Too many otherwise extremely critical people concerned with social justice overlook a vital area. It's a shame, really, considering how otherwise thoroughly this field of discourse seems to have explored so many aspects of life by these folks. But in this one area, so many radical groups have ignored the most fundamental aspect of life, and in so doing have set up the course for a system doomed down the line to repeat the tyranny of the masters they revolt against. What they've ignored is the landbase, the ecosphere, the environment, or whatever you want to call it.

Of course, one can easily make the observation that environmentalism is more popular now than fifty years ago, and this is true. However, the environmentalism we see plastered all over the television and movie screens, that we get inconveniently from corrupt politicians-turned-celebrity, and from corporate greenwashing has nothing to do with protecting our landbases and ensuring justice for traditional communities. It has to do with the illusion of being "green", of giving people small lies that they can digest easily and trick themselves into believing that they don't have to fundamentally change their lifestyles to keep a living planet. They want to be able to keep producing and consuming, without thinking about the real effects these habits have beyond the check-out line.

This lack of deep insight into the landbase is what I think was the primary problem of the Soviet Union, as well as several other radical revolutions that birthed repressive regimes, and ultimately all empires. The Bolsheviks revolted with the intent of taking the power to the people and creating a "worker's paradise" out of the wreckage of a corrupt monarchy. Sounds like a great idea, right? So many of us today, and especially those of us who critique capitalism, want to create a setting in which people are treated fairly and not exploited by predatory economics and robber baron governments. The Bolsheviks had a pretty good critique going, and what appeared to be a good setup for fair distribution of resources and human rights. But we know something went wrong.

They were doomed from the start, though, because they didn't question the relationship that their culture had with the land(s) on which they lived. Indeed, in the attempt to collectivize the food production and maximize productivity (sound familiar?) they ignored the damage that agriculture, and especially industrial agriculture, does to the land. Traditional methods of food cultivation were completely ignored in the Communists' drive towards widespread industrialism. As Lierre Keith, author of "The Vegetarian Myth", puts it:

The truth is that agriculture is a relentless assault against the planet, and more of the same won't save us. In service to annual grains, humans have devastated prairies and forests, driven countless species extinct, altered the climate, and destroyed the topsoil- the basis of life itself.

So I bet some of you are thinking, "So what? That doesn't mean they'll treat the [human] people badly, does it?"

The problem with unsustainable ways of living is that you can't do it forever, especially not in one spot. If you could, it wouldn't be unsustainable (duh). Damaging continuously, using the same resources over and over faster than they replenish (if they replenish) means you'll run out. You'll strip it from the landscape and do irrevocable damage to said landbase. So, what happens when you've stripped something from the land, something your way of life is based on (like food or the nutrients necessary to grow the food, or perhaps oil) is that you'll go somewhere else for it. Maybe at first you can just trade for it, using some non-essential thing like gold or spices to get your grain. This might work out for a little while. But eventually trade becomes unreliable, and your neighbors say they can no longer trade as much with you as they previously had. If it's something your way of life depend on, something your people perceive that they need (whether or not that perception is true), you're going to go over there and take it, by force if necessary (and it almost always is when it comes to stealing resources).

To do this continually, you need to create a culture that makes this sort of exploitation not only acceptable, but encouraged, as well as making a mythos encouraging constant expansion and increased production ("be fruitful and multiply"). Hierarchal, abusive relationships become the norm. It comes to permeate the relationships throughout all parts of the culture. Chances are the culture already developed a bit of this, if you've already decided that humans are above other creatures and that clearing and destroying the land solely for your own use is acceptable.

In the case of the Soviet Union, we see that their unsustainability led them to many military actions for resources, especially oil, much in the same way that the U.S. military has been operating for the last few generations. One thing that hastened their collapse was the degradation of their soil, which reduced agricultural output (as any degradation of land eventually does) and forced them to import their food from elsewhere. This coincided with the rapid decline of their oil production, i.e. "Peak Oil", since their industrial agriculture, like that practiced widely in the U.S., depended on the stuff. It should be noted that, in fact, both countries had degraded their soil beforehand; the Dustbowl of the Great Depression was the result of just a few centuries of "organic" agriculture. Both countries "fixed" (read: 'hid') the problem with oil, creating massive amounts of chemical fertilizers.

This is where ethnographies and other testaments concerning indigenous people come in handy; while not perfect, we can see that peoples who relate to their landbases through some combination of hunting, gathering, and gardening are highly egalitarian people with few social problems. Reportedly, the language of the Okinagans of British Columbia have no word for violating a woman; their closest word literally translates to 'looking at her funny'. Six Nation clan mothers, from a society that traditionally lived off of a combination of complex horticulture, hunting, fishing, trapping, and foraging, themselves were the primary holders of political power, as were other women to a lesser extent on the Womens' Councils. This is a clear difference from civilized, agricultural peoples, who even in societies considered more 'progressive' in regards to gender politics have a huge level of disparity in economic, social, and political power between genders.

More to the point is that these cultures do not have slavery (and it could be argued that the outstanding treatment of women is related, as patriarchal cultures basically view women as property). Slavery, like exploitational warfare and destruction of one's landbase, requires that those who perpetrate it consider themselves as a higher form of life that has the right to dominate others. This is especially true in race-based forms of slavery; racial systems of slavery are built upon the superiority of one accident of birth over another, usually having primarily to do with skin tone. These systems are almost universal in civilized people, though contemporary forms of wage slavery and indebted servitude go under different guises to conceal their true nature.

Indigenous peoples, in contrast, don't have slavery. In big part it just doesn't make economic sense; there is no need to till the land, and most of the "work" they do is viewed as fun to them (being things that many people in our society consider vacation activities). The exception is often brought up of a few societies like the Six Nations and some Pacific Northwest cultures, but in reality what some Westerners view as slavery as practiced by them was in usually a form of hazing new members. I don't particularly agree with these forms of membership enculturation, but I need to make clear that it was not slavery in our sense, in the sense of ownership and superiority. In that same regard, I consider the Six Nations' infamous "wars of conquest" to be an exception that proves the rule in terms of expansionist warfare; they formed the League after making peace between the various nations and agreeing not to capture from one another, and in the tradition of adopting captured members of other groups they replenished their lost members through raids. And it should be noted that at the time of European contact with the Six Nations, many large Onondaga villages were made up of over 60% by people not born Onondaga. Again, not something I really endorse, but we need to name it for what it was.

Therefore I put forward this assertion: anyone with the slightest bit of caring and compassion, who is in any way involved in promoting social justice and equitable treatment of all people, needs to understand that degradation of the land and soil makes truly just societies impossible, and have at least a basic understanding of ecologically sound food production that reinforces and even improves biodiversity. You need to understand that agriculture is damaging in any form, even "organic" agriculture. Without these understandings, we're doomed to repeat the processes that have historically lead to tyranny and exploitation, in addition to overshoot and crash.

Look forward to upcoming essays concerning why radicals need to understand collapse (and how it effects subjugated peoples), why collapse is a good thing for humanity, and the differences between hard and soft collapse.

