Deep Green Resistance

Last updated
Deep Green Resistance
Founded2011
Founder Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, Aric McBay
Focus Environmental justice, Social justice
Location
  • USA
Method Direct action, education
Website deepgreenresistance.org

Deep Green Resistance (DGR) is a radical environmental movement that perceives the existence of industrial civilization itself as the greatest threat to the natural environment, and calls for its dismantlement and a return to a pre-agricultural level of technology. Although DGR operates as an aboveground group, it calls on others to use underground and violent tactics such as attacks on infrastructure or assassination. A repeated claim in DGR literature is that acts of sabotage could cause a cascading effect and lead to the end of civilization. DGR and far-right ecofascists use similar accelerationist and anti-majoritarian tactics, seeking systemic collapse.

Contents

DGR is widely denounced by other radical environmentalists, even those who support sabotage, because of "the group’s vanguardism, its disregard for billions of already-precarious human lives dependent on agriculture, its self-defeating attacks on anarchism and veganism, and the virulent transphobia of the group’s leaders, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen". [1] Some Native American [2] and other environmental groups have refused to work with DGR because of its controversial stance on transgender issues.

Beliefs

In the 2011 book Deep Green Resistance, the authors Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay state that civilization, particularly industrial civilization, is fundamentally unsustainable and must be actively and urgently dismantled in order to secure a future for all species on the planet. [3]

DGR calls for the dismantling of industrial civilization, [4] [5] and the return to a pre-agricultural lifestyle. [4] :1 [5] :1

Tactics

DGR operates as an aboveground movement [6] and requires members to take a nonviolence pledge as of 2019, [7] calling on others to use underground and violent tactics such as attacks on infrastructure or assassination. [6] DGR is one of very few environmental groups to endorse lethal violence as sometimes justified. [8] A repeated claim in DGR literature is that acts of sabotage could cause a cascading effect and lead to the end of civilization. [6] Because the organization advocates sabotage and violence, which it views as necessary tactics to achieve its goal of dismantling industrialized society and capitalism, it can be classified as an apocalyptic or millenarian movement. [9] DGR and far-right ecofascist groups such as The Green Brigade share similar tactics and an anti-majoritarian and vanguardist approach to activism, and both are accelerationist, seeking systemic collapse. [10]

In 2017, DGR filed a lawsuit against the state of Colorado arguing that the Colorado River should be recognized as a legal person. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2019. [11] [12]

An article in Journal of Strategic Security describes the group as a "worrying bioterrorism threat", citing its strategy and propensity towards violence. [13] Beginning in 2014, the FBI investigated Deep Green Resistance. [7] [14]

Criticism

Anarcho-primitivists John Zerzan, Kevin Tucker and others criticize DGR's promotion of hierarchy in organizing an underground resistance, the code of conduct, the historical understanding of revolution and radical history, and the cult of personality around Jensen and Keith. [15] [16] [17] [18] Michelle Renée Matisons and Alexander Reid Ross of the Institute for Anarchist Studies have accused DGR of "emulating right-wing militia rhetoric, with the accompanying hierarchical vanguardism, personality cultism, and reactionary moralism." [19]

How to Blow Up a Pipeline author Andreas Malm—who argues that some forms of infrastructural sabotage are justified to advance the environmental movement—condemned DGR, arguing its proposals, if implemented, would spell disaster for the vast majority of people in the world. [20] [21]

Anti-trans views

DGR describes itself as a radical feminist organization, and has been described by critics as transphobic and TERF. [22] [23] [24] The organisation has described hormone therapy for transgender youth as eugenics and excludes transgender women from women's spaces, [25] while Keith has compared gender transitioning to mutilation. [26] In 2019, Jensen, Keith, as well as DGR activist Max Wilbert published an article in Feminist Current saying "Hands up everyone who predicted that when Big Brother arrived, he’d be wearing a dress, hauling anyone who refuses to wax his ladyballs before a human rights tribunal, and bellowing ‘It’s Ma’am!’" [25] Keith linked the group's views on transgender issues to the environment, claiming that trans women "want to violate the basic boundaries of women" and comparing that to "violating the boundaries of forests and rivers and prairies". [2] During the fight against the Thacker Pass lithium mine, some members of DGR formed another group called Protect Thacker Pass without disclosing their affiliation with DGR. They worked with local Native American group People of Red Mountain, which broke off the affiliation saying that DGR members had not been transparent about their anti-trans views. [2]

In 2012, founder McBay left the group, saying that it promoted transphobia. [9] Earth First! Journal repudiated DGR in 2013 and said that it would "no longer print or in any way promote DGR material" because of its leaders' anti-transgender stances. [27] In 2022, during the resistance to the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, Indigenous group People of Red Mountain broke ties with attorney and DGR member Will Falk, citing transphobia as the reason. [28] Other environmental groups involved in opposing the Thacker Pass project have distanced themselves from DGR. [29] The organization has also faced criticism for its association with Jennifer Bilek, an investigative journalist, who has, with antisemitic connotations, argued that transgender rights are a transhumanist conspiracy. [25] [30] [31]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transphobia</span> Anti-transgender prejudice

Transphobia consists of negative attitudes, feelings, or actions towards transgender people or transness in general. Transphobia can include fear, aversion, hatred, violence or anger towards people who do not conform to social gender roles. Transphobia is a type of prejudice and discrimination, similar to racism, sexism, or ableism, and it is closely associated with homophobia. People of color who are transgender experience discrimination above and beyond that which can be explained as a simple combination of transphobia and racism.

Radical environmentalism is a grass-roots branch of the larger environmental movement that emerged from an ecocentrism-based frustration with the co-option of mainstream environmentalism.

