Warrior Up Resistance Tour: Speakers and Musicians In Defense of Mother Earth

Join Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin for a resistance-oriented speaking and music event on Saturday, January 26th, 2013, beginning at 3:00pm, at the Wilmar Center in Madison, WI, located at 953 Jenifer st.

Indigenous activists and their allies are hitting the road in an effort to bring knowledge to the people. The tour’s Wisconsin stop will feature speaking and music aimed at telling the truth about this invader culture and its wholesale destruction of Mother Earth. In the end, it will ask those in the audience if they will warrior up and fight back for Mother Earth. It will do this through speeches by people who are on the ground already fighting back and with Hip Hop music that promotes the same message.

The Warrior Up Resistance Tour features a variety of activists and artists. Included is the radical indigenous music group Savage Family, Lakota activist Olowan Martinez, Coastal Salish activist Queen Sascheen, and Deep Green Resistance member and Latino activist T.R. McKenzie.

DGR member to present on Unis’tot’en Camp

Deep Green Resistance member Will Falk will speak and fund raise in Milwaukee for the BC, Canada Unis’tot’en Camp. The Camp is blockading construction of multiple pipelines from tar sands and shale gas projects, an excellent example of strategic aboveground action towards the goals of DGR’s Decisive Ecological Warfare. Please spread the word, and come out in support if you possibly can!

Date: Monday, December 15
Time: 6 PM

Location: Riverwest Public House Cooperative
815 E Locust St
Milwaukee, WI 53212

See other midwest tour dates including Dayton OH and Chicago IL, at the Deep Green Resistance blog.

Read Will’s writing about his experiences at the Unis’tot’en Camp, or his series on Do It Yourself Resistance.

Eco-Sabotage is Planetary Self-Defense

Editor’s Note: This essay first appeared on the Deep Green Resistance Blog.  We think this analysis is relevant to all regions.

Max Wilbert and other members of Deep Green Resistance Seattle participated in a May “ShellNO” protest against Shell’s arctic drilling rig. Their display of signs reading “Sabotage the Machine” and “Eco-Sabotage is Planetary Self-Defense” attracted a lot of attention. Elliot Stoller conducted a short video interview in which Wilbert explains his concern about ineffective tactics and strategies in the face of dramatic threats to biodiversity, climate, and social justice.

Wilbert discusses DGR’s radical evaluation of systems of power and what might actually work to alter their destructive course: targeting critical communication, electrical, and oil infrastructures, and addresses some common questions about what that means for the safety of activists who undertake such work, and what sort of life humans can live without the comforts and elegancies of industrial civilization.

Please share this radical analysis, and help put sabotage on the table as a viable tactic in our struggle for life and justice!

Sabotage the Machine

Land returned to Ho Chunk tribe

Great news for the Ho-Chunk tribe!

The federal government has given back almost 16-hundred acres of land it seized from ancestors in the Ho-Chunk Indian tribe. Tomorrow the tribe will hold a celebration of the land transfer, which involves property along the Wisconsin River at Baraboo.

Tribal president Jon Greendeer will speak at a ceremony, along with U-S Senate Democrat Tammy Baldwin and Randy Poelma of the Ho-Chunk’s environmental health department. There will also be a round dance, and public tours of the land — which will eventually be developed into a grazing area for bison. The transfer was part of a larger Defense Department bill passed by Congress last December. That was 16 years after the Ho-Chunk filed a claim for federal surplus lands.

HoChunk_jpg_475x310_q85

Energy and CO2 emissions for one wind turbine is disturbing

Wind Turbine Installation Cashton

Image: The base of a wind turbine – tonnes of iron ore, cement processing, and land destruction.

This very impressive research and analysis on the energy requirements and the CO2 emissions for one wind energy capturing device (wind turbine) should be sobering, and disturbing – just the rebar and concrete used for the base of a 2.5 megawatt structure! This, on top of enormous and ongoing land destruction for so-called wind farms. (And even “small” turbines do not return their energy or dollar investment during their entire life cycle, as reported elsewhere).