Yesterday author Lierre Keith (of "The Vegetarian Myth", which I'm currently reading) was attacked by three masked cowards, with a cream pie laced with cayenne pepper, who then shouted "GO VEGAN". By her account she's still in pain today. This is an ideologically driven hate crime, and I suspect misogynistic motivations as well (myself and others have spelled out why the fanatic vegan movement has huge racist and sexist undertones). It was an exercise in dominating-male violence over a woman.

Lierre is a middle aged woman with a degenerative disease. The attackers were reportedly young men. In no way was it a "fair fight". To add insult to injury (literally), the pepper in the pie is an honest-to-goodness chemical weapon. Pepper spray, even the strength used by police for crowd control, is the same active compound as that put in the pie. This causes injury that can't be taken lightly. Pie-ing is usually a political statement made against CEOs and politicians; they don't receive capsicum pies, but a fellow environmentalist gets a legitimate attack on her safety!? It's the bullshit of chauvinistic males attacking someone they deemed lower than them on the violence hierarchy; she was perceived as an easy target, in part because she's a woman.

Of course, dogmatic vegans aren't actually interested in the environment, or justice, just their identity politics. Even at the expense of potentially driving further rifts into the already tenuous radical environmental movement, apparently.

Call out cowardly zealots committing ideologically-driven assaults as the criminals they are! Ostracize them, if not more! Say no to "Horizontal hostility"! Especially you vegan allies!

I'm obsessed with the tool commonly called a machete. I'm an avid outdoors-man, and when I can I spend hours in the forest. Naturally, interacting with the world around me, the bioregion I dwell in and am a part of, requires some tools. The machete has a great range of uses, and a good one can be acquired for a small price. It is essentially a large knife, and therefore has all of the uses of a good knife, and a few more.

What I didn't know about machetes until recently is that they've historically played a huge role in resistance movements, slave revolts, and other revolutionary actions. They've also taken a huge variety of forms, often shaped for optimal efficiency in whatever is common use in the region, such as the bolo used commonly in Filipino households, weighted at the tip to allow in part for the cracking of coconuts.

The Haitian slave revolt that lead to the formation of Haiti was achieved in part because the slaves, being forced to work primarily on sugar cane plantations, were wielding and proficient with machetes, which in addition to being an invaluable tool for wandering the forest or cultivating plants, are basically swords. As in many places, a regional martial art evolved around using the weapons at hand, and this is the case in the Caribbean. So the people of Haiti, armed and maintaining the agricultural output of the land, could mount an effective assault against their enslavers, eventually capturing other weapons.

The "Spanish-American War", really a series of wars against indigenous and Afro-Caribean peoples worldwide, saw an extreme amount of machetes being used by resistance forces. In Puerto Rico, some resisters were referred to a Los Macheteros, which literally means "the machete wielders". These voluntary defenders picked up their machetes, and along with other fighters were able to hold several strategic points until the Treaty of Paris was signed. More recently, the clandestine Puerto Rican freedom organization The Boricua Popular/People's Army, named a terrorist organization by the FBI, is often referred to in common parlance as Los Macheteros, evoking imagery of the freedom fighters of the past.

Halfway across the globe, the Filipino resistance fighters used as one of their popular tools the machete, ideal for the guerrilla combat being waged first against the Spanish, then the American army. As mentioned before, machetes are a common tool in the islands.

What we see is that populations of people with weapons, which allow them to defend themselves from tyrants and enslavers, have a far greater ability to either free themselves or resist enslavement in the first place. As I have written elsewhere, this is aided largely, and perhaps even hinges in big part upon, some level of self-sufficiency. The machete aids in this as well. It may not be the most effective weapon in the world, but it has proven itself time and again as a useful tool for liberation, especially considering the low cost and availability. The machete has found its place in the history of liberation because of it's wide applicability and cheapness. Even in the days in which forging them took some expense and time, it was a tool that even the poorest families had, and usually cherished. Now I understand that better, and appreciate my barong.

This is an appeal to many of my friends and allies nearby, any of those wishing to live saner lives and create a better world. It will hopefully also be inspiration and resource for my friends outside of my immediate area. Spread it around as you see fit.

I'm becoming more and more aware that our culture's divisiveness and it's general hatred for real community makes many sorts of social movements fight uphill battles. Movements are nothing without communities. I think this is where a lot of movements lose effectiveness, because the people involved aren't actually bound to any stable communities, and therefore in their minds are only defending theory and not flesh and blood humans (and other animals). A lot of things, like the very setup of our lives (car culture, physical division of communities, egocentric and sociopathic levels of individualism, etc.) make it hard for us to get anything done. We've fallen into the trap of cutting ourselves off from our own lives, buying into pathological levels of individualism that drive us away from each other.

Without being grounded in a real community, being connected to flesh-and-blood people instead of just some socio-political theory, we lack a certain level of impetus to create change. This is why so many movements and campaigns just seem to all the be same, follow the same cookie-cutter formula and lifespan, and ultimately fizzle out. And this is why community-centered movements, like the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers, the Katipunan in the Phillipines, or the EZLN in Mexico, that had/have communities that they were immediately benefiting and defending, did/do great things despite literally being attacked by government forces.

We need to form solid, real life communities that are at least partially economically self sufficient. When a group can't sustain itself, imperialists don't need guns to enslave them (hence wage slavery). When a group is self-sufficient, the imperialists need to bring in guns to enslave. When the group is self sufficient and has the guns (or knives, bows, machetes, plastique, whatever we're talking about for defense) their chances are greatly increased that they remain free (think the Lakota and their long resistance).

Part of what I'm pondering over lately has had to do with two aspects of community: one is the impetus it provides to get people to actually fight for their rights, their conditions, to make real social change to benefit all. The other is the material support, like food sharing and gift economies, added to the shared base of skills and knowledges, like medicine, repairing/making things, and general wisdom. For instance, a major reason that we have to fight so hard for a woman's right to choose and access to reliable birth control is because traditional indigenous family planning knowledge isn't passed down within communities. In the same vein, we argue and bicker over a "public option" because we lack community-centered healthcare based on age-old and proven methods, (and because so many of us have been brainwashed to believe Western medicine is the only effective one, and to ignore factors like quality of life that are directly related to economic injustices and our relationship(s) to the land) making us dependent on industrial medicine that is often quite literally poisonous to us and our environments. We keep putting more and more money into authoritarian schools that don't teach (that is, besides teaching us to submit to authority) instead of just teaching ourselves and making available knowledge to kids that want to learn. We therefore become dependent on profit-driven corporations who only care enough about your health to keep you a repeat customer, about education only enough to produce useful cogs, and about womens' rights not at all. Not being able to do these things ourselves inextricably ties us to systems controlled by parasitic politicians and destructive corporations, whereas self-sufficiency (providing these things for ourselves) at least gives us a chance to get away from "the machine" and cause real change.

We can also look at the interplay between these two factors, the follow up of the impetus to enact change being made possible and supported by the material support of the community. Having some degree of economic independence means not being forced to enact change only on the oppressors terms, and therefore being doomed to failure. After all, if your only experience is that your food comes from the market, how can you be expected to fight against factory farming and industrial agriculture? How can you effectively challenge a system that keeps you alive? This has been why I've been trying to teach people more and more lately how to do things they didn't think possible outside of the industrial infrastructure. This is why we need to do more than learn these skills, but form communities that use them to provide for each other.

