The Ecology of a Police State

Or, why hating cops may be the most environmentally sustainable decision you can make in your life

by Panagioti / Earth First! Newswire

The police state in effect at 2013 RNC in Tampa.

Imagine being an environmental activist in a world where police can get away with killing young people for vandalizing a fast food joint; where a government’s local law enforcers are collaborating with giant energy corporations to stifle opposition; where a sheriff demands funding for a program urging neighbors to snitch on anyone who says they hate said government.

Sadly it doesn’t take much imagination, does it? In case you weren’t inspired to click the embedded links above, they reference recent stories of these things occurring in the US.

In light of this reality, it’s crystal clear that global ecology will never be stabilized as long as the police have anything to do with it.

That’s right. Stopping the tar sands’ atmospheric climate bomb, keeping GMOs out of our food, and defending wolves’ ability to restore biodiversity depends on getting rid of the fuzz. Perhaps this is the beginning of a new movement initiative that aims to reduce the CO2 parts per million (ppm) by simultaneously slashing the cpms (cops per million). Cops are not only the industrial empire’s first line of defense against, well, us. They are also massive usurpers of the public financial resources that might otherwise be put towards restoring the Earth.

Where the Earth First! movement was once known for its epic wilderness corridor proposals in the ‘80s which became a basic foundation for the future of conservation biology, I think this plan too will shape the face of the ecology to come. 

Green Scare Lite

When the Feds Come Knocking on the Climate Movement’s Doors

by Scott Parkin / Counterpunch

In 2003, my friends and I organized a forest defense campaign against a financial holding company called Maxxam We called the campaign Dirty South Earth First! (DSEF!). Maxxam were the owners of Pacific Lumber, a California based company that was rapidly clear-cutting Northern California’s redwoods for big profit. Maxxam had also hired private security goons that violently extracted tree-sitters non-violently defending those forests. In response, we aggressively targeted not just Maxxam, but individual executives in both their Houston offices and lavish homes. We quickly got the attention of Houston police, the company’s private security team and the federal government.

Years later, through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (both mine and friends), I found out that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had tracked my air travel, watched my home, listed me as an associate of a “criminal organization,” paid at least one fellow Houston activist to inform on us and most likely reported me to the Australian government while I traveled there resulting in my detention and forced removal from that country as a “national security threat.” Others in DSEF! had similar or worse experiences.

Hey Earth First!, Time to Get Busy!

More Full Time Direct Action campaigns about to kick off this Summer…

from Earth First! Newswire

At the 2012 Earth First! Rendezvous, during the 4th in a series of workshops intending to “Give EF! a Kick in the Ass,” facilitators proposed what was initially called the “FTDA Pledge” [FTDA = Full Time Direct Action]. The result was a list of people who expressed the desire to be contacted when crucial campaigns were in need of support at critical times.

The workshop discussed what sort of criteria would be used in making these “call-outs” for support.

What was decided together was that they should be: (1) Strategic and well thought-out campaigns, (2) Community-led with strong local organizing looking for support, (3) Against mega-infrastructure

With goals being strong participation in actions that can strengthen the EF! network; renew the culture and spirit of ecological resistance; and radicalize other movements, groups and individuals.

According to EF!ers on the ground last year in East Texas, the Tar Sands Blockades fit very squarely in these criteria, so we called for support from EF! activists around the US, and they came.

There has since been a suggestion to call the FTDA pledge “the Crunch” (a nod to the Movement for a New Society), highlighting the limited window of space that is often present for a rapid escalation of direct action tactics and strategy. 

The following text is modified from an email sent out to EF! activists nationwide regarding organizing efforts which have been discussed and found to also fit the above criteria. If you can plug in to these campaigns over the next few weeks with skills, supplies, time, energy, funds, etc, it could be pivotal moments for the growth of the movement.

Check out the details below. Send it out over local EF! lists. Hope to see you out there. 

No Compromise: A Compilation in Defense of the Wild

Earth First! Has Released a Punk Compilation Benefit Album

Celebrating 34 years in print and direct action, the Earth First! Journal is the voice of the radical direct action environmental movement. Punk is an artistic movement founded in the same era on the principles of resistance and, as a culture, continues to boldly challenge a destructive system. The EF!J collective presents this compilation of punk bands that share a no-compromise attitude towards defense of the living world, in order to draw these two powerful forms of communication together. All profits from the  album’s sales go to Earth First! Media projects, organizing expenses, and legal funds.

The compilation comes with a book featuring exclusive interviews between band members, heads of punk labels like Will Butler from To Live a Lie, and a former Earth First! Journal co-editor and contributor, MJ. This album was released through All We Know Records, an independent DIY label out of Miami, FL.

This limited-edition press of only 1,000 copies are each hand-numbered, and they’re going fast!

