Tools: ethics, escalation, solidarity

Lessons Learned

1. Read the law according to a deeper set of ethics:  Sociopathic threats to life use the law when it works for them, and ignore it (or pretend it does) when it doesn’t.  Likewise, we must ignore laws wherever they facilitate the destruction of the earth’s life support systems.  This deeper set of ethics will guide us through murky legal territory.
2. Prepare for escalation:  attempt nonviolence first.  When the threat ignores, exploits or exhausts our nonviolence, prepare for and use escalating physical means to protect the land’s capacity to support life.  We must protect the earth’s life support systems at all costs.  A destroyed land leaves nothing left to live for, anyway.
3. Seek deeper solidarity:  Set aside any (relatively) shallow territorial disputes and join in common defense against the common enemy threatening the earth’s capacity to support human life.  Territorial disputes only matter when the territory remains intact!

Discussion

We need this type of resistance 1000x’s more.

Deeper ethics:  Both sides may engage in extra-legal activities.  Corporations and others with profit motives feel entitled to the land.  People who depend on the land for their life and livelihood respect it.  The land, not corporations or governments, feeds us.  The land, not corporations or governments, gives us air to breathe, water to drink.  It’s not about private property — corporations and their bureaucratic cronies seek to destroy land regardless of whether they “own the rights [sic]” to do so.  This is about the earth’s capacity to support life, and whether someone feels entitled to destroy it or responsible for protecting it.  When the law helps, use it.  When the law gets in the way, ignore it (in the short term) and change it (in the long term).  Connection to the importance of democracy.

Escalation: We never seek escalation.  But if a threat continues to escalate, we must find effective ways to disable it, which may necessitate further escalation on our part, including physical violence.  We should seek to de-escalate, because the destroyers will likely always have more, bigger, better guns.  Find ways to de-escalate without compromising integrity or position.  Protect life.

Deeper Solidarity: Fights like these have nothing to do with territorial disputes.  Have you ever seen bees go to war over a flower patch?  It’s brutal.  But the flower patch remains.  When we allow corporate zombies access to land, they poison and destroy it, leave nothing left, and then move on to the next ecosystem.  Stopping them means protecting our planet’s capacity to support human life, period.  Understanding this, we can join in solidarity among those who share a common vision (of an inhabitable earth capable of supporting human life), even admist long-standing territorial disputes.  Otherwise, there won’t be anything left to have disputes over.

The solidarity here rests on mutual respect for a land facing the threat of destruction.  Many “environmental activists” these days practice a shallow activism more as a form of conspicuous consumption.  In contrast, when we develop a relationship with the land so deep that our lives become intertwined, we see that we cannot live without the land.  When we understand that we cannot live without the land, we become willing to protect it with our lives.