This is a major reason why I do not go in for electoral politics, nor depend on parasitic politicians to "give" me rights. Although a politician will occasionally be an ally to a social movement, they've never been prime determinants in enacting change; any of them with any pull are owned by corporations and will do what corporations say (or get their head blown off when they stray too far). Rather, fundamental change has always been the result of the people taking real action towards the change they needed. It has always been the result of people exerting force on society and on government, not by voting and letter-writing. Not that I wouldn't rather have a friendly fascist over a murderous one, of course.

As much as possible, I try to take or make what I and my community need. And this is hard in many ways, because I have the support of only a small community that is not very economically self sufficient, and somewhat disparate. I have a great family and we support each other as much as possible. I also have some great friends, but the support we can give each other is limited; we have the potential for real community. But we're small, and lack economic self-sufficiency. Even with only this meager community support, I can manage a lot of great ways to support my family and friends, as long-time readers of my postings know.

And I'll be clear here: this doesn't necessarily mean monetary economic self-sufficiency. This isn't some goal only available to middle and upper classes. In fact, it shouldn't include money very much at all, as basing one's wealth on money alone (or even primarily) only allows the corporate-government complex to continue controlling us, to allow them to dictate to us how we can live our lives. We need to establish a gift economy among our community. Gift economies are likely as ancient as human beings; it's a complex way of sharing. In essence, a gift economy is a non-authoritarian way to distribute wealth within a community, to insure that everyone's needs are met without some robber baron ruling class exploiting everyone else.

The urgency of this all is compounded by the fact that oil production has peaked and industrialism is crumbling. As if it weren't clear to everyone by now, we can't live a lifestyle that uses ever growing amounts of resources. Only the most insane peak oil doubters can deny this, as it requires a complete disconnect from reality to not understand that even renewable resources (e.g. wood) have a rate at which they replenish, and therefore a rate of harvesting at which they decline (“Peak Wood” of pre-Dickensian England). It will crash and it will crash hard, and oil is used for everything in the industrial economy. If we have a stable, self-sufficient community, we can benefit from this and help others to benefit from it, or at least help them survive. Even if we're not self-sufficient to the extent of growing, hunting, and gathering our own foodstuffs, just having a gift economy in place is a huge level of security.

Also, we need not own land in the legal sense to be self-sufficient in some degree. I spent a couple hours outside in the pouring rain today, preparing some of my parents' forest/yard for some forest gardening. Mostly I was clearing stuff with my new barong machete, and Wednesday I'll do more of that and some raking. Many of us know people who do "own" land, and would likely be open to mutually beneficial use of the land. This is another important part of community. In addition to my parent's couple of acres, from which I forage a lot, I've been invited several times to "clean up" acorns from my partner's parents house, and her grandmothers house. There are also "public" lands that we can access. The biggest acorns I've ever found were from a park/trail in Glocester. And as the First Ways blog I've posted links to makes clear, there's even a lot to forage in urban areas, it might just take a bit more ingenuity.

And although I've found food gathering to be a profoundly effective community and relationship building activity, it's not something that everyone in a community needs to do for it to have significant impact. I always read about the fact that an adult hunter-gatherer, working an average of two hours a day, can feed five people. I can say that having foraged for years now, that seems reasonable to me, even with nowhere near the same expertise truly indigenous people have. At the very least, a small group of dedicated part-time foragers and gardeners can greatly supplement their diets on wild plant foods. My forest gardening and guerrilla gardening projects will certainly help that.

I and a number of my friends are radicals in the truest sense of the word, meaning that we attempt to discover root causes (from Latin: radix) for social injustices in the world. And yet, we often overlook the lack of community support and community self-sufficiency and the role it plays in keeping people subjugated. Many of us decry industrial food production and its various negative effects, yet we rarely try to organize community and personal gardens, launch guerrilla gardening campaigns, or organize trips to forage our own food. We'll talk about the effects of classism and racism in industrial healthcare without encouraging traditional medicines on a community level (or again, organize community gardens).

We need not share the same views and be fighting for the exact sames causes, either. As Derrick Jensen (have you guessed that I like his writing?) is so often pointing out, we need it all. This is as much true for causes and movements as it is true for practical skills and knowledges. What is important is that we provide for one another and have the sort of open dialogue in which we can disagree over minor details while still supporting one another. It is perhaps even better that we don't all work on the same issues; we can and likely need to be the intersection between social justice, human rights, ecological restoration and protection, etc. And we need people who don't give a damn about these issues and just want to live comfortably and happily.

Healthy communities reinforce behaviors that benefit the community, making community interest the same as personal interest. Until we have communities of people that work for the good of the community, and understand the necessity of working together despite personal differences (instead of the rampant horizontal hostility I see/hear about) we'll constantly be thwarted by pettiness, bickering, and conflicting work schedules. It will take work to build and maintain a community. There is a reason why indigenous people often spend as much time socializing and building community as they do on subsistence.

I'm willing to dedicate myself to building a real community. I'm willing to put my community ahead of a job, because only one of those can give real economic independence. I'm willing to extend myself to all of you to make sure your needs are met, if you're willing to do the same for me. I'm willing to defend you if you're willing to defend me. I'm willing to grow with you if you're willing to grow with me.

I am a killer. I don't deny this, and I have no problem with it. I'm a complex animal, and therefore I'm a killer. All complex animals are, as are most simple animals. Basically all creatures besides a few types of lichens feed off of the dead matter of other creatures, though plants don't kill firsthand too often. So I kill things or have things killed for me. This is not to say I'm a murderer, though some dogmatic vegans certainly classify me as such.

So what differentiates a killer and a murderer? We're all killers, all of us that read this, but are we all murderers? Killing for living clearly isn't murder, considering that we humans all need to take part in it in some way. If you're uncomfortable with that, I can only tell you that you need to grow up and come to terms with it. I was once verbally assault by the sort of dogmatic vegan I mentioned above while we walked through the quad at Rhode Island College, after I'd tried to explain animism to her. She said if I considered animals to be sentient (and plants too, but she kept overlooking that) but still killed them (or led to their deaths), then would I also kill a person (she meant human person, but her own particular brand of anthropocentrism shone through)?

The answer of course was yes. I have no problem saying I'd kill a human for my survival or to protect a loved one, and I hope my loved ones feel the same. I don't consider human lives more valuable than other creatures, which is a common accusation flung at meat eaters by dogmatic vegans. The thing is, I don't really have a reason to kill humans to live, I do have a reason to kill plants and animals. I've thankfully never been confronted with the need to kill a fellow human, never been subjected to threats on my life, at least not in person. But obviously, I have continued eating for most of my twenty five years, and therefore I've killed. Death has occured so I can live. And I've personally killed hundreds and perhaps even thousands of beings for food and medicine. I've processed countless seeds into food, seeds that had a small chance of becoming a plant had I not eaten them. Each acorn I've turned into meal was potentially another oak tree.

