Green

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During the week of Tuesday the 25th to Friday the 28th of November, the following sabotages took place:

- Half a dozen Molotov cocktails were thrown at installations of the tren férreo (metro rail) in Mexico City, causing damage to roads, electricity poles and walls of facilities.

- Incendiary sabotage against a 'control box of telephone lines,' property of Telmex; the box exploded and hundreds of lines were left unusable, 7 public telephones also owned by Telmex were sabotaged leaving them unusable, 1 public phone burned.

- In the early hours of the last day, a 'Banamex' bank was sabotaged, leaving the ATM unusable, thanks to the abolitionist fire of a Molotov.

From Infoshop

A new kind of conversation is cropping up in radical circles these days. Green anarchists are rethinking primitivism, red anarchists are embracing radical sustainability, and people everywhere are asking where we go from here. We’re looking for submissions for a new radical journal, Post-Civilized. Post-Civilized will be--we expect--how-to heavy, theory light, and useful to a wide range of sustainability activists.

A new kind of conversation is cropping up in radical circles these days. Green anarchists are rethinking primitivism, red anarchists are embracing radical sustainability, and people everywhere are asking where we go from here.

We’re looking for submissions for a new radical journal, Post-Civilized. Post-Civilized will be--we expect--how-to heavy, theory light, and useful to a wide range of sustainability activists. We want to move towards an eco-anarchist future, one that critiques alienating technology but refuses to reject appropriate solutions. An eco-anarchist future that recognizes that 6+ billion people aren’t going away anytime soon.

From New West - By Chrstian Probasco

“I’m not going to bombard you with graphs and statistics, which don’t make much of an impression on intelligent people anyway.”
--Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please, pp14

“In 1984 the Bureau of Land Management…confessed that 31 percent of the land it administered was in ‘good condition’ and 60 percent in ‘poor condition.’ And it reported that only 18 percent of the rangelands were improving, while 68 percent were ‘stable’ and 14 percent were getting worse.”
--Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please, pp15

A father of five and a supposed anarchist who admired Thoreau’s dictum, “That government is best which governs not at all,” an implacable enemy of the “Anthill State” which was a “technocratic despotism…the enemy of personal liberty, family independence, and community sovereignty,” Abbey was also an advocate for state-imposed birth control.

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From The Steam Boat Pilot - By Melinda Dudley

Steamboat Springs — The National Ski Areas Association recently notified its members, including Steamboat Ski and Resort Corp., about potential acts of eco-terrorism during a three-week period ending Nov. 5.

The threat, made on an anarchist Web site and referencing an infamous case of arson at Vail, calls for “mischievous mayhem” and an effort to “Give Capitalism the Creeps.”

Donovan Gilhume, Associated Press, October 19, 2008

A disturbing trend has rocked the online, news, and science fiction communities in the United States, and the world, said Roy Schwartz, editor of WIRED magazine recently, "People simply aren't scared of this stuff anymore. It used to be easy to grab headlines, let alone freak out your next door neighbor with tales about the day the robots would take over society. Now, with new scientific neuropsychological breakthroughs, not to mention media productions like "2010", "Terminator", "A.I.", "Battlestar Gallactica", "I, Robot", "Wall-E" and so on, it's become clear to people that the artificial intelligences we create will be just as confused and emotionalistic as we are. Not only that, but actual efforts and scientific advances, mixed with the realities of corporate profit margins and priorities have made people less, not more impressed with every actual advancement that comes along. It's not that people do or don't want these profound societal and technological changes to happen, it's simply that they no longer care either way. The fear factor we relied on to generate controversy and sales simply isn't there anymore."

"It's just not like it used to be.", said Maron Smearez, a resident and programmer in Sunnyvale, California. "I used to tell people about how great it would be someday when the world becomes so polluted we'll all be forced to become cyborgs, or upload our personalities into robots, and move to outer space. Now nobody even gives a shit. They just make fun of me for acting like the idea is even novel. I think I'm gonna be working in the advertising business the rest of my life, even if it DOES happen, and the prospect doesn't really thrill me. I've been confused about where to go from here in my life."