Though it would be elegant if wind and solar energy capturing devices could actually maintain a modicum of the wonderfully rich lifestyles many of us live, this is a delusional dream (“greenwashing”) that centers on perpetuating the industrial culture that got us into the mess we’re in. BAU (business as usual) is not sustainable or “green” nor really desirable for the future of the earth or even our species. The picture of the rebar base says it all – and the charts expose all the industrial profiteering and fossil-fuel exploitation involved.

Deep Green Resistance is opposed to ALL industry. We have faced the fact that A: there is no “clean” fossil-fuel derivative (which so-called solar, wind, hydrothermal, and nuclear are) and B: we are out of time, the biosphere is in its death throes. Industry needs to stop, and humans need to change the way we live with the earth.

If you are new to this subject, don’t worry – many DGR Members also had bright hopes for some “no-impact high-tech ecotopia” some years back. Check out our FAQs on so-called “Green” Tech.

Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question

Erik Lindberg of Transition Milwaukee recently posted a good deconstruction of several common “progressive” fallacies around climate change. Climate change is a systemic problem created by our high consumption way of life, and can’t be solved while maintaining that way of life. Liberals and progressives often blame Republicans or conservatives for getting in the way of solutions, but the solutions on the table are ridiculously inadequate to address the issue and constitute another form of denial.

Unfortunately, Myth 6: “There is Nothing I Can Do” only discusses personal reduction in consumption, not the organized resistance necessary to stop the destructive system of industrial civilization. For a much more thorough treatment of “what I can do”, read the Deep Green Resistance strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare. Otherwise, though, this is an excellent analysis.

The upshot of the previous sections is that the comforts, luxuries, privileges, and pleasures that we tell ourselves are necessary for a happy or satisfying life are the most significant cause of global warming and that unless we quickly learn to organize our lives around another set of pleasures and satisfactions, it is extremely unlikely that our children or grandchildren will inherit a livable planet. Because we are falsely reassured by liberal leaders that we can fight climate change without any inconvenience, it bears repeating this seldom spoken truth. In order to adequately address climate change, people in rich industrial nations will have to reduce current levels of consumption to levels few are prepared to consider. This truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.

Global warming is not complicated: it is caused mainly by burning fossil fuels; fossil fuels are burned in the greatest quantity by wealthy people and nations and for the products they buy and use. The larger the reach of a middle-class global society, the more carbon emissions there have been. While conservatives deny the science of global warming, liberals deny the only real solution to preventing its most horrific consequences—using less and powering down, perhaps starting with the global leaders in style and taste (as well as emissions), the American middle-class. In the meantime we continue to pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with each passing year.

Read Lindberg’s full post: Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question

Derrick Jensen on Resistance Radio

Almost every Sunday, Derrick Jensen interviews an activist, biophile scientist, land restorationist, or other person similarly engaged in building a culture of resistance. The interviews are always worth listening to, packed with interesting information and insights drawn out by Jensen’s experienced questions. The interviews have always been available as mp3 downloads or audio streams from PRN.FM (you can also browse just the interviews related to Deep Green Resistance).

We’ve now made Resistance Radio available on youtube as audio with a still image of the interviewee, accessible to those who prefer to browse youtube or want to add the episodes into playlists. We’ll keep adding new interviews as they’re released. See them all at the Deep Green Resistance youtube channel, and please share these important conversations widely!

(reposted from the Deep Green Resistance blog)

Mid August Report

Table at Earthfest

By Ben Barker, Coordinator of Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin

For the past several months, the Wisconsin Chapter of the Deep Green Resistance movement has been building its own capacity and helping the international movement with campaigns and projects.

We recognize that one of our major goals as a chapter of the larger DGR movement is to simultaneously support DGR as a whole and bring the movement to our locale. Without a strong international movement, local resisters would have little support in their efforts. Yet, without resistance happening locally, the more broad structure would be irrelevant and ineffective.