Ethical issues involving life and death need to take into account the wider biological sytem, the biological communities, before anything else. Obviously the individual personhood of creatures need to be taken into account as well, but that has more to do with humanely killing and proper treatment/circumstance in life. Creatures and their interactions make up entire systems, and subsystems, and so on and so forth. Every creature's wellbeing is in some way dependent on the larger system, so it is therefore vitally important to keep such biological systems functional in their role of supporting the lives of those within. The reason we need to keep our ecosystems intact, aside from the necessity that one's own community needs other biological communities in the ecosystem to survive, is that killing another creature for sustenance creates a responsibility on your part. When you consume the flesh of another being, be they plant, animal, or fungus, that being's death has gone to sustain your community, be it a family, tribe, or just you. Therefore, the responsibility of those who kill and consume other creatures is to make sure that the communities of those who are killed are taken care of, that they're allowed to live in a healthy manner and be allowed to exist as they are meant to. This will include considerations to the individual personhood of creatures, and since every creature I can think of is in the best circumstances free and not enslaved (domesticated) one major implicit value in this is opposition to slavery of any sort, and promotion of emancipation. To properly take care of the communities of the creatures we consume, we need to do so in ways that are reinforcing and helpful to the larger biological system we live in, as well. This should be simple and just an obvious part of intelligent survival for any species, but we civilized humans have been told contrary messages so long that it's sometimes hard to remember basic and simple truths such as this one.

The fulfillment of our responsibility can take numerous forms and be handled in a lot of different ways. Sometimes fulfilling this relationship is quite easy, like when voles eat the fungus at the bases of redwoods, and the fungus mycellium propagates from their feces, creating more fungus which allows the redwoods to continue growing. They don't need to do anything aside from eat and defecate. At other times it's more convoluted, such as our eating of deer meat, then our feces fertilizing plants that feed the deer and other animals in the area (maybe even us). Sometimes it's more cerebral, like knowing which of the deer would be best to kill from a population. Knowledgeable killing can curb disease in their community, ignorant killing might make disease worse, or cause other population problems. Many state hunting regulations had previously allowed for only killing male deer during the hunting season, reasoning that the few males that weren't shot could still mate with all the females. As it turns out, though, this horribly stressed the male deer, and adversely effected the rest of the population as well.

Killing in self defense is obviously rather different. The predator prey relationship doesn't quite apply, does it? After all, while the death of an enemy threatening to kill you or your family might technically mean that your community is sustained for longer than it otherwise would have been (i.e. they're not dead), it's not actually being taken in to your community physically. Well, if it is, such as if hunters have killed a bear that was attacking a child and you then ate said bear, you still have some sort of responsibility to keep the rest of the bears alive and relatively healthy. But say a human person or a group of human persons attacks you; say you're a band of Lakota being hunted by the U.S. Military after the Civil War (or shit, in 1973). You don't owe anything to these aggressors who are mercilessly killing your people. You have no responsibility to make sure that the U.S. and it's war machine survive, and in fact have every right to end them. They clearly don't intend to keep your community alive and free. Crazy Horse was perfectly justified in slaughtering soldiers. Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who raised an army to wage war against the encroaching United States, was acting exactly as he should have when he allied with the British to gain guns and steel blades to kill the Americans who were attacking and stealing Shawnee and other indigenous peoples' lands. He owed people who indiscriminately killed his friends and family with death right back at them. Geronimo, on the other hand, went beyond killing in self defense. In his case, he started out killing many members of the Mexican force that came and basically wiped out his village, which was justifiable, but in the end became a murderer by killing civilians who had little or nothing to do with the soldiers attacking his newly adopted band. There is a fine line here between self-defense and fighting back on the one side, and lashing out undirected on the other.

A big part of rewilding for me, as well of a lot of other people, has included learning to take responsibility for my killing, my death-dealing. Too many of us don't take responsibility for the death involved in their living; too many don't even understand their role in the wider world in regards to death. We're so disconnected from life that we fear death in any form, not understanding that one implies the others. Too many civilized humans are destructive to the communities of other creatures they depend on, too many torture the animals and plants we consume. And in that process, too many destroy the land (or let it be destroyed on their behalf) that we all come from, disallowing other beings the ability to live there as they probably should (to the dogmatic vegetarians: your fucking GMO soy is grown over the clear cut rainforests. Fuck you). To have any sort of sustainable, sane, and healthy culture, the people need to at least understand and acknowledge the death that is required for them to live.

Personally, I have taken the easy killer's route so far, killing only plant people personally (though that's in part just because I suck as an angler), but I've killed personally. The narrow focus of my killing is likely to change in the near future, as I've been prepping for years to learn to hunt and this year have actually aquired a hunting permit. Killing animals, I'm told, is a terrible and fantastic experience. Animals are harder to kill emotionally, in addition to physically, because we related to them easier. They have eyes and faces, and their form of sentience is much more similar to ours than that of plants (as an aside, some idiots try to argue that saying plants and other animals besides us have emotions and sentience in anthropomorphising them: is it anthropomorphising to say a cow has lungs? They have organs, though they're not exactly like ours. Cows have stomachs, but not like human stomachs. Just like that, they have sentience and emotion, just not exactly like ours because human modes of thinking wouldn't serve them as well as ours serve us. This is doubly true for plants, who have little need for emotions just like ours).

This essay didn't start off in my head as primarily about killing for food, though. I had conceived orignally of this essay as a tangent off of a thought I had concerning womens' rights to choose, which is why at the beginning I specifically used the real example of eating acorns. "Pro-life" advocates (I'll be honest here; as much as I respect my friends who identify as "pro-life", the term "pro-life" is at best imprecise and at worse complete propaganda and misdirection. It's either "pro-fetus life" or "anti-choice") often bring up the biblical passage "Thou shalt not kill" as one reason why abortions should be illegal (some also extend it to many forms of birth control). As a rabbi once told me, the proper translation isn't "kill", but "murder". The Bible doesn't particularly disparage killing, but rather murder. The right to kill in defense is established in many passages, such as Exodus 22:2, though that one is a bit too supportive of property rights over human rights for my liking.

Not that I particularly use the fact that something is in the Bible as a legitimizing argument, nor do I think anyone should, even devout Christians. It's just not a good way to win arguments, especially about killing because a lot of the killing supposedly ordered by G-d in the Old Testament is clearly genocidal and ecocidal. Good ethical arguments and their actions are defensible logically because they end up working to maintain positive circumstances like freedom, personal sovereignty and self-determination, and the continuation of life. I simply draw upon biblical passages to draw attention to the fact that the Judeo-Christian tradition has also involved a discourse concerning the subject of what is acceptable killing, even if most tellings and translations fail to recognize the individual personhood of plants and "lesser" animals (I'm sure there is at least one version does at least some of this, but I'm not familiar with it). In the specific case of the right to choose for women there is the issue of establishing personhood of a baby, which can be argued basically forever because nobody will ever decide what draws the line between a lump of cells and a new human (though as I hear it, the Bible actually has an answer to that). The above text concerning cases of ethical killing for survival, while being important in their own right concerning the subject of how we relate to the world and the creatures in it, also serve the purpose of establishing the argument that it is okay to kill, and under what circumstances that killing is okay.

