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Pink Sari Gang Screening – The need for womens self defense 6/19 6PM
Gulabi Gang Screening and Discussion
Friday June 19th
6PM – 9PM
Word Up: Community Bookshop
2113 Amsterdam Ave. NY NY 10033
If women activists are to be successful, it will be from understanding and utilizing the strategies of other successful resistance movements, led by women, both throughout history and in present time. This success must become the lifeblood of our own movements.
The Pink Sari Gang of India, is one such movement. Otherwise known as the Gulabi Gang, this grassroots, 10,000 women-strong, women-led movement in India has developed in response to widespread domestic abuse and other violence against women. These modern day women warriors, wear pink saris, symbolizing strength and arm themselves with bamboo sticks, for weapons. Their fight for social justice on behalf of oppressed and abused women, uses and teaches physical self-defense and empowers women with community outreach efforts in rural India.
Join us for a screening of the documentary revealing their resistance tactics. After the screening we will discuss what we can learn from our sister-warriors in pink saris and how to apply this to sexual violence prevention work in our communities.
Join the event on Facebook!
In love, rage, and resistance
If you have any questions, need directions, or need any further information, please contact us at newyork@deepgreenresistance.org. To keep up to date on our events, check us out on facebook or join our celly group by texting @dgrnyc to 23559.
Introduction to DGR series: Part 1
Wed June 17th 8:30-10p
Cosi Cafe
841 Broadway (Union Sq)
“Welcome to the struggle of all species yearning to be free. We are the burning rage of this dying planet.”
Deep Green Resistance is an analysis, a strategy, and a movement being born, the only movement of its kind.
As an analysis, it reveals the last 10,000 years of human history–the rise and dominance of civilization–as the culture of death that is now threatening every living being on Earth.
As a strategy, it critiques ineffective lifestyle actions and explains their inevitable failure to stop the destruction of people, species, and the planet. In contrast, DGR offers a concrete plan for how to stop that destruction.
As an aboveground movement, just now taking its first steps, Deep Green Resistance is based on this analysis and implementing this strategy. And we’re recruiting.
No more ineffective actions – piecemeal, reactive, and sad. No more feel-good, magical-thinking, navel-gazing, consumer-based, capitalist-approved denial and dead ends.
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. This will require defending and rebuilding just and sustainable human communities nestled inside repaired and restored landbases. This is a vast undertaking but it needs to be said: it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.
Come learn about DGR, answer questions and discuss potential tactics and strategies. This time is meant to be informal and to give a brief introduction to DGR as a strategy. The 101 will be the first part of a three-part intro series.
DGR NYC at the Left Forum 2015!
Recent events have certainly shown that these are excitingly terrifying times to live in. With recent upheavals, new forms of oppression, and increasingly powerful pockets of resistance, we wish to add to that global conversation. Come join DGR NY at the Left Forum May 29th-May 31st. Be ready to learn about issues, discuss solutions and help create a true culture of resistance.
Let us turn “love into a verb”.
We’ll be facilitating the following discussion sessions:
Myths of Non-Violence and Building a True Culture of Resistance
Session 4: May 30th 5:10p-7:00p
Rm 1.63
We are daily confronted with the onslaught of destruction wrought by the industrial power system. Inequality around the world is at an all time high as opulence excels, water scarcity is becoming an oppressive reality for large portions of the world as we water golf courses in Arizona, and as peak oil develops, we find new and horrific ways to power our industrial economy. Worst of all, we idly stand by as industrial civilization decimates entire ecosystems, produces irreversible climate change, and pushes 200 species to extinction a day. Is industrial civilization a war against the natural world? And if so, what is our threshold for fighting back? We on the left cling to ineffective strategies, symbolism, and working to be the change we want to see. In doing so, we are left powerless to stop the destruction. What then needs to change? What other strategies do we need to be discussing? If we truly accept the reality of the world as it exists, and if we accept the reality that the tactics used by our “movement” have not worked, how does that change our methods of resistance? A look at successful resistance movements can offer us a path. Join us as we discuss the historical context for underground resistance, confront popular myths concerning violence, and work to build a true culture of resistance here in the Empire State.
