Mom’s Sure Fire Recipes for Sabotage: A One Act Play

Daughter: Hey mom, what can I do now to insure that I can get into venture capitalism when I grow up?

Mom: Honey, why would you want to do something that will only alienate the human spirit and lead to the destruction of all things wild? Its evil, and well, its also down right boring. Maybe you should think about becoming an insurgent.

Daughter: Ok mom, well how can I stop the earth brutalizing industrial machine when I grow up then?

Mom: Well, you can download Eco-defense: a Field Guide to Monkeywrenching as well as the Black Cat Sabotage Book. Its probably best if you download them from a public computer not monitored by cameras. There’s lots of neat stuff there. Listen, you didn’t hear it from me but there are some pretty good recipes for stopping this entire fucking genocidal and ecocidal system before it kills us all. 

But before that its really important that you take into consideration that you live in a nation that hosts the highest rate of incarceration and a high level of techo-surveillance 1984-type-shit. You should download Security Culture: a handbook for activists. It will help keep you safer in the fight ahead.

Daughter: Great, when I grow up I’m going to help bring down the prison system, border walls and smash the machinery used to destroy the wild. You’re the best mom!

 

143 arrested at August 29 tar sands protest in DC

Reposted from Indy Media DC

click here to view the video

August 29th was the 6th anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and barely a day after the departure of Hurricane Irene from DC. Delayed by the storm and hearing nature’s message about climate change from Irene, 143 people were arrested in front of the White House in the opener to the second week of tar sands protests.
This was the largest tar sands protest to date in the two-week series of protests running from August 20 until September 3ed. It was the first of these to involve triple-digit mass arrest totals-and over double the size of most of last week’s protests.

The Saturday protest as the storm approached was changed to a rally no including civil disobediance, and the Sunday protest had to be cancelled. On Monday, however, the tar sands pipeline opponents delivered on their promise of a much larger protest than any yet seen in front of the White House on this issue.

The Keystone XL Pipeline would connect the tar sands oil mining operations in Canada to refineries in Texas. A pipeline to the Canadian coast has been blocked, preventing exports to places like China, but some of the oil gets to the US by existing smaller pipelines. The much larger and dedicated Keystone XL pipeline would create the large export market the destructive tar sands mining project has so far lacked, bringing about a massive expansion of the mining.

The State Department as approved the environmental impact statement of this pipeline but still has to decide if it is in the “national interest.” A decision on that question is expected by December. Since tar sands oil can be anywhere(depending on process and surface vs deep) from 17% to several times as carbon intensive as normal oil, this is in truth a decision about whether or not global climate catastrophe is in the national interest!

Hey Obama-Irene has spoken, did you get her message?

Wage Slave Dilemma

Check out more of Stephanie McMillan’s Code Green comics here.

The following text was posted on McMillan’s site accompanying the Wage Slave Dilemma comic: “The capitalist system sets up a false jobs vs. environment conflict, that serves the system on both sides. If people’s land wasn’t stolen and destroyed, they wouldn’t be able to be forced into a position of dependency and into the labor force in the first place.

Here’s an interesting article by a labor leader about why he opposes the Tar Sands pipeline. Though he’s very much part of the establishment unions, he seems to be honestly grappling with the false conflict between labor and the environment that has been set up by the ruling class. I don’t see things the same way he does (like his advocacy of “green jobs” within a continued framework of capitalism, or participating in a protest of orchestrated arrests that appeals to Obama), but he makes some good points and, I think, eloquently expresses the real anguish of the worker trapped in a bind—of balancing the immediate need to feed one’s family while realizing that the only options we’re offered for doing so are destroying their future.”

Can Deep Green Resistance bridge the gap between two political prisoners in Utah?

by Panagioti, co-editor of the Earth First! Journal

Tim DeChristopher, Utah's "Bidder 70"

The eco-resistance movement is in the midst of a growth spurt. Cases like that of Tim DeChristopher, known as Utah’s Bidder 70, represent a significant change in the battlefield between ecology and industrialism; they whisper to the potential of a broad, massive civil disobedience movement. One that might embrace tactics which have thus far been relegated to the fringes of environmentalism in the US, with the exception of a few instances, like the Redwood campaign in northern California in the 90s, or perhaps the anti-nuke fights of the 70s and 80s.

DeChristopher refused to apologize and is now serving a 2 year sentence for his actions. He called for more to join his style of defiance.

Another 26 people were arrested at the courthouse following his sentencing, and since that time another couple hundred have been arrested at the White House, and elsewhere, during civil disobedience actions to display their opposition to tar sands infrastructure.

Walter Bond, awaiting sentencing in Utah

Sharing the county corrections facility in Utah is another political prisoner. Or a prisoner of war, as Walter Bond prefers to be known. Before Bond was arrested, he was known as “Lonewolf.” He was arrested for sabotage against directed against animal abuse, and in his view, against the entire industrial society that is dependent on exploitative industries. See our earlier post on Bond, “Green is the New Rage”

Bond is less likely to attract as broad of a crowd at his sentencing on October 13 (although people are mobilizing to support him.) But his case represents another potential component of the eco-resistance movement’s growth spurt. And while neither of these prisoners’ support groups may express overt affinity for each other, there is a new network forming who seem to be making a case that these two prisoners could have a lot more in common than one might think.