So I won't argue what I believe concerning when that lump of cells becomes a person, because it's irrelevent to my argument. What is relevent in this case is how the overall human community in a particular location fairs in direct consequence of how we live our lives, and how we choose to go about having families. And the human communties in an area are directly dependent on the wellbeing of other communities around them: the deer and bison, the oaks and birch and maple, the blueberry bushes and the cranberry bogs, the salmon and the trout. A community of humans that grows too populous, that goes beyond the means of the other creatures and the land to maintain them, will necessarily do damage to the communities of other creatures that they rely on if they are going to feed all of their people. Continually doing this will lead to the inability to eat later on, and naturally lead to disease, starvation, and suffering in all of the communities involved. That is until it leads to warfare, expansionism, and genocide, as always does. It therefore becomes necessary, not just for the sake of our human communities, but also the plant and animal communities that we are consuming and are therefore partially responsible for, and the reciprocal relationships that are essential for ethical and sustainable living, that we take into account the role our numbers play in that, and therefore require honest, intelligent discussion about the utilization of natural family planning methods.

And let's be clear: this doesn't mean it needs to involve abortions or abortifactants. There are plenty of methods and medicines that can, in a myriad of ways, allow heterosexual couples to plan out their child birthing(or lack thereof). In the North American land mass alone there are over two hundred species of plants that have been traditionally used by indigenous women to plan when they have children. Some are abortifactants, some prevent implantation from occurring at all. There are also timing methods, though limited as they are in effectiveness when used alone. There's the obvious practice of abstinence, though frankly I don't consider it very realistic as a widespread practice, nor would I feel that widespread abstinence would be all that humane because sex is a part of healthy human romantic relationships (even if civilization has the nasty habit corrupting and co-opting it into something warped and hierarchal, turning it into having more to do with power politics and gender roles than about sharing intimacy and love). The point is that there are a lot of ways in which people can and need to consider planning births, and we can't rule any of them out based simply on whether it involves "death". We can (or at least I do recommend) rule out things like the pill, as the concentrations are high enough to cause infertility in species subjected to human waste, which down the line damages ecosystems (not to mention how much they fuck up womens' bodies). Most importantly, we need to consider the health of the landbase first, both when considering methods and timing of family planning (for instance, spreading wild carrot seeds where they don't grow and would become invasive would hurt the landbase).

The issues and implications involved in understanding killing and balance extend quite readily to the sort of technology we use. Technology is a primary focus of our materialistic society, especially since it's the primary attribute that we tend to consider ourselves to be accomplished at as a society. The thing is, our technology doesn't do a whole lot to make us happy and healthy, and despite the greenwashing we get from corporations it continues to grow more and more destructive every day. Anyone who points this out is always met with idiotic remarks from techno-utopianists: "What technology SHOULD we use, then? You want to send us back to the dark ages/iron age/stone age? Wouldn't you rather have robots do work for you instead of sitting around banging rocks together?" These are sadly not that far from real remarks I've gotten; I'll just skip over decrying the obvious racism and ethnocentrism of some of these and get to the point.

Traditional indigenous people, by and large, aren't "into" technology. Life for most indigenous people is more about relationships, and their technology reflects this. Their technology is sustainable because of this, because they use the tools and technologies based on what the land freely gives. They have, and continue to in many places, used what parts of their plant, animal, and stone relations they can use without damaging the landbase. And let's be clear here: this does not mean it's restricted to fictional designations like "Stone Age", "Iron Age", or any other non-useful/Progressivist label. It does not reject complex technologies. It simply rejects ethically those technologies that take more than is sustainable, more than what is "freely given", and would thereby require exploitation to sustain. Anything more than that crosses over into the area of killing that damages the landbase and throws off the balance, and many unnecessary deaths by extension; killing that is murder.

What will this look like? I can't say anything other than that your individual landbase needs to be the ultimate decider on that. Complex machines made from unsustainable materials will be around for at least the next generation, and plenty of interesting and useful things can be made simply from scrap. We'll have steel tools for awhile, even if the industrial economy collapses tomorrow. If I were to make a guess, I'd say we're likely to see as many steampunk style devices being made from scrap as we do buckskins and wood bows, at least for the next couple of generations. In the long run, seven generations from now or more, we'll be seeing that the only sustainable way to live will be dictated by each landbase, and naturally a big part of what the landbase will be able to provide in the future depends on how we treat it now. So take care of it, spread wild native seeds, learn permaculture, and encourage biodiversity.

Whether we're using tools made from what the earth gives freely, or those made from the scrap of civilization, the consideration of how we use tools and technologies in relation to the landbase is as important as how we create or get the tool, if not more important. Put another way, whether the killing we do with our tools is good for the landbase is at least as important as whether the killing we did to get the tool is good for the landbase. Put yet another way: the only sustainable (and therefore have the possibility of being ethical) technologies are those that employ only that which the landbase gives freely. Put one final way: the only way of life that has any shot at being a truly ethical one is one that sustains or improves the health of the landbase, i.e. is truly sustainable.

Sometimes people react to any mention that we're overpopulated, that there are just too many humans, with accusations of promoting genocide, and since I've just stated that killing in ways to benefit a landbase is acceptable, I need to point out here that these accusations don't naturally follow. One major point that is routinely missing from discussions about overpopulation is overconsumption. Some people consume too much. It's probably people like you and I, living in the industrialized nations. But it is most especially the people pulling the strings of industrialism, and the industry itself. The fact that our way of life has both degraded the landbase(s) and led to the birth of too many humans doesn't mean the solution is to kill a bunch of us off. The voluntary human extinction movement is likewise not the solution, and their racist exclusion and ignorance of indigenous people isn't the only reason. Like I've articulated above and in another essay, humans are capable of making intelligent, community-based decisions about child rearing. We don't need war or genocide to reduce the numbers. We need to be realistic, and encourage the learning and teaching of traditional medicines (also for health and longevity).

Another problem with this argument is that it overlooks the "resources" we have (I hate referring to other beings as resources, but it's sometimes necessary in discourse), and better ways to get them. Plenty of activists have read that there is more than enough food in the world, but it's locked up and not distributed evenly because, well, that's what the civilized do. We need to take to heart that these statistics, if they can even be trusted (I'm always skeptical of statistics), do not take into account wild foods, though those are clearly taking a beating. The BIG thing to pay attention to here is that the bulk of the foods being grown and counted are the results of agriculture, which in addition to being terrible for the soil, for biodiversity, and allow for the centralization of power, also is terribly inefficient. One can't grow as much per acre with a destructive monocrop as one can with a natural, beneficial polycrop like those grown using permaculture methods. By encouraging the reestablishment of natural ecosystems through permaculture methods (whether they be forests, prairies, or wetlands), or even using complex horticulture involving complimentary planting, we not only more thoroughly fulfill our obligations to our cousins in the natural worlds, we're likely facilitating the growth of more food (and more nutritious food, too).