Environmental Collapse and the Need for Resistance: Introduction to Deep Green Resistance
Session 5: May 31st 10:00a-11:50a
Rm 8.72
Deep Green Resistance is an analysis, a strategy, and a movement being born, the only movement of its kind. As an analysis, it reveals the last 10,000 years of human history–the rise and dominance of civilization–as the culture of death that is now threatening every living being on Earth. As a strategy, it critiques ineffective lifestyle actions and explains their inevitable failure to stop the destruction of people, species, and the planet. In contrast, DGR offers a concrete plan for how to stop that destruction. As an aboveground movement, just now taking its first steps, Deep Green Resistance is based on this analysis and implementing this strategy. And we’re recruiting. No more ineffective actions – piecemeal, reactive, and sad. No more feel-good, magical-thinking, navel-gazing, consumer-based, capitalist-approved denial and dead ends. 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. This will require defending and rebuilding just and sustainable human communities nestled inside repaired and restored landbases. This is a vast undertaking but it needs to be said: it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped. Come learn about Deep Green Resistance, what we are doing in NYC, answer questions and discuss potential tactics.
Register at Left Forum 2015
In love, rage, and resistance
DGR Male Ally Meetup April 23rd at 8pm
“This is why militarism is a feminist issue, why rape is an environmental issue, why environmental destruction is a peace issue. We will never dismantle misogyny as long as domination is eroticized. We will also never stop racism. Nor will we mount an effective resistance to fascism, which is the eroticization of domination and subordination–fascism is in essence a cult of masculinity. Those are all huge spin-outs from the same beginning. The result is torture, rape, genocide, and biocide.” Lierre Keith
Please join male members of DGRNYC as well as other NYC activists as we continue our “Male Ally Meetups”. We will keep on with our open discussion of sexism, feminism, gender, and the role of men in the feminist movement.
Thursday April 23rd at 8p at Barnes and Noble on the Upper East Side (86th and Lex) in the 1st level seating area (first floor of Barnes and Nobles)
Those of us in the fight for social justice are quick to stand against the daily oppression we see in our culture. But so often, male activists can be blinded to the structural violence that our female comrades experience. In the “age of information”, fast streaming porn, and mass media advertising, the brutalizing effects of patriarchy on women and girls within the dominant culture can be ever more horrific and normalized. It is vital that male activist seeking social change take concrete steps towards challenging patriarchy and misogyny, both within our culture and ourselves.
What is masculinity, and how can we as male activists identify and challenge it in our lives, both in and out of activist circles? How can we best support the women’s liberation movement? What holds us back from being true allies to women? What would a truly egalitarian movement look like, and how do we work towards it?
Museum of Women’s Resistance: Under Siege Exhibit 10/19 7PM
Join DGR NY to visit the Under Siege Exhibit at the Museum of Women’s Resistance.
March 19th at 7PM
279 Empire Blvd. Brooklyn, New York, 11225
Cost: $7
Under Siege: A History of Policing and Black Women in America is a groundbreaking multimedia exhibit curated by Black feminists invoking ancestral voices, narratives, testimonies and speaking through their art for our foremothers whose bodies were tortured and were indeed as proclaimed by Sister Fannie Lou Hamer—“never theirs alone”.
Check out the exhibit: http://www.museumofwomensresistance.org/
In love, rage, and resistance
DGR NYC on “Nature Bats Last”
Conversation with Guy McPherson, well known conservation biologist, Pauline Panagiotou Schneider, documentarian/artist/mother/activist, and Frank Coughlin, DGR NY activist. A discussion on near-term extinction, connecting social justice and environmental justice, and building a culture of resistance. Let us know what you think at newyork@deepgreenresistance.org.
PRN Podcast: Nature Bats Last
Nature Bats Last: Facebook
Open Letter to Reclaim Environmentalism
Once, the environmental movement was about protecting the natural world from the insatiable demands of this extractive culture. Some of the movement still is: around the world grassroots activists and their organizations are fighting desperately to save this or that creature they love, this or that plant or fungi, this or that wild place.