In Wisconsin news, our group recently set up a literature table at Earthfest, an annual environmental festival in Sheboygan, WI. The mission of Earthfest is as follows:

Since 1990, Earthfest’s mission is to provide a joyful, annual, free family festival in Sheboygan to promote community spirit and a healthy environment through music, art, education, lectures, stories, demonstrations, and local foods.

From behind our table, we engaged in conversation with several folks about our organization and perspective. As is predictable given the tone of the so-called environmental movement in the United States, many whom we spoke with were not of the mind that resistance is even a possibility. They know the problems, but don’t know what we can honestly do to stop them. This is a major reason why DGR Wisconsin participated in Earthfest; we want to bring a radical analysis into the environmental milieu. The festival now being over, and many of our pamphlets seeing the fresh eyes of it’s attendees, it’s hard to say what impact our presence will have. Though, we will keep spreading the seeds of resistance and attempt to build a movement to save the planet.

Many thanks to organizers of Earthfest for putting the event on and allowing us to participate.

As always, the resistance needs you, and our group has expanded it’s options for getting involved, so please consider joining us in our fight for the future.

Wisconsin oil spill is Canadian firm’s worst since 2010 disaster

from: http://www.latimes.com/

 
By Matt Pearce
July 29, 2012, 2:10 p.m.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Enbridge, a beleaguered Canadian oil pipeline company, has spilled more than 50,000 gallons of light crude oil in rural Wisconsin —  shortly after the company said it had implemented safety reforms after a massive 2010 spill in Michigan.

Officials for Alberta-based Enbridge Inc., one of the United States’ most vital suppliers of Canadian oil, said Friday’s spill has been contained by cleanup workers,  who are now trying to repair and restart the 24-inch pipeline known as Line 14, which carries more than 300,000 barrels a day.

The incident is another black mark for an ambitious energy company ridiculed earlier this month by U.S. safety officials, who likened Enbridge workers  to the Keystone Kops. The comparison came after an investigation of a broken pipeline that released more than 800,000 gallons of heavy crude near Marshall, Mich. — one of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history and certainly the most expensive.

The new spill, in sparsely populated Adams County, Wis., forced the evacuation of two homes. It is the company’s worst spill since the 2010 disaster, and it drew the ire of U.S. Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee.

“Enbridge is fast becoming to the Midwest what BP was to the Gulf of Mexico, posing troubling risks to the environment,” Markey said in a statement. “The company must be forthcoming about this entire incident, and deserves a top-to-bottom review of their safety culture, procedures and standards.”

Continue reading

The Corporate Rot Eats Away at Wisconsin

from The Progressive

The corporate coup d’etat in Wisconsin is harder to ignore since June 5 when Scott Walker was deemed winner of the recall election. The veil is being lifted on the identities of the people who have their hands on the levers of power in the state and the economic interests they represent.

Gogebic Taconite is a case in point. This week, Matt Rothschild broke the story revealing dissension within the ranks of the mining lobby. James Buchen, the Vice President of Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, took the Wisconsin Mining Association (of which Buchen himself is a board member) and its executive director, Kennan Wood, to task for working on a compromise mining bill with Democrats in the legislature after the one written by and for Gogebic Taconite failed to pass the state senate earlier this year.

The letter offers a rare glimpse of the inner workings of corporate influence in Wisconsin politics and illustrates several points:

1) That lobbyists and the businesses that pay their salaries believe they control the legislative process;

2) That consolidation of power within a certain corporate faction – namely the defense manufacturing and resource-extractive industries – is nearly complete. Total domination of the state apparatus only requires two more senate seats;

3) That even the people promoting the Gogebic Taconite project themselves realize that it is not viable unless extraordinary de-regulatory measures are taken to subsidize it; and

4) That they believe the very purpose of the legislative process is to do the bidding of wealthy corporations. Continue reading