Therefore, the fears of the jaded pseudo-anarchists and others who wryly insist that anyone falling somewhere close to the "anarcho-primitivist" philosophy is a genocidal maniac is ill-placed. We're not going to "go around clubbing anyone wearing glasses" (as one condescending motherfucker told me when I praised Endgame on an anarchist list). At best these accusations are just simple misunderstandings, at worst they're racist, ironic apologetics for a genocidal culture. I'll let you decide on a case-by-case basis.

Since starting this essay I've covered a lot of issues concerning killing, balance, and their intersection. And early on I asked the question of whether or not we're murderers, before examining what makes some killing not murder and makes other killing murder. So now that I've established a case, are we murderers? So many of us are complicit in the murder of trees and deer and fish, of the poor here and abroad, of faceless brown people in far away countries that the U.S. military kills for resources. So many of us don't question the car culture that kills 30,000 humans a year in this country alone, not to mention countless non-humans, and facilitates the moving of resources bought on/made from the corpses of so many of civilization's victims. Maybe some of us aren't murderers, maybe those of us who work against this monstrous machine have at least done enough to not be accessories to murder. Maybe our meager flailing at this death culture is enough to be considered adequate enough protest to the murder that we can't be considered in any way responsible. If you're reading this you're more likely to at least question these things.

We only have so much control over the circumstances of our lives, and while there are plenty of ways we can not take part in the omnicidal culture around us, we can't just jump out of it and pretend it's not there. And it's not us that are making the decisions that are killing the world. We're not murderers just because we're forced into a system; we're not guilty for something we have no control over. We ARE guilty if we don't fulfill our bargains. I eat meat, so I owe it to animals to ensure the health and freedom of their communities, and therefore I need to work to end factory farms, monocropping, and rampant deforestation. I eat maize, beans, and squash, and I owe it to their communities my efforts to end monocropping and have the three of them (and their oft-forgotten fourth sister, sunflower) put together more often. I wear clothes made from cotton and wool, so I owe it to both sheep/alpaca and cotton plant communities to stop pesticide filled farming of cotton and encourage sustainable pastoralism of the wool-bearers, or even better the growth of feral flocks. Needless to say, my example shows that we industrialized humans have a lot of responsibilities we're not keeping up our ends of, and I'm not even much of a consumer. I for one intend to fulfill at least some of those bargains. Whether my sustainable killing will help, we'll see.

Women must not depend upon the protection of man,
but must be taught to protect herself.
- Susan B. Anthony, July 1871

I've come to notice that there is a particular difference between men and women. I mean, aside from the very obvious stuff, slot A meets tab B, birds and bees and all that jazz. Specifically, I've been noticing that many women just don't know anything about guns, and yet most men seem to know technical statistics about guns they'll probably never see, let alone touch or even shoot. This has been true even with women who tend to dispense with most usual gender-role expectations, which is what really got me noticing that something was up.

Our culture is to blame. In patriarchal Western cultures, firearms and other weaponry are the realm of men. Women are not encouraged, and in fact are actively discouraged, from using or even knowing about firearms. We see it in movies and television, news stories, and editorials; guns are the tools that men use, women should use pepper spray and other less effective means to defend themselves. And yet women are subject to a disproportionately high amount of violence. Wouldn't it seem logical to give women a means to prevent and defend themselves from the violence that so many of them are subjected to?

The attitude of keeping women disarmed, and thereby either keeping them dependent on men for protection or making them easy targets for criminals (who may be the same men who they rely on for protection, as most cases of sexual assault are perpetrated by men that the women know) relates directly to what author and activist Derrick Jensen lays out as one of his premises in his monumental two-volume book, Endgame. He states:

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

This idea certainly sounds familiar to most people, though many have trouble digesting it if they'd never previously realized that their own culture is based on just as oppressive a hierarchy as more obvious dictatorships. Women especially are subjected to this, having been treated as passive beings for centuries and having yet to totally shake that particular stereotype. We also see this sort of oppression being foisted upon various minority groups, even specifically in the case of purposeful disarmament, as the recent video put out by the Jews for the Preservation of Gun Ownership “No Guns for Negroes” makes apparent in its indictment of racist gun control laws copied directly from Nazi Germany by U.S lawmakers.

The dominant culture has many ways to enforce its hierarchies, and they aren't limited to laws and other official actions. Popular culture is a huge means by which social values are shaped, and oppressed peoples can be kept oppressed. Self-policing subjects are the favorites of those at the top of a hierarchy, and many women fall into this category. Pro-gun control propaganda is often aimed at manipulating womens' fear of attack, and yet as Gary Kleck, a Criminologist at Florida State, points out, approximately 550 rapes are prevented every day by women who simply pull a gun on their attacker. There are plenty of other statistics and articles that can be easily found by typing “guns prevent rape” into a search engine. As groups such as Women Against Gun Control will readily declare and explain to anyone, gun control does not have the best interest of women in mind; the Brady Bill's 5-day rule, instead of preventing violence, caused a slight increase in the rate at which rapes occur.

I'm no gun nut, and I'm certainly no fan of much of what I see in “gun culture” in the United States, but it seems readily apparent from any critical look at the history of gun control that it has been routinely, explicitly, and solely used as a means to keep oppressed people in a position in which they can continue to be easily oppressed. We don't all have to turn into junior Rambos to counteract this, but simply educate ourselves and others on the realities of firearms, their proper functioning, and their role in crime prevention. In fact, we need to strip guns from the macho rambo and thug culture as much as possible, and make them the tools of responsible, pro-community people.

Ultimately, this isn't about guns, but about an indictment of a culture that continually and routinely sends implicit messages to women and girls that it's not okay to fight back, that you should really just take what others are forcing on you: “Take the violence, abuse, and trauma that this culture foists upon you, and don't you dare try to stop it.”

This essay is about encouraging women and girls to fight back, not to take abuse, violence, and trauma just because it's the “way things are”. And most of all, it does come back to guns, and making it clear that it is not only all right for women to own and learn to use firearms (or any other means necessary) for their own and their family's protection, but that it is right, it is intelligent, and that effective self-defense is their right just as it is the right of all human beings.

One thing that's become increasingly clear to me is the need to offer/create immediate and viable alternatives to civilization and its unhealthy cultural traits. In this area especially, I think Malcolm X presents a great example. As he covered in the statements of purpose for the OAAU, we need to think about all the basic needs of our community. It's also become clear to me that, while learning all those great primitive skills is useful, and the food gathering/producing stuff is essential, anyone who wants to realistically build a rewilding culture needs to focus on the "Transition" culture, the mode of existence immediately during and after civilization that makes use of the scrap and select technology industrialism produces.

If we don't like civilized "educational" systems, we need to offer alternatives to the educational system that teaches children and adults to behave as cogs in a machine; instead, we need to push for regular skills shares, storytelling and music, and homeschooling networks for parents choosing not to send their children away every day. We need to understand Daniel Quinn's conception of "tribal" learning and teaching methods, in which children are encouraged to learn instead of having it shoved down their throats. If any of us ever get the space and requisite funding (if any is needed), we can set up community libraries.

If we don't like civilized healthcare industry (which is exactly what it is, industry), we should create community alternatives to it. We need not only to learn basic natural medicines ourselves, but have trained medical professionals who aren't completely embedded into the civilized mode of health and healing.