Contrast this to what some activists are calling the conservation-industrial complex–big green organizations, huge “environmental” foundations, neo-environmentalists, some academics–which has co-opted too much of the movement into “sustainability,” with that word being devalued to mean “keeping this culture going as long as possible.” Instead of fighting to protect our one and only home, they are trying to “sustain” the very culture that is killing the planet. And they are often quite explicit about their priorities.
For example, the recent “An Open Letter to Environmentalists on Nuclear Energy,” signed by a number of academics, some conservation biologists, and other members of the conservation-industrial complex, labels nuclear energy as “sustainable” and argues that because of global warming, nuclear energy plays a “key role” in “global biodiversity conservation.” Their entire argument is based on the presumption that industrial energy usage is, like Dick Cheney said, not negotiable–it is taken as a given. And for what will this energy be used? To continue extraction and drawdown–to convert the last living creatures and their communities into the final dead commodities.
Their letter said we should let “objective evidence” be our guide. One sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns: let’s lay out a pattern and see if we can recognize it in less than 10,000 years. When you think of Iraq, do you think of cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? That’s how it was prior to the beginnings of this culture. The Near East was a forest. North Africa was a forest. Greece was a forest. All pulled down to support this culture. Forests precede us, while deserts dog our heels. There were so many whales in the Atlantic they were a hazard to ships. There were so many bison on the Great Plains you could watch for four days as a herd thundered by. There were so many salmon in the Pacific Northwest you could hear them coming for hours before they arrived. The evidence is not just “objective,” it’s overwhelming: this culture exsanguinates the world of water, of soil, of species, and of the process of life itself, until all that is left is dust.
Fossil fuels have accelerated this destruction, but they didn’t cause it, and switching from fossil fuels to nuclear energy (or windmills) won’t stop it. Maybe three generations of humans will experience this level of consumption, but a culture based on drawdown has no future. Of all people, conservation biologists should understand that drawdown cannot last, and should not be taken as a given when designing public policy–let alone a way of life.
It is long past time for those of us whose loyalties lie with wild plants and animals and places to take back our movement from those who use its rhetoric to foster accelerating ecocide. It is long past time we all faced the fact that an extractive way of life has never had a future, and can only end in biotic collapse. Every day this extractive culture continues, two hundred species slip into that longest night of extinction. We have very little time left to stop the destruction and to start the repair. And the repair might yet be done: grasslands, for example, are so good at sequestering carbon that restoring 75 percent of the planet’s prairies could bring atmospheric CO2 to under 330 ppm in fifteen years or less. This would also restore habitat for a near infinite number of creatures. We can make similar arguments about reforestation. Or consider that out of the more than 450 dead zones in the oceans, precisely one has repaired itself. How? The collapse of the Soviet Empire made agriculture unfeasible in the region near the Black Sea: with the destructive activity taken away, the dead zone disappeared, and life returned. It really is that simple.
You’d think that those who claim to care about biodiversity would cherish “objective evidence” like this. But instead the conservation-industrial complex promotes nuclear energy (or windmills). Why? Because restoring prairies and forests and ending empires doesn’t fit with the extractive agenda of the global overlords.
This and other attempts to rationalize increasingly desperate means to fuel this destructive culture are frankly insane. The fundamental problem we face as environmentalists and as human beings isn’t to try to find a way to power the destruction just a little bit longer: it’s to stop the destruction. The scale of this emergency defies meaning. Mountains are falling. The oceans are dying. The climate itself is bleeding out and it’s our children who will find out if it’s beyond hope. The only certainty is that our one and only home, once lush with life and the promise of more, will soon be a bare rock if we do nothing.
We the undersigned are not part of the conservation-industrial complex. Many of us are long-term environmental activists. Some of us are Indigenous people whose cultures have been living truly sustainably and respectfully with all our relations from long before the dominant culture began exploiting the planet. But all of us are human beings who recognize we are animals who like all others need livable habitat on a living earth. And we love salmon and prairie dogs and black terns and wild nature more than we love this way of life.
