From https://archive.org/stream/CracksInAGreySkyAnAnthologyOfDoOrDieVoicesFromTheEcologicalResistance/

An Introduction

It’s strange to put together a collection of articles from a publication that has been defunct for 13+ years and from nearly 9000 km away. Do or Die, Voices from the Ecological Resistance filled a void that US publications (Live Wild or Die!, Green Anarchy, and Black Seed) have attempted, in their ways, to fill but with nowhere near the quality or quantity of the original. Do or Die (DoD) was the expression of a singular moment by strong writers who agreed about how to approach and discuss a high point of ecological resistance. Here I want to contextualize the struggles discussed in DoD, to speak to the parallels between that time and our current moment, to take seriously the critique and proposals in the paper generally and in “Down with the Empire, Up with the Spring” and “The Four Tasks” specifically. Ultimately we want to introduce a new generation of warriors to the intelligent approach presented in DoD nearly 20 years ago and discuss how this approach is still relevant today.

The Project and Audience

DoD was produced by and largely aimed at a few hundred people in the UK eco scene. Although it had a wider circulation than this, it was largely produced with this audience in mind. But, DoD has also been really liked by all sorts of other people who often didn’t like each other at all. For example lots of more traditional anarchist communists really liked DoD, as did lots of conservationists – the magazine was big enough that very few people read all of it – people just read the bits they liked and ignored the rest. We’d get comments from more traditional anarchists saying that they really liked it, but it was a shame about the articles about beaver restoration or Native American spirituality. And then we’d get almost exactly opposite comments from other people who liked the beavers but weren ‘t so into class struggle.

– From the EF! postmortem interview circa 2006

DoD was a pre-Internet project and we can only mourn the differences between then and now. Today print publications— that rare and dying breed— cannot accept contradiction or lack of coherence. When they exist at all it tends to be for a small group of true believers, rather than a broad audience of fellow travelers, which is what DoD eventually pulled together. The idea of having something of value to share with your ideological opponents seems increasingly rare within radical politics. There is no more kumbaya as we clamor for smaller and smaller crumbs from a body politic that has a decreasing appetite for the big dreams and declarations about what is ahead, from radicals who are barely able to demonstrate ambulation and mastication (much less simultaneity).

DoD had dozens of contributors each issue. While that is also true for the Earth First! Journal here in the US, DoD, in addition to having commentary based on first-person observation and testimonial (especially as the journal grew in size in the last four issues —issue 10 was nearly 400 pages long), also had lengthy theoretical works. EF! barely has theoretical texts at all, and what there are tend to be short and ranty rather than the massive accomplishment of the pieces “Down with the Empire, Up with the Spring” (DwtE) and “The Four Tasks” (TFT), and even smaller but still engaging ones like the pieces on Critical Mass, Action Theater, and the impact of the dole on activism. That kind of effort has to be nurtured and celebrated to find its pace.

It’s also worth noting the decision to shut down the project rather than hand it to the next generation. As they make clear, it wasn’t for lack of relevance or reader enthusiasm. Clearly the same problems and even some of the efforts and solutions offered by DoD make sense to a new generation (hence this collection). But each new generation has to find their own voice, to express even old problems in a way that makes sense to new ears, and dusty old projects (think Rolling Stone) really do tend to stink up the room.

Road Building

What DoD told us about the UK— and about how direct action against the mega-machine looks different when away from forests and wilderness— was wonderful. The imagery and storytelling of road resistance seems like something out of science fiction, not a British parallel to tree sitting and its accompanying culture. In the US the road-protest scene is arguably more needed than it is in the UK, but apart from a few meager protests (1-69, Loop 202 in AZ, etc), the US innovation seems to be having protests ON freeways rather than efforts against their construction in the first place.

The struggle against the M11 link was inspiring on a number of levels. In particular the imagery of tunnels to burrow under and befuddle construction was amazing. The growth of road-building protests in the 90s seemed so much more salient to the everyday life of someone in civilization, rather than tree-spiking and -sitting in far-off locales. The protest against roads seemed like the right kind of action to come from a country that had so little official wildness left to fight for. Clearly the fight for the Earth is complex and the war against roads was lost, or perhaps just the battle, although the protestors doubled the cost of the M11 link (which eventually became the ninth most congested road in the UK), and ended, in embryo, similar road-building attempts (the M12 was cancelled on first review). The fight against such an existential opponent — roads are the primary circulation system of capitalism— was a worthy one, but it’s hard to believe that anyone involved ever believed that this fight was enough: necessary, but not sufficient. But the grind of an enormous campaign (the Newbury campaign was attempting to stop construction on a nine-mile piece of land, every day, for months) meant that bigger issues could not be debated— exhaustion, drinking, and politics would not allow for it.

The story of roads is inspirational and a great piece of UK EF! cultural currency but ultimately an open wound— the gap between building a movement of the disparate forces that engage in these forms of struggle and the motivation of those groups being ephemeral and contradictory.

Winning and Losing

Basically what happened within EF! was that we won. DoD and the political perspective it represented was relatively unpopular at the beginning. DoD was essentially trying to fulfil the same role that Live Wild or Die! did in the States – a radical anarchist fringe publication trying to ginger things up a bit. When we say that we won, in that the green anarchist perspective went from being the minority to the majority perspective within EF! in the UK over the course of the 1990s, that isn’t quite as arrogant as it sounds… this may have been partly due to our efforts but is probably more due to people’s own experiences of resistance over time. This resulted in lots of people dropping much of the non-violent pacifist ideology, moving more towards an anarchist position and supporting sabotage actions.