If we don't like supporting agriculture and supermarkets, and the culture surrounding them, we need to have organized ways to at least lessen our dependence on them. We need to have groups who will be willing to forage, garden, permaculture, fish, hunt, and so on together. We need to build traditions of our own around these things, traditions about when to gather, how, songs and games associated with them, and all of those other traditional ways that indigenous cultures use to make the work easier.

If we're going to live away from police and military whose job is to violently maintain the status quo and facilitate the exploitation of others' resources, we need to be able to defend ourselves. This is especially true considering that indigenous communities, or anyone seen as different than the dominant society, have consistently and historically been subjected to the brunt of the violence of civilization. This will require basic organizing of community defense, and other things like community watches.

If we don't like the economic exploitation we're forced into to either rent an apartment or get a mortgage for a house, we need to create acceptable co-housing situations. While running away to some abandoned farm land to create a commune-like village might sound great, it's likely not immediately feasible for a lot of us. Therefore, we need something we can do now. We can organize groups to share costs and responsibilities for apartment buildings or multi-family houses. This will also help tackle the problem of isolation from friends and family that industrialism seems to encourage, and make the previous goal of community defense, crime watch, and other safety issues more favorable. Friends and family will be more likely to watch your back. If a favorable circumstance can't be arranged, even renting apartments in the same building or area would help us form stronger community. I'm still gonna hold out hope for building an earthbag and timber frame neo-indigenous longhouse, though.

If we don't like politics as usual and having intrusive governments getting into our business, we need to have forums of our own in which to discuss issues and make community decisions (preferably by consensus), while not impinging on an individual's rights to free choice.

It would be advantageous for any of us to find ways to become more economically independent. As much as it sucks, we live surrounded by a society that feels it has the right to demand money from us for simply living. Finding ways to produce some money ourselves can, at the very least, reduce the amount of time we need to sell our lives away to others.

Obviously many of these goals overlap, as in the case of co-housing aiding crime-prevention, and food and health will always be inseparable, and of course living near your "tribe" and having access to land will make food procurement networks easier to work. They all interact in the sort of holistic fashion one expects.

These are all steps that I think we can take and even realize within the next few years. I don't think these are too difficult or too far from the way we're used to living that they would present significant difficulty, while I do think they are also huge steps in realizing a healthier, saner, and more fulfilling way to live.

If you have any ways to add to this, or think I'm just nutty in one area, please contribute. We need many voices to have a strong community.

One night, my partner and I went to a meeting of the discussion group that my friend puts together. One of the people there brought up the idea that the dichotomy between Reform and Revolution is a false one, which I quite agree with (an opinion I dropped and then picked back up recently, both times due to Derrick Jensen). After all, what good is it to dismantle civilization if there's nothing left of the people you're working to help? At the same time, what good is it to do volunteer work to better the lives of people in the culture if you're just going the let it continue to march all over them, metabolizing them and ultimately destroying the bulk of life on the planet? What good was it for the Nazi doctors at Auschwitz to do all they can to improve the situation of Jews in the camp (which they seem to have cared about) without questioning fundamentally why they're there and if the camps have any validity? What good would it have done to carpet bomb Auschwitz without first releasing the Jewish, Roma, and other prisoners?

The discussion going on after the meeting proper had me further analyzing subjects related to this, specifically after I'd suggested a book of Ward Churchill's for the next reading ("Kill the Indian, Save the Man"), which seemed to go over well. I'd brought up that one of the biggest influences on my current ethical stance(s), as well as one of my favorite books, is Churchill's "Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America". One of the major arguments in the short book, besides the fact that every situation and struggle needs to be evaluated on its own merits when deciding whether or not armed violence is an appropriate strategy, is that the habit of mainstream (especially White) activists to dogmatically embrace pacifism for themselves while supporting freedom fighters elsewhere is the result of White privilege and cowardice.

The implicit message to their pacifism is that their lives and well-beings aren't worth sacrificing in the struggle, as opposed to those of poor brown people elsewhere. Those who decry the freedom fighters elsewhere are worse still, as they seem to basically ignore the circumstances of their struggle and can only reference them in regards to their own privileged lives in what might be the most racist ethnocentrism ever. This is much like the insane vegans telling Inuit to import tofu grown in obliterated former rainforests or prairies instead of killing some fish and caribou. It involves a certain level of silencing of the voices of others (necessary for continued exploitation), or just an extreme willful stupidity. Or insanity. ("The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane...")

I think I see something similar in a lot of First Worlders when talking about taking down civilization, but there's more there than that. Sure, one of the big problems when talking to people (especially privileged, white, male people) is that they often simply cannot see or comprehend circumstances too drastically different from their own. It's part of the way our abusive culture limits our stimuli, like in any abusive situation. Further than that, this creates a state of mind in which people identify civilization as all of humanity, maybe all of life, and become incapable of seeing that the "accomplishments" of civilization do not extend to all humans, not even all civilized humans. This is where the real danger is, for it creates a story of the world which is false, which ameliorates murder, genocide, ecocide, and shit, omnicide, for the lengthening of the lifespans of a select few (to that of prehistoric people) and the delivering of ice cream and grapes year-round.

Arguing that taking down civilization means killing people dependent on it ignores that civilization is killing far more to give the privileged situation to you, and that it will continue to do so. It ignores that the cancer cures given predominantly to rich White people are killing hundreds more poor brown people through the release of dioxin (the most carcinogenic substance on the planet) into poor neighborhoods. It ignores the fact that to get a constant supply of mono-species bananas (causing other types to become endangered) deprives people in Guatemala from having self-sustaining economies of their own, damning many to starvation. It ignores the fact that having cheap government subsidized corn and soy products for people in America destroys the once-fertile prairies and pushes farmers to destroy entire forest ecosystems to spread their farmland, essentially murdering the various species that live there. It ignores the fact that your cell phone requires coltan, for which bloody civil wars are fought and child slavery is employed to mine.

Arguing that we can't throw away the science that we've learned is stupid and racist. Aside from assuming a lot about the value of Western science (and no, it really hasn't proven itself to be of much value aside from a few bright ideas), and for some reason thinking that useful knowledge would instantly be thrown out the window, it ignores the sciences of other cultures. "Western Science" as a worldview is shit, at its basis being built around a false epistemology. This is not to say that the scientific method has no redeeming value, but it is to say that the world view postulated by "Enlightenment" thinkers does not. It's a way of thinking created to facilitate hyper-exploitation of land and people by describing the world as mechanistic and devoid of volition. It goes hand in hand with the myth of Progress, the cousin of the completely racist myth of Social Evolution.

Not to mention the completely racist and ethnocentric bias in ignoring the knowledge and learning of everyone else on earth by slapping the label SCIENCE on the meager learnings of a few Westerners, thus implicitly relegating other knowledge and other ways of learning as UNSCIENTIFIC and superstitious. Sounds a lot like labeling heretics, doesn't it? In labeling one's own belief as the true science, it ignores the fact that indigenous people (who have historically enjoyed much higher standards of living before being forcefully civilized) have their own immense and complex learning, the collected wisdom of generations. Vine Deloria Jr., the famous indigenous philosopher and scholar, when comparing Western Science to indigenous ways of learning, said that science imparts an immature understanding, whereas the entire indigenous lifeway was based on gaining maturity and mature understandings.

