Decisive Ecological Warfare

Deep Green Resistance is for those who can’t wait anymore.

If you care about life on this planet, and if you believe this culture won’t voluntarily cease to destroy it, how does that belief affect your methods of resistance?

Most people don’t know, because most people don’t talk about it. Some are too afraid of being called terrorists by those who are murdering the planet. Some believe using the same tactics that have not worked for the last forty years – whether it be protests or petitions, collaboration with corporations, or window breaking will magically start being effective. Some think a technological solution will appear to make it all go away. Some have pinned their hopes on lifestyle changes, and its corollary, personal change, as if individual behaviors can dismantle systemic problems. And finally, some just have hope – the groundless, amorphous belief that allows us to keep “living” these lives while all around us and inside us the destruction grows exponentially. The hard truth is none of this has or will work, ever. Yet these represent the majority of our efforts to save the Earth.

Those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped are going to judge us by the health of the landbase, by what we leave behind.

They’re not going to care how we lived our lives. They’re not going to care how hard we tried. They’re not going to care whether we were nice people.
They’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent.
They’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet.
They’re not going to care what sort of excuses we had to not act.
They’re not going to care how simply we lived.

They’re not going to care how pure we were in thought or action. They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see.

They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy.

They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water.

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Environmentalists fight as hard as we can to protect the places we love, using the tools of the system the best that we can. Yet we do not do the most important thing of all: we do not question the existence of this death culture. We do not question the existence of an economic and social system that is working the world to death, that is starving it to death, that is imprisoning it, that is torturing it. We never question the logic that leads inevitably to clearcuts, murdered oceans, loss of topsoil, dammed rivers, poisoned aquifers.

When most people ask, “How can we stop global warming?” they aren’t really asking what they pretend they’re asking. They are instead asking, “How can we stop global warming without stopping the burning of oil and gas, without stopping the industrial infrastructure, without stopping this omnicidal system?” The answer: you can’t.

Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are already gone. Where is your threshold for resistance? Is it 91 percent? 92? 93? 94? Would you wait till they had killed off 95 percent? 96? 97? 98? 99? How about 100 percent? Would you fight back then?

If salmon could take on human manifestation, what would they do?

What would we do if Nazis had invaded, and they were vacuuming the oceans, scalping native forests, damming every river, changing the climate, and putting carcinogens into every mother’s breast milk, and into the flesh of your children, your lover, your mother, into your own flesh? How much worse would the damage have to get? Would you resist? If there existed a resistance movement, would you join it?

A Strategy
The strategy of Deep Green Resistance starts by acknowledging the dire circumstances that industrial civilization has created for life on this planet. And that these circumstances should be met with solutions that match the scale of the problems.

This is a vast undertaking but it needs to be said: it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.

Deep Green Resistance is a plan of action for anyone determined to fight for this planet—and win.

How? Decisive Ecological Warfare Strategy

We will describe a possible future in which a hypothetical resistance movement embarks on a strategy of Decisive Ecological Warfare.

Decisive Ecological Warfare Strategy

Goals

The ultimate goal of this resistance movement is simply a living planet—a planet not just living, but in recovery, growing more alive and more diverse year after year. A planet on which humans live in equitable and sustainable communities without exploiting the planet or each other.
Given a state of emergency, this translates into a more immediate goal, which is at the heart of this movement’s grand strategy:

Goal 1: To disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization; to thereby remove the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the planet.
This movement’s second goal both depends on and assists the first:
Goal 2: To defend and rebuild just, sustainable, and autonomous human communities, and, as part of that, to assist in the recovery of the land.
To accomplish these goals requires several broad strategies involving large numbers of people in many different organizations, both aboveground and underground. The primary strategies needed in this theoretical scenario include the following:

Strategy A: Engage in direct militant actions against industrial infrastructure, especially energy infrastructure.

Strategy B: Aid and participate in ongoing social and ecological justice struggles; promote equality and undermine exploitation by those in power.

Strategy C: Defend the land and prevent the expansion of industrial logging, mining, construction, and so on, such that more intact land and species will remain when civilization does collapse.

Strategy D: Build and mobilize resistance organizations that will support the above activities, including decentralized training, recruitment, logistical support, and so on.

Strategy E: Rebuild a sustainable subsistence base for human societies (including perennial polycultures for food) and localized democratic communities that uphold human rights.

In this alternate future scenario, Decisive Ecological Warfare has four phases that progress from the near future through the fall of industrial civilization. The first phase is Networking & Mobilization. The second phase is Sabotage & Asymmetric Action. The third phase is Systems Disruption. And the fourth and final phase is Decisive Dismantling of Infrastructure.


Each phase has its own objectives, operational approaches, and organizational requirements. There’s no distinct dividing line between the phases, and different regions progress through the phases at different times. These phases emphasize the role of militant resistance networks. The aboveground building of alternatives and revitalization of human communities happen at the same time. But this does not require the same strategic rigor; rebuilding healthy human communities with a subsistence base must simply happen as fast as possible, everywhere, with timetables and methods suited to the region. This scenario’s militant resisters, on the other hand, need to share some grand strategy to succeed.

Phase I: Networking & Mobilization
Phase II: Sabotage & Asymmetric Action
Phase III: Systems Disruption
Phase IV: Decisive Dismantling of Infrastructure