistance, what we are doing in NYC, answer questions and discuss potential tactics.
Left Forum: Myths of Non-Violence and Building a True Culture of Resistance
Recent events have certainly shown that these are excitingly terrifying times to live in. With recent upheavals, new forms of oppression, and increasingly powerful pockets of resistance, we wish to add to that global conversation. Come join us at the Left Forum May 29th-May 31st. Be ready to learn about issues, discuss solutions and help create a true culture of resistance.
Let us turn “love into a verb”.
We’ll be facilitating the following discussion session:
We are daily confronted with the onslaught of destruction wrought by the industrial power system. Inequality around the world is at an all time high as opulence excels, water scarcity is becoming an oppressive reality for large portions of the world as we water golf courses in Arizona, and as peak oil develops, we find new and horrific ways to power our industrial economy. Worst of all, we idly stand by as industrial civilization decimates entire ecosystems, produces irreversible climate change, and pushes 200 species to extinction a day. Is industrial civilization a war against the natural world? And if so, what is our threshold for fighting back? We on the left cling to ineffective strategies, symbolism, and working to be the change we want to see. In doing so, we are left powerless to stop the destruction. What then needs to change? What other strategies do we need to be discussing? If we truly accept the reality of the world as it exists, and if we accept the reality that the tactics used by our “movement” have not worked, how does that change our methods of resistance? A look at successful resistance movements can offer us a path. Join us as we discuss the historical context for underground resistance, confront popular myths concerning violence, and work to build a true culture of resistance here in the Empire State.
Male Ally Meetup
“This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. We will never dismantle misogyny as long as domination is eroticized. We will also never stop racism. Nor will we mount an effective resistance to fascism, which is the eroticization of domination and subordination–fascism is in essence a cult of masculinity. Those are all huge spin-outs from the same beginning. The result is torture, rape, genocide, and biocide.” Lierre Keith
Please join male members of DGRNYC as well as other NYC activists as we continue our “Male Ally Meetups”. We will keep on with our open discussion of sexism, feminism, gender, and the role of men in the feminist movement.
Those of us in the fight for social justice are quick to stand against the daily oppression we see in our culture. But so often, male activists can be blinded to the structural violence that our female comrades experience. In the “age of information”, fast streaming porn, and mass media advertising, the brutalizing effects of patriarchy on women and girls within the dominant culture can be ever more horrific and normalized. It is vital that male activist seeking social change take concrete steps towards challenging patriarchy and misogyny, both within our culture and ourselves.
What is masculinity, and how can we as male activists identify and challenge it in our lives, both in and out of activist circles? How can we best support the women’s liberation movement? What holds us back from being true allies to women? What would a truly egalitarian movement look like, and how do we work towards it?
Open Letter to Reclaim Environmentalism
Once, the environmental movement was about protecting the natural world from the insatiable demands of this extractive culture. Some of the movement still is: around the world grassroots activists and their organizations are fighting desperately to save this or that creature they love, this or that plant or fungi, this or that wild place.
Contrast this to what some activists are calling the conservation-industrial complex–big green organizations, huge “environmental” foundations, neo-environmentalists, some academics–which has co-opted too much of the movement into “sustainability,” with that word being devalued to mean “keeping this culture going as long as possible.” Instead of fighting to protect our one and only home, they are trying to “sustain” the very culture that is killing the planet. And they are often quite explicit about their priorities.
For example, the recent “An Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy,” signed by a number of academics, some conservation biologists, and other members of the conservation-industrial complex, labels nuclear energy as “sustainable” and argues that because of global warming, nuclear energy plays a “key role” in “global biodiversity conservation.” Their entire argument is based on the presumption that industrial energy usage is, like Dick Cheney said, not negotiable–it is taken as a given. And for what will this energy be used? To continue extraction and drawdown–to convert the last living creatures and their communities into the final dead commodities.
Their letter said we should let “objective evidence” be our guide. One sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns: let’s lay out a pattern and see if we can recognize it in less than 10,000 years. When you think of Iraq, do you think of cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of this culture. The Near East was a forest. North Africa was a forest. Greece was a forest. All pulled down to support this culture. Forests precede us, while deserts dog our heels. There were so many whales in the Atlantic they were a hazard to ships. There were so many bison on the Great Plains you could watch for four days as a herd thundered by. There were so many salmon in the Pacific Northwest you could hear them coming for hours before they arrived. The evidence is not just “objective,” it’s overwhelming: this culture exsanguinates the world of water, of soil, of species, and of the process of life itself, until all that is left is dust.
Fossil fuels have accelerated this destruction, but they didn’t cause it, and switching from fossil fuels to nuclear energy (or windmills) won’t stop it. Maybe three generations of humans will experience this level of consumption, but a culture based on drawdown has no future. Of all people, conservation biologists should understand that drawdown cannot last, and should not be taken as a given when designing public policy–let alone a way of life.
It is long past time for those of us whose loyalties lie with wild plants and animals and places to take back our movement from those who use its rhetoric to foster accelerating ecocide. It is long past time we all faced the fact that an extractive way of life has never had a future, and can only end in biotic collapse. Every day this extractive culture continues, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. We have very little time left to stop the destruction and to start the repair. And the repair might yet be done: grasslands, for example, are so good at sequestering carbon that restoring 75 percent of the planet’s prairies could bring atmospheric CO2 to under 330 ppm in fifteen years or less. This would also restore habitat for a near infinite number of creatures. We can make similar arguments about reforestation. Or consider that out of the more than 450 dead zones in the oceans, precisely one has repaired itself. How? The collapse of the Soviet Empire made agriculture unfeasible in the region near the Black Sea: with the destructive activity taken away, the dead zone disappeared, and life returned. It really is that simple.
You’d think that those who claim to care about biodiversity would cherish “objective evidence” like this. But instead the conservation-industrial complex promotes nuclear energy (or windmills). Why? Because restoring prairies and forests and ending empires doesn’t fit with the extractive agenda of the global overlords.
This and other attempts to rationalize increasingly desperate means to fuel this destructive culture are frankly insane. The fundamental problem we face as environmentalists and as human beings isn’t to try to find a way to power the destruction just a little bit longer: it’s to stop the destruction. The scale of this emergency defies meaning. Mountains are falling. The oceans are dying. The climate itself is bleeding out and it’s our children who will find out if it’s beyond hope. The only certainty is that our one and only home, once lush with life and the promise of more, will soon be a bare rock if we do nothing.
We the undersigned are not part of the conservation-industrial complex. Many of us are long-term environmental activists. Some of us are Indigenous people whose cultures have been living truly sustainably and respectfully with all our relations from long before the dominant culture began exploiting the planet. But all of us are human beings who recognize we are animals who like all others need livable habitat on a living earth. And we love salmon and prairie dogs and black terns and wild nature more than we love this way of life.
Environmentalism is not about insulating this culture from the effects of its world-destroying activities. Nor is it about trying to perpetuate these world-destroying activities. We are reclaiming environmentalism to mean protecting the natural world from this culture.
And more importantly, we are reclaiming this earth that is our only home, reclaiming it from this extractive culture. We love this earth, and we will defend our beloved.
-Derrick Jensen
*If you agree, please sign the letter