Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet • by Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, and Lierre Keith

☀ You can borrow and read Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet free below. ☀

Derrick Jensen lays it on the line with this book’s opening words:

This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture — civilization — is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living being….

a book about fighting back against industrial civilization to defend who and what we love

A few intense and interesting pages later, Jensen asks:

And what do we mean by fighting back? As we’ll explore in this book, it means first and foremost thinking and feeling for ourselves, finding who and what we love, and figuring out how best to defend our beloved, using the means that are appropriate and necessary. The strategy of Deep Green Resistance (DGR) starts by acknowledging the dire circumstances that industrial civilization has created for life on this planet. The goal of DGR is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. It also means defending and rebuilding just and sustainable human communities nestled inside repaired and restored landbases. This is a vast undertaking, but it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.

Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet is a handbook divided into three parts, Resistance, Organization, and Strategy and Tactics. Authors Aric McBay* and Lierre Keith* have written various of the chapters, with Derrick Jensen* contributing the Preface and an FAQ that is woven throughout the book.

Keith writes in “The Problem”:

For “sustainable” to mean anything, we must embrace and then defend the bare truth: the planet is primary. The life-producing work of a million species is literally the earth, air, and water that we depend on. No human activity — not the vacuous, not the sublime — is worth more than that matrix. Neither, in the end, is any human life. If we use the word “sustainable” and don’t mean that, then we are liars of the worst sort: the kind who let atrocities happen while we stand by and do nothing.

Even if it were possible to reach narcissists, we are out of time. Admitting we have to move forward without them, we step away from the cloying childishness and optimistic white-lite denial of so much of the left and embrace our adult knowledge. With all apologies to Yeats, in knowledge begins responsibilities. It’s to you grown-ups, the grieving and the raging, that we address this book.