Anarcho-primitivism, also known as anti-civilization anarchism, is an anarchist critique of civilization that advocates a return to non-civilized ways of life through deindustrialization, abolition of the division of labor or specialization, abandonment of large-scale organization and all technology other than prehistoric technology and the dissolution of agriculture. Anarcho-primitivists critique the origins and alleged progress of the Industrial Revolution and industrial society. Most Anarcho-primitivists advocate for a tribal-like way of life while some see an even simpler lifestyle as beneficial. According to anarcho-primitivists, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence during the Neolithic Revolution gave rise to coercion, social alienation, and social stratification.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Earth First!</span> Environmental advocacy group

Earth First! is a radical environmental advocacy group that originated in the Southwestern United States. It was founded in 1980 by Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle, Howie Wolke, Bart Koehler, and Ron Kezar. Today there are Earth First groups around the world including ones in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Derrick Jensen</span> American ecophilosopher

Derrick Jensen is an American ecophilosopher, writer, author, teacher and environmentalist in the anarcho-primitivist tradition, though he rejects the label "anarchist". Utne Reader named Jensen among "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World" in 2008, and Democracy Now! says that he "has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecology movement".

Eco-terrorism is an act of violence which is committed in support of environmental causes, against people or property.

Ecotage is sabotage carried out for environmental reasons.

William David Foreman was an American advocate for the conservation of wild lands and wildlife. He was a co-founder of three organizations: Earth First!, the Wildlands Project, and the Rewilding Institute. A prominent member of the radical environmentalism movement beginning in the 1980s, his advocacy and actions shifted in the early 1990s into collaborations with professionals in the field of conservation biology.

Ecofascism is a term used to describe individuals and groups which combine environmentalism with fascism.

William Courtney Rodgers, also known as Bill Rodgers and Avalon, was an environmental activist, animal rights activist and a co-proprietor of the Catalyst Infoshop in Prescott, Arizona, US. He was one of six environmental activists arrested December 7, 2005 as part of the FBI's Operation Backfire. His charge was one count of arson for a June 1998 fire set by the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) at the National Wildlife Research Center in Olympia, Washington. He was found dead in his jail cell on December 21, 2005. According to police, Rodgers committed suicide using a plastic bag.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audre Lorde Project</span> LGBT community and activism organization

The Audre Lorde Project is a Brooklyn, New York–based organization for LGBT people of color. The organization concentrates on community organizing and radical nonviolent activism around progressive issues within New York City, especially relating to LGBT communities, AIDS and HIV activism, pro-immigrant activism, prison reform and organizing among youth of color. It is named for the lesbian-feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde and was founded in 1994.

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF), also known as "Elves" or "The Elves", is the collective name for autonomous individuals or covert cells who, according to the ELF Press Office, use "economic sabotage and guerrilla warfare to stop the exploitation and destruction of the environment".

Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy that promotes the inherent worth of all living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, and argues that modern human societies should be restructured in accordance with such ideas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lierre Keith</span> American feminist and environmentalist activist

Lierre Keith is an American writer, radical feminist, food activist, and radical environmentalist.

Feminist views on transgender topics vary widely.

The Thacker Pass lithium mine is a lithium clay mining development project in Humboldt County, Nevada, which is the largest known lithium deposit in the US and one of the largest in the world. There has been significant exploration of Thacker Pass since 2007. The Bureau of Land Management issued a Record of Decision approving development of the mine in January 2021. Construction began in March 2023 after an emergency appeal was denied by the court. The project site would cover 18,000 acres (7,300 ha), with less than 6,000 acres (2,400 ha) of that being mined, on a site 21 miles (34 km) west-northwest of Orovada, Nevada within the McDermitt Caldera. The mine is a project of Lithium Nevada, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lithium Americas Corp. In late January 2023, car giant General Motors announced it would invest $650M in the mine project, giving GM exclusive access to the first phase of production. In February 2023, when the initial $320 million investment was completed, GM became Lithium Americas largest shareholder and offtake partner. At full capacity the mine would produce 66,000 tons annually, equivalent to 25% of the current (2021) demand for lithium globally, which is expected to triple over the next five years. Development of the mine is driven by increasing demand for lithium used in electric vehicle batteries and grid storage of intermittently generated electricity from sources such as solar power or wind power.

Accelerationism is a range of revolutionary and reactionary ideas in left-wing and right-wing ideologies that call for the drastic intensification of capitalist growth, technological change, infrastructure sabotage and other processes of social change to destabilize existing systems and create radical social transformations, otherwise referred to as "acceleration". It has been regarded as an ideological spectrum divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, both of which support the indefinite intensification of capitalism and its structures as well as the conditions for a technological singularity, a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TERF (acronym)</span> Acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transphobia in the United States</span> Prejudice against Americans of other gender identity than assigned at birth

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Transphobia in Norway has evolved over time. Since the late 20th century and into the early 21st century, acceptance of transgender people has greatly increased. Norway has made significant progress in transgender rights, with strong support from political parties ranging from the most left-wing to the Conservative Party. In the 2020s, Norway has seen an increase in the anti-gender movement, from both gender critical radical feminist groups and the far right. Recently, hate crimes against transgender people have increased, and several anti-trans groups campaign against transgender people. The 2024 Extremism Commission's report cited sources that pointed to "the connections between radical feminism and Christian conservatism" in relation to anti-trans activism, noting that "these are groups and individuals who use violent and dehumanizing language and are also threatening and extremely active."

References

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  2. 1 2 3 Scheyder 2024, p. 139.
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Further reading