Examine your loyalties. Are they to life and freedom? Or does your frame of reference, like so many civilized, extend only to your industrialized surroundings? Even if you choose to be 100% anthropocentric, there are other humans out there that will instantly benefit from the dismantling of civilization. Does your frame of reference extend to the bulk of humanity that won't care if the electrical infrastructure gets turned off? To the subsistence farmers being forced off their land or being forced into a cash economy that will/does starve them? To the wage slaves in this country? To the indigenous still having their land stolen by force, now by corporations building coal-burning plants and uranium mines or Olympic Stadiums? To the indigenous in Peru earlier this year who were machine-gunned so corporations could steal the forests? To Iraqi children being born en masse with birth defects from depleted uranium dust? To the over 25% of women who are subjected sexual assault in our high-rape culture (no, not all cultures rape)? To the children getting cancer from inhaling airborne dioxin from burned medical waste? To anyone getting cancer at all!?

The main argument I'm making here is that to lay one's loyalties with civilization, to argue for industrialism and against life (while thinking it is FOR life), to argue against the REVOLUTION part, one must ignore the others in the world. This is especially true for non-humans, but also of women, children, people of color, indigenous people... this has been the major means by which the abuse of civilization is perpetuate, just like any abusive and exploitative relationship is maintained through denial and silencing. This is why Western Science as a world view has historically been used to commit the worst acts of genocide in history. To ignore the fact that your culture is emmiserating the bulk of humanity and literally murdering life on the planet, you need to narrow your focus to the circumstances of privileged First Worlders. Until one understands what it really is to be human animals, what it's been to be human animals for the past 1-3 million years, and how the rest of humanity today is living as a result of industrial civilization, I don't think one can make any reasonable decisions for strategy in making the world significantly better.

After work Sunday night I managed to make it to a great party hosted by my friends Elizabeth, Marco (of the blog "Politics of the Cerebral", linked on the right), and Christina. The party was in celebration of Black History month, and featured a clothing drive to send to Haiti. As always happens when these particular friends are involved, the night was full of fantastic intellectual discussion, and I met a lot of great, intelligent people.

It was during one of these great intellectual discussions that the topic of similarities in foods between "former" colonies of different colonial powers. For instance, Senegalese food includes spring rolls similar in style to those in Vietnamese cuisine. Both were conquered at one time by the French, who apparently used Senegalese soldiers to enforce their rule in Vietnam. Likewise, the Filipino food that I cook includes foods with names identical to many Mexican dishes; both are former Spanish colonies.

The discussion moved on to the blending of cultures subjected to colonialism in this way, even when the colonial powers officially back off (and then only enforce economic control through neo-colonial techniques, which I'm sure I'll write about another time). Despite the horrors of colonialism and even continued economic exploitation, oppressed people live on and create/maintain cultures different from their past ones, but still entirely distinct.

This is how I see those of us who rewild forming our new cultures. In our efforts to create sustainable, sane ways of living, we're coming together and blending bits of our own histories and cultures with that of other peoples', all of us subjected to the colonialism of civilization. In a very real sense, we're building cultures that will (hopefully) survive after civilization is dead and gone, and in the mean time be a remedy to its disease. And maybe, just maybe, this will mean delicious delicious lumpia and adobo.

"All major decisions should be decided over a meal." - Marco Antonio McWilliams

This piece has been spread around a lot lately, and originates from Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen.

When a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

Do you believe that the United States government takes better care of corporations, or human beings?

I don’t know anyone who believes the United States government takes better care of human beings than it does corporations.

Do you believe that your vote counts as much as the votes of owners of transnational oil and gas corporations? Do you believe your vote counts as much as the money of owners of transnational oil and gas corporations?

The United States government is not a democracy. It is a plutocracy: government by, for, and of the wealthy.

It is a kleptocracy: government by, for, and of thieves. These thieves, these extremely wealthy thieves, these thieves who own corporations and the thieves who serve them in the U.S. government, steal communities, and they destroy the land. When they destroy the land, they steal not only the present but the future.

The purpose of a corporation is to amass wealth. That is its function. The function is not to protect communities, not to promote democracy, not to promote the health of the land. Corporations have no morals, and those who run them do not scruple at destroying life on this planet. Indeed, that is precisely what they are doing.

If aliens from outer space came to this planet and did the harm that oil and gas corporations are doing, we would stop them using any means necessary. If aliens from outer space were making it so there were carcinogens in every mother’s breast milk, we would stop them. If they were putting in oil and gas wells all over the planet, we would stop them. If they were changing the climate, we would stop them. If they were destroying landbase after landbase, we would stop them. And if they set up governments to “legalize” their sociopathological behavior, we would stop them.

When a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

When a government and corporations work together to destroy life on earth, it is the responsibility of the people to stop this using any means necessary.

In a sane culture, Tim DeChristopher would not be facing trial. He would be seen as the hero that he is. And the corporate executives who destroy landbases as surely as they destroy democracy would be on trial. And the federal land managers who put out illegal oil and gas leases, leases which violate law after law after law, would be on trial. And the police who arrest those who protest against these illegal gas leases would be on trial (do these individual police officers realize they are lending their talents to the destruction of the land and of democracy? They are to protect and to serve, but do they realize they are protecting and serving not the people, not their communities, but instead sociopathological corporations and the politicians who serve those corporations?).

Never forget that the atrocities committed by the Nazis were under their own laws legal. The Nazi government passed laws allowing them to legally commit atrocities. And they arrested those who opposed those laws. Never forget that the atrocities committed in apartheid South Africa were under their own laws legal. The South African government passed laws allowing them to legally commit atrocities. And they arrested those who opposed those laws. Never forget that the atrocities committed in Stalinist Soviet Union were legal. The Soviets put on show trials for many of those condemned under these laws. And the police arrested those who opposed these laws.

In all of these cases, including the current one, the question becomes, whose side are you on?

In the current case, Tim DeChristopher is on the side of communities, on the side of the land, on the side of democratic decision-making processes. He is standing against atrocities, and against a sociopathological kleptocracy.

Whose side are you on?

I’m on Tim DeChristopher’s side.

Never forget, when a government becomes destructive of life, community, and democracy, it is the responsibility of the people to alter or abolish it. If you do not, that government will destroy life, community, and democracy. As we see.

It is time we fulfilled our responsibility. The corporations would like us to believe that we can’t fight them. Timothy DeChristopher has single-handedly proved them wrong. Whether he is successful now depends on the broader environmental movement. Will we let Timothy’s act stand alone, as a symbolic protest that got a moment of press and then faded? Or will we join him in protecting the last scraps of wilderness, the final, fragile shreds of our planet? Will we let corporate power turn mountains into rubble and deserts into sludge? Or will we do what it takes to stop them? We have weapons, from protests and lawsuits to the time-honored American tradition of civil disobedience to the serious tactics that resistance movements have always used. Whatever weapons you choose, use them wisely and use them well, but use them.