By Doug Gilbert, Presented at the Phi Alpha Theta Conference in Chico CA, 2007

Anarchists and Earth First!ers Organizing Within the Contemporary Struggle Against Mountaintop Removal in the United States

“The ideology of progress serves to confuse the needs of capital with the needs of those whom it exploits.”
Kellen Kass#

Industrial capitalism destroys through the dismemberment of the earth, it’s living things, and through the alienation, subjugation, and breaking down of those that are forced to operate its apparatus of resource extraction. But in doing so, capital also develops and innovates in order to carry out that destruction in the most efficient way possible. In here lies the need for a myth of progress, or a belief that the continued development and expansion of the capitalist project is needed to make our lives better even though it is we who are forced to suffer and toil under it’s regime. Like everything within class society, as long as capital holds power it will benefit from technology and development, not us. But, as the insurrectionary anarchist journal A Murder of Crows points out,

Clearly a variety of different people have seen through the smoke and mirrors of the shinny, clean future, and have seen the shit that lies underneath.

Class society produces it’s negation, class struggle, and thus it produces the possibility for it’s own destruction.

On Monday, September 8, 2008 Midwest “Green Scare” arrestee Marie Mason accepted a plea bargain offered by federal authorities.

The “Green Scare” is the name given to the recent arrests of animal rights and ecological activists who have been charged with acts of economic sabotage, in which federal authorities have sought outrageous sentences (often Life in prison) and have publicly and legally labeled the activists as “terrorists”, despite the fact that no one has been hurt in any of the actions.

Mason was arrested in March 2008 and charged with four felony offenses, which were related to two 1999 actions of eco-sabotage in which no one was hurt. Mason’s arrest was based on information provided by Frank Ambrose, Mason’s former husband, who unbeknownst to her had been cooperating with authorities for a number of years, and who entered his own plea bargain in March of 2008.

From The Guardian - By George Monbiot

In seeking to put politics ahead of action, Ewa Jasiewicz is engaging in magical thinking of the most desperate kind

If you want a glimpse of how the movement against climate change could crumble faster than a summer snowflake, read Ewa Jasiewicz's article, published yesterday on Comment is free. It is a fine example of the identity politics that plagued direct action movements during the 1990s, and from which the new generation of activists has so far been mercifully free.

This music CD is a 2008 benefit re-release of Marie Mason's ‘Not For Profit’, which was originally released in 1999. A classic anarchist neo-folk record, these eight songs feature Marie (accompanied by guitarist and Earth First! activist Darryl Cherney) singing against the destruction of the earth and the oppression of humanity.

Mason is a recent Green Scare arrestee who is facing Life in prison for two acts of property destruction in which no one was hurt. She is a long-time IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) and Earth First! activist, as well as a writer for ‘Fifth’ Estate magazine. All proceeds from this re-release go to the Marie Mason General Support Fund. For more information visit: http://freemarie.org.

From Anarchist Studies Volume 16, Number 1 2008 - By CHARLES THORPE AND IAN WELSH

ABSTRACT

The authoritarian and ecologically destructive juggernaut of state-supported big science and technology in the twentieth century understandably fostered a deep pessimism and suspicion towards science and technology among many in the green, anarchist, and libertarian left milieu. This reaction has been crystallized in the "anti-civilization" primitivist anarchism of John Zerzan. In opposition to this drift towards primitivism, this paper argues that a vision of a liberatory and participative science and technology was an essential element of classical anarchism and that this vision remains vital to the development of liberatory political theory and praxis today. The paper suggests that an anarchist model of science and technology is implicit in the knowledge-producing and organizing activities of new social movements and is exemplified in recent developments in world, regional, and local social forums.

INTRODUCTION

This article develops an anarchist political theory of science and technology that highlights the latent forms of anarchist praxis present within a diverse range of social movement engagements with contemporary techno-science. We argue that there is a marked congruence between contemporary social movement engagement and the key concepts and principles underpinning anarchist writing on science and technology from the nineteenth century onwards.