Track Listing

1. Masakari – XVI. Rapid Dominance
2. Autarkeia – Saving Seeds
3. Baker Acted – Hours That Never Add Up to Comfort
4. Oiltanker – Ends Meet
5. Recreant – Burn
6. Gattaca – Sešli Jsme z Cesty
7. ACXDC – Crux
8. Autarch – Shepherds
9. Landbridge – Manufacturing Greed
10. Closet Burner – Apathy
11. Torch Runner – Feeding
12. Deathrats – Crutch
13. Breag Naofa – II.
14. Black Hole of Calcutta – Cirrhosis
15. Cloud Rat – 6 Mile
16. Iskra – Machine Infernale
17. Sin Orden – Tierra Indigena
18. Oi Polloi – Doigh Eile
19. Adelit@s – Contra el Olvido
20. Rat Storm – Refuse to Be Silenced
21. Beartrap – Human Factory Farm
22. Cizaña – Bosque
23. Agathocles – It Is What It Is
24. Shadow Of The Destroyer-Dark Days
25. Appalachian Terror Unit – We Will Continue to Break the Law and Destroy Property Until We Win

To Order
http://earthfirstjournal.org/store
http://allweknowrecs.blogspot.com
Earth First! Journal
PO Box 964, Lake Worth, FL 33460

For more information, contact
Ashley: allweknowrecs@gmail.com
Molly Jane: mollyjane@earthfirstjournal.org

 

Early reviews and sample interviews after the jump…

Feds Pressure Web Firms for Encryption Keys

by Declan McCullagh / Cnet

The U.S. government has attempted to obtain the master encryption keys that Internet companies use to shield millions of users’ private Web communications from eavesdropping.

These demands for master encryption keys, which have not been disclosed previously, represent a technological escalation in the clandestine methods that the FBI and the National Security Agency employ when conducting electronic surveillance against Internet users.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Planet

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Planet

by Eric Moll / Policymic

Do you agonize over the little venial eco-sins of everyday life? Every gallon of gas, every extra minute of a hot shower, each flush?

I was the same way. Yet somehow, despite constantly policing myself, I was never satisfied. Instead of feeling like I was doing anything to stop climate change, I just felt tired and hopeless.

Working at a company that sold wind energy credits didn’t help either. Was I fighting climate change or just helping my bosses get rich as middlemen in the carbon-offset market? My next job, struggling under the bureaucracy of the National Park Service to run a climate change education program, wasn’t much better.

My problem was that I had internalized my assigned identity as an isolated consumer. We are conditioned to think that our most meaningful interaction with the world is through the work we’re paid for and how we spend our wages. In actuality, we are most powerful not as individuals, but through our ability to organize and work together.

Earth First!…even before Snowden

by Ishan Raval / TechnicianOnline

The Edward Snowden affair has become the event of our moment in history. I do not remember living through a single political saga that was so much of a spectacle — in terms of diplomatic sparring and the comedy of errors from governments, publics and media in the “Where is he?” wild goose chase — that it could well have come out of a Hollywood movie. I’ve seen people from normally politically apathetic youth in India to ordinary people in Austria talking about Snowden, and I, too, have contributed to this hullabaloo.

Some have pointed out that with the focus on Snowden, his asylum-seeking from the shadows, the U.S.’s search and the waltz of the international community around all of this, nothing substantial will happen in regard to the actual information he brought us about the National Security Agency and the PRISM surveillance program. That is a valid concern.

Drone Demonology: Flying Robots, Cop Mustaches & Resistance in the End Times

by Russ McSpadden / Earth First! News

The first time I ever saw a drone I was sweating my ass off, hiking jugs of water through a cactus forest to drop in remote canyons for famished migrants making the deadly trek through the Sonoran desert. U.S. Customs and Border Protection surveillance drones patrol the skies along the border with Mexico on the daily. Like any good activist I gave the drone the bird and then quickly ducked beneath a cholla, which I don’t advise doing, as it is a cactus with a reputation.

Two 10,000-pound Predator-B border patrol drones. These are the fellas that patrol the borderlands, from Yuma, Ariz., to Brownsville, Tex.

Since his inauguration, noble peace prize winning president Barack Obama has increased the U.S. military’s use of drones and rewritten the rules of engagement in over a dozen countries around the world. Hundreds of civilians, including swaths of children and several dozen Al Qaeda operatives have been eviscerated by remote. Even four U.S. citizens have been assassinated by drones, violating due process and habeas corpus protections in the U.S. constitution. Reports put the ratio of civilians to “suspected terrorists” killed by drone strikes at about 50 to 1, meaning roughly 98% of the deaths are “collateral damage.”    

The Houses Built on China’s ‘Poisoned’ Land

Homes are being built on contaminated land in Chinese cities – and the residents of these developments have no idea

by Gao Shengke and Wang Kai / The Guardian

Photograph: Caijing

Gao Shengke and Wang Kai have won the prize for Best Investigation at ChinaDialogue’s and The Guardian’s China Environmental Press Awards – 2013 for their investigation into contaminated earth in Chinese cities. Here is the first of their three-part series of reports.

The excavators are rumbling and dust swirls all about at the second phase of the Kangquan New City construction project in Guanzhuang village, Chaoyang District, outside Beijing’s east fifth ring road.

A 20-metre deep pit has been dug on the site. A foul stench rises from the pile of earth that has been removed. Until now, few people knew about the secret that was buried here.

Infographic: 1950s Futurists Take On 21st Century Problems

by Eric Rhey / Qualcomm Spark

Air pollution, food shortages, disease, dependence on fossil fuel—these are all big issues. And thanks to the rapid technological innovation of the 1950s, many thinkers had big ideas on how to solve these problems. The concepts they came up with ran the gamut from visionary to absurd. Here’s a whimsical look at some of the more fanciful ideas ’50 futurists devised to solve humans’ biggest challenges.