Environmentalism is not about insulating this culture from the effects of its world-destroying activities. Nor is it about trying to perpetuate these world-destroying activities. We are reclaiming environmentalism to mean protecting the natural world from this culture.
And more importantly, we are reclaiming this earth that is our only home, reclaiming it from this extractive culture. We love this earth, and we will defend our beloved.
-Derrick Jensen
*To see the whole article and sign the letter, please click here
There Will Be Blood
“If a person perceives that food comes from a grocery store, gasoline from a pump, shoes from an online retailer, it is reasonable to believe then that this person’s perceptions have been skewed into believing that nothing must ever die for us to consume whatever we want in whatever quantities we desire. As long as the blood is on someone else’s hands in some other land far from sight, then there is no blood at all. It is this willful blindness to the day to day functioning of industrial civilization on the part of the world’s wealthier populations that allows a people draped in slave made textiles who are kept fed by the mechanistic rape of stolen land powered by stolen oil to stare up with their doe eyes and without a hint of irony ask, “But why do they hate us?”
“He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in this world save that which death has put there.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing
In Theodore Kacynski’s manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” he lays out many premises concerning the existence of man in relation to technology and technological societies. One of these premises is that modern people in technological societies are afraid of death because they have never lived. They have not used their bodies, minds, and souls to their full potential, and thus even in old age, feel like they are yet to begin. Kacynski writes about the primitive man who in his sixties, having seen the successful life of his child…
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Guy McPherson coming to NYC!
CONSERVATION BIOLOGIST, SOCIAL CRITIC, THOUGHT LEADER, EXPERT WITNESS
Guy McPherson will be coming back to NYC and he’s been busy filling his schedule with events! Guy is an energetic speaker and talented moderator. He has appeared before countless audiences to speak about the two primary consequences of our fossil-fuel addiction: global climate change and energy decline. Because these phenomena impact every aspect of life on Earth, his talks reach a wide variety of audiences such as universities, associations, nonprofits, and numerous educational and scientific symposia and conferences.
Guy McPherson will be coming back to NYC and he’s been busy filling his schedule with events! Guy is an energetic speaker and talented moderator. He has appeared before countless audiences to speak about the two primary consequences of our fossil-fuel addiction: global climate change and energy decline. Because these phenomena impact every aspect of life on Earth, his talks reach a wide variety of audiences such as universities, associations, nonprofits, and numerous educational and scientific symposia and conferences.
You can find more information about his work at Nature Bats Last.
Tues Feb 24th 7-9:30p: Book signing, conversation, and wine with Guy McPherson
Come join Guy for some wine, books, and conversation about the collapse of industrial civilization.
Spoonbill Books
218 Bedford Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11249
Fri Feb 27th 6:30-8:30p: Deep Green Resistance NY hosts discussion session with Guy McPherson
Join DGR NY and Guy McPherson for a discussion about the science behind his climate predictions, what it means for our way of life, and what it means to create a true culture of resistance. Come bring your thoughts, concerns, and love to this discussion. We look forward to hearing from you!
Project Reach
39 Eldridge St, Suite 4
Chinatown, NY
Sat Feb. 28th 10-4p: Pursuing Love and Excellence as Liberation from Modern Culture: A Workshop
Participants are encouraged to acknowledge and understand the cultural milieu in which we are embedded, and then discover how to change our story. Bearing in mind the words of Adyashanti, we call this process enlightenment: “Make no mistake about it – enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the façade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.” The goal of this workshop will be to help participants identify what they love, use that as a leverage to break the shackles of culture, and acquire skills to deal with anticipatory grief. It is asked that those who will attend the Sat workshop have attended the previous night’s discussion.
RSVP is required, please email to newyork@deepgreenresistance.org.
Mar. 1st 6-8p: Climate Change, death, and extinction
Come join a discussion on the epochal themes of mortality and finitude, death and extinction.
1882 Woodbine Collective
18-82 Woodbine St
Flushing, NY
Mar 2nd 7-9p: NYC NVC Workshop
TBA
Mar 3rd 7-9p: Manhattanville talk with Guy McPherson
TBA
Deep Green Resistance New York 