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. 

Armed Permaculturists Explain Strategy of Seed Bomb Explosives

from Earth First Newswire

This beautiful short documentary sheds some light on a little-known international perma-eco-terra-ist group calling itself SLF-NAG (Seed Liberation Frontier-North Aegean Guerrillas). The mysterious organization has gone public to explain the motives behind their seed-bombing campaign:

“Seed control is an issue of growing importance not only for the consumers, but also for the producers. The current state of affairs endangers not only the public health but also the freedom of the people. Hence, there is an urgent need for innovative and radical means of reaction.

“In our days it is the mass media which shapes the reality. Documentaries, on the other hand, often act as key instruments for deconstructing the ‘”reality” and unveil the truth behind. Therefore, documentaries should also be used to inform the public, challenge well-established views of reality and, subsequently, to turn the propaganda upside down.”

Wait a minute… Do those accents sound a little fishy to anyone else?

Protesters Blockade Monsanto Seed Facility in California

By Lisa Baertlein and Carey Gillam, Reuters

Opponents of genetically engineered foods blocked shipments and deliveries yesterday at Monsanto Co’s vegetable seed company that developed a new genetically modified sweet corn that will hit stores this fall.

The protesters, who want to remove all so-called genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from the food supply, say their action is a preview of about five dozen other events planned for countries around the world next week.

They also hope to drum up support for a California ballot measure that would require food sellers to label a broad range of products, including soup, soy milk, breakfast cereals and chips, that contain GMOs.

Native American Health Traumas Addressed

cross-posted from Indian Country

By Devon G. Peña, Ph.D.

European colonizers destroyed bison populations in North America, creating negative health implications for native peoples.

One of the consequences of the conquest and settlement of North and South America by Europeans was the displacement and destruction of native biological and cultural diversity. The environmental historian Alfred Crosby has called the European invasion of the Americas [sic] a biological conquest and a form of “ecological imperialism.”

No space or native habitat touched by colonialism was spared the effects of this bio-invasion. Indigenous plants and animals were diminished by the violence and displacement associated with the arrival of European colonizers and their biotic baggage. Cattle displaced bison; sheep replaced native deer; wheat displaced maize and amaranth.

Europeans and others benefited from the arrival of the crops of Native America including amaranth, agave, avocado, bean, bell pepper, cashew, cassava, chili, cocoa (for chocolate) corn, guava, peanut, potato, pumpkin, tomato, vanilla, wild rice, and many more.

A demographic catastrophe resulted and native populations declined by 70 to 98 percent. This was caused by genocide through war, enslavement and forced labor, introduced disease (smallpox, measles), and widespread hunger and malnutrition. Many people were worked or starved to death in mines, plantations, and sweatshops.

Historical trauma and native foods

Recently, we have become more aware of the peculiar form of death facing Native peoples as a result of processes that Russel L. Barsch calls ecocide, or death caused by destruction of indigenous ecosystems including the agricultural and food systems of entire cultures and civilizations.

Research demonstrates that access to traditional foods—the nutritional substances a given people co-evolve with over generations of living and adapting to place—is essential to our health. Thus, eating poorly is not a case of persons making “poor personal choices” or engaging in “bad individual behaviors;” it is a matter of systematic discrimination and structural violence when people are denied access to the resources they need to maintain their own indigenous food traditions, cuisines, and diets.

Green light for GMOs to be planted in national wildlife refuges

Cross-posted from NaturalNews.com:

A battle is raging over whether or not it should be legal to plant genetically-modified (GM) crops in US wildlife refuges. A little over a month after various conservation and food safety groups achieved a unified legal victory that banned all future plantings of GMOs in refuges, the Obama administration announced its full-fledged support for GMOs in refuges. And the administration is now working towards ramrodding through a new plan that would exempt the issue of GMO plantings in refuges from having to face any further legal challenges that oppose them.

According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a non-profit alliance of local, state, and federal resource professionals, the Obama administration is on a quest, of sorts, to create justification for GM plantings in the refuges. Only crops deemed “essential” to refuge operations are permitted for planting, so the administration will have to craft some pretty manipulative rhetoric in order to make its proposal anything other than a pitifully laughable insult to both science and common sense.

“These (Obama administration) plans are based on the curious notion that wildlife benefit from having the small slivers of habitat set aside for them covered by genetically engineered soybeans,” said Jeff Ruch, PEER’s Executive Director. “To boost US exports, the Obama administration is forcing wildlife refuges into political prostitution.”

Read full article: http://www.naturalnews.com/032726_GMOs_national_wildlife_refuge.html#ixzz1PjvXd7HL

Sources for this story include: http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.ph…