No, we’re not talking about Earth First! (we said new network, EF! is over 30 now… that’s no spring chicken!) We’re talking about Deep Green Resistance (DGR). The recently established organizing effort based on the recent book of the same name, spawning from Derrick Jensen’s Endgame books. DGR embraces an explicit strategy of building mass aboveground support for an underground movement that can dismantle industrial infrastructure. Similar perhaps to the support role that Quakers played in aboveground organizing which complimented the militant underground abolitionist efforts of Harriet Tubman or John Brown and company.

While the actions that Walter Bond was charged for may not represent the ideal strategy of dismantling infrastructure as DGR favors, his incarceration does pose the question of how to relate between the aboveground and underground eco-resistance movements.

How the official DGR representatives handle this issue has yet to be seen. As for the Earth First! Journal, we will continue supporting both of these prisoners.

Addresses and updates on their cases can be found at their support websites: Support Walter.org    Bidder70.org  (as of this post, Tim is in transit to a federal facility)

Alright You Dirty So-and-Sos, the Online Funding Drive Continues

Ah, the image of this action never gets old.

Earlier in the week a post appeared on the Earth First! Newswire announcing the start of our one month online funding drive.  The Earth First! Journal collective, that group of lovable editorial anarchists, is in need of funds to keep the Earth First! Journal and the Earth First! Newswire alive. Please click here to donate to our funding drive.

After three days we have received one donation of 10 bucks (thanks ABug).

We would love to believe that our friends connected to us through the online world (excluding the FBI guy monitoring our Facebook) appreciate our work enough to throw us a buck or ten. Thats all it takes. We can make a dollar stretch. Of course, if you got it, we’ll take a hundred!

Three Heavy Machines torched at Ukraine Construction Site

reported by activists in Ukraine (photo from 057.ua):

“In the night of August 28th, 3 wheeled loaders were torched in Gorky Park (Kharkov, Ukraine).

According to the chief engineer of Gorky Park, Oleg Grinenko, the loaders had just started their work in the park. The equipment belonged to a subcontractor whose task was to provide for new road infrastructure. One of the destroyed loader’s market price was estimated as $60,000.

Since the beginning of construction on May 2011 , the construction site has seen numerous ecotage actions, expropriations of construction equipment and mass protests.”

Midwest Rising Protest Blocks Traffic to Protest Coal

Earlier this month, participants in the Midwest Rising conference in St. Luis followed up their gathering with a four day tour of direct action and civil disobedience, culminating in a 200-person protest outside of Peabody Coal’s headquarters that blocked traffic. Among other protest sites were Monsanto, Bank of America, Verizon and the school board.

The following is an excerpt from the report back, crossposted from Counterpunch.org

“The fourth action took place at Arch Coal, one of the largest coal companies in the country. Coal mining, processing and burning are the largest sources of CO₂, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for global climate change.

The major direct action of the convergence took place on Monday afternoon. It began with a march from a park to an intersection in downtown St. Louis that has Bank of America and Peabody Coal’s headquarters located on opposite sides of the street. When the 200 convergence participants reached the intersection, 14 people sat down, linked arms and blocked traffic. One by one the police carried them off to jail as the crowd chanted “Shame! Shame!”

A small group of youths unveiled an ingenious cardboard model of a coal plant that they turned inside out to form a school to demonstrate that coal companies and other corporations are receiving tax breaks with money that could be used for public schools.

The convergence participants met for the last time at a Monday afternoon debriefing. Everyone was tired but stimulated as they left for home to share with their fellow activists the exciting story of what they learned and achieved at the Midwest Rising Convergence.”

Write a letter to Willow Cordes-Eklund in jail for defending Maine’s mountains

Send Willow a letter in jail today. She received a 10-day sentence for blocking construction of TransCanada’s industrial wind turbines in endangered lynx habitat on the Boundary Mountains, starting August 25, so notes mailed in the next 24 hours from the US should reach her before she gets out.

Her address at the Somerset County jail is: Willow Cordes-Eklund, 131 East Madison Road, Madison, ME, 04950

2012 Presidential hopeful says she’d drill for oil and gas in the Everglades

Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, who has argued for the dissolution of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, said this weekend that she is open to oil and  gas drilling in the Everglades.

Bachmann commented that all options, and ecosystems, should be made available to insure the United States can meet its energy needs.

According to a quote in a recent AP article Bachmann said “The United States needs to be less dependent on foreign sources of energy and more dependent upon American resourcefulness. Whether that is in the Everglades, or whether that is in the eastern Gulf region, or whether that’s in North Dakota, we need to go where the energy is…”

Trophy Hunters, Cattle Industry and the State of Alaska Appeal Listing the Polar Bear as Threatened

By the Earth First! Journal Collective

On August 25, dozens of intervenors, from the cattle industry to trophy hunters, filed three notices appealing a US district judge’s decision in favor of the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2008 listing of polar bears as ‘threatened species.’ They claim that the polar bear population has doubled since the 1960s and that the listing status is based on the theoretical climate science.

On August 27, the State of Alaska joined the intervenors and filed a fourth notice of appeal.  The administration of Alaska governor Sean Parnell claims that polar bears survived past periods of global warming and that they will do so again. The adminsistration has not come out directly denying climate change but argues that the Endangered Species Act is being inappropriatly used for a ‘speculative’ situation without hard data showing signs of population decline.

Alaska officials say they are concerned that the listing will hinder oil and gas developement in the Arctic.

Several environmental organizations have sued in District Court because they believe the status of ‘threatened’ is not strong enough to provide the protections necissary to preserve polar bear habitat.