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Title: Beyond Civil Disobedience Author: Snap Dragon Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: civil disobedience, deep ecology, Earth First!, green, reformism, violence Source: Retrieved on 11 April 2010 from http://www.angelfire.com/journal2/feraltowardswildness/beyond.html Notes: from Earth First! Journal March-April, 1998
If someone broke into your home, tried to kill your family and steal
everything you had, what would you do? A: Make a banner and call the
media. B: Call a lawyer and file for a restraining order. C: Chain
yourself to the front door. Such reactions seem ridiculous because they
would be completely ineffective. However, this is exactly how we respond
to the homicidal mania of industrial society, and it is no less
inappropriate. The most sensible response is to fight like hell. Passive
resistance, civil disobedience and related strategies don’t work, not as
a long-term strategy for transforming society nor as short-term stopgap
measures.
Our problem is larger than endangered species or plunder of public
lands. Our solution will not be found in a piece of legislation or a
better management plan. Industrial collapses, an end to corporate
capitalism and a complete transformation in the way our culture relates
to the environment are necessary to stop this assault on the planet. On
this, most agree. Our movement, however, has become dominated by the
rhetoric and tactics of civil disobedience (CD), which are incongruent
with this necessity. CD has never been a strategy for revolutionary
change but a way to reform existing institutions. Because of this
inconsistency, these actions will continue to be largely ineffective.
Civil disobedience is an established part of the political process that
has defined and modified the American empire for over 200 years. It is
widely accepted as legitimate, regardless of its legality, because CD
attempts to pressure government to remedy the situation through
legislation, administrative action or court ruling. However, there is
enormous pressure to maintain the status quo or shift it in favor of
corporations. This pressure is generated by bureaucratic momentum,
industry and government collusion, good ol’ boy networks and systemic
tendencies (such as how laws are written to uphold the interests of
property). Government, industry and technology are inextricably linked,
forming institutions that make the wholesale destruction of the
biosphere possible and profitable. Government consistently rushes to the
aid and defense of industry, unless specifically forced to do otherwise
by massive public outcry. To this end, nonviolent resistance tries to
elevate consciousness and gain public sympathy. However, the assumption
that the public will someday rise to the defense of other species denies
the reality of modern society.
Biocentrism is necessarily opposed to almost everything the American
people know; their lifestyle, the technology they use every day, the way
they relate to the world. Their values and beliefs are molded by a mass
media owned by exploitative global corporations and controlled by the
advertising demands of other corporations. Television, radio, magazine,
newspapers and other media outlets teach people who they are, what is
going on in the world and what they should think about it. This
corporate conditioning and the perspective it promotes are practically
inescapable. As people become more dependent on technology and the
infrastructure that makes it possible, life without it becomes not only
undesirable but unimaginable. The success of all forms of nonviolent
resistance depends on substantial public support, and citizens of an
affluent industrial society are not going to demand radical change.
Although nonviolent resistances not going to get us from where we are
today to where we need to be, it can be argued that until the political
climate changes or industrial society collapses (whichever comes first)
CD can temporarily slow habitat destruction. We can sometimes achieve
environmental victories using CD by appealing to human-based concerns
such as pollution, recreation and economic efficiency, but we must
realize what we give up in this process. In doing so, we compromise our
vision to gain public support. This is the same compromise mainstream
environmental groups make to gain political clout, and it is a mistake
for the same reason. Cooperation with destructive institutions by
engaging in the political process grants them legitimacy through
complicity. We accept a limited realm of debate and become co-opted and
incorporated into industrial culture. We create the illusion that the
system works, both to the public and to ourselves, which only masks the
real problems.
Making these compromises would be justified if we were getting something
significant out of it, but we don’t. We have our successes, but these
small political gains are always temporary. They are tolerated only as
long as they don’t threaten corporate interests, and then they are
systematically ignored, circumvented or dismantled. The entire saga of
the spotted owl injunction, Option 9, the Salvage Rider and now the
Quincy Library Group is evidence of the transitory nature of political
solutions. Old-growth logging, roadless area incursions and habitat
destruction continue; the only thing that changes is the political
framework that justifies these travesties.
Most CD campaigns require enormous amounts of time and resources but
achieve very little. In the absence of effective methods of nonviolent
resistance, we need to consider more militant strategies. The most
common objection to more radical tactics, of any kind, is that they are
equated with violence and thus inherently oppressive and immoral, and
“good” ends cannot be achieved through “evil” means. This analysis is
based on the extremely unbalanced morals of modern human civilization.
We know that we are part of the Earth and that the web of life which
allows for our survival is imminently threatened, but we often forget
the moral implications of this biological fact. We are fighting in
self-defense, a situation in which violence is almost universally
accepted. In the natural world, when animals are attacked, they run or
fight back. To claim moral superiority in nonviolence separates us from
the natural world. We are animals with nowhere to run. To think that we
have somehow evolved to higher consciousness is naive at best.
The fear of more radical tactics triggering a backlash against
environmentalism is unsubstantiated. Popular support for
environmentalism is a reaction to the continued degradation of the human
environment, which will be unchanged by the public’s perception of
“extremists.” For example, the current efforts to cut emissions of
greenhouse gases are not based on altruistic concern for delicate
ecosystems but on the very real economic and social consequences of
global warming, a cause for no matter what you think of radical
environmentalists.
There simply is no moral or strategic imperative to adhere to
nonviolence and engage in civil disobedience. We don’t need to convert
the public; we need to protect wild places. Without its symbolic
underpinnings, CD is a terribly inefficient way to stop logging, road
building and development. Every day 137 species become extinct and
176,000 acres of forest are lost forever. We don’t have the luxury of
civility. We must do whatever is necessary to defend our home and
protect our ecological family. Once it is gone, we can only wish that we
had done more.