–From the EF! postmortem interview circa 2006

This quote is deep. It holds a lot of history in a few, easily-missed words and refers to a before that is hard so see from the position of one who has only been in the now. There was a time when EF! held at the same time very different ideas of what comprises direct action in defense of the earth. This is outside of debates about peaceful (or not) tactics or what shape a better world should take. This quote refers to a time when EF! (alongside many other social justice groups) wasn’t homogenous. That is no longer true. On the one hand political people (who describe themselves with terms like anarchist) want to have deep and engaged conversations about the implications of ideas to daily life. On the other this has created a cultural context where participation has entailed a type of conformity. The example above doesn’t refer to the split between red-necks and hippies but a time when summit protests were being challenged by anarchists as having a limited depth of strategic vision. These same people were developing a tighter connection between a green anarchist perspective and EF! activities. The unforseen consequence of this move has been a further whittling of the kind of opinions, actions, and ideas that EF! participates in. There hasn’t been a rondy in a decade that doesn’t have some sort of identity politics drama attached to it.

Down with the Empire

This essay is a strong conclusion to the DoD project. It does it all: savors the victories, names the defeats, and tells the story of a decade of attempts by human beings to defend the Earth against the rapacious industrial system. It is a thoughtful, considered, un-depressed summation of years and years of thinking and acting. DwtE frames the history of UK EF! and, like any frame, is perhaps unfair to future ecological actions in the UK theater. It’s a story of birth, land struggle, localism, and ultimately the globalization of the movement. This might be cold solace to those who are still fighting against roads and industrialism in the nooks and valleys of the greater UK. The article implies, “Keep trying but your story has already been told.” That said, DwtE was a fantastic introduction to the section that followed it, the rare strategic document, or at the very least a solid set of proposals.

The Four Tasks

Somewhere between strategy and tactics is the conversation all of us in the change-the-world movement need to have. At this point I would say that strategy is easy, if silly. It’s easy to declare that peace will be the result of peace, or killing tyrants will make leaders behave. In fact, the focus required to do either enough to test whether the hypotheses work, is in short supply. Grandiose statements— especially since the Internet is so frequently the way we communicate with each other— have become a principle form of non-communication. Tactics is also easy enough. It is simple to talk about the technics, specifics, and experiences of how to deal with meetings, windows, and equipment in the field. But the gap between what we can do and what we want is enormous, it’s existential, and it touches on everything we love and hate about people.

TFT attempts to bridge this strategy-tactics gap and its effort is worth engaging with, even 20 years later, because of how prescient and accurate (if not precise) it was (with regard to the shape of ecological resistance). TFT is, from our perspective, the zenith of DoD.

Growing Counter-Cultures

We need to catalyse living , loving, fighting counter cultures that can sustain rebellion across generations. In both collective struggle and our everyday lives we must try to live our ecological and libertarian principles. Our counter-cultures must be glimmers of ecological anarchy — fertiliser for the growth of collective imagination. Fulfilling this task is what will enable the others to be fulfilled over the long haul. The counter-cultures must be bases from which to carry out ‘thumb in the dam’ actions and give support to rebellions beyond the core. In times of crisis they should act decisively against authoritarian groups. The counter-culture’s eventual aim should be total social transcendence— (r)evolution.

In the US the perspective that counter culture is valuable has fallen entirely out of favor. This is mostly because of the Internet (also somewhat because of the surprising popularity and misreading— or at least highly attenuated reading— of “Introduction to Civil War” by Tiqqun). These days in the US there is a disdain for all things counter cultural. Of course the disdainers were also once the royalty of the same counter cultures they are oh-so- over, but that isn’t the point. The Internet killed counter culture[1] , especially what was most visually distinctive about it. For the spectacularized American, that was enough. These days no one is allowed their own special little treehouse in which to foment (r)evolution, not without a thousand blogs of light shining down upon them. And this will not do.

The tension for us, as people who were formed pre-Internet, is that to eschew the counter culture is to embrace mainstream culture: Mom & Dad, jobs and retirement, home ownership and life insurance, kids, dogs, and white picket fences. We claimed counter culture as the escape from that, but mainstream culture has already, mostly, consumed each individual component. You want Mom & Mom, a shared job, no home or insurance, and a cat? Go for it! To put this another way, the problem with American counter culture is that we had no culture in the first place. Since WWII we have had nothing but capitalism’s throbbing successes at solving the problems of human storage and survival. Counter culture, especially as defined by DoD (and by us), is about something else entirely. For starters, it’s about something that spans generation, which we absolutely do not have.

To put this conundrum into slightly more positive language, we feel outside of and opposed to mainstream culture but strongly desire something-like-a-community to fulfill both the spiritual and material needs a culture could provide— so we endure counter culture. We have big dreams for counter culture— which has time and time again disappointed— and believe something connected to our daily life must also be the mechanism by which we participate in the change we’d like to see in the world (which I don’t mind calling (r)evolution even though it sounds dorky to a North American ear). I think the common criticism of this position is a communist one. We, by whatever broad definition you want to give counter culture, will never be large enough to be a force-to-be-reckoned-with on the stage where a revolution (or even a (r)evolution) would need to be waged. We, to put it gently, are not enough. We aren’t even talking about a Russian Revolution-style change but about survival, fertilizer and safe houses, dance parties and hook-ups, and even putting thumbs in the dam. It seems hard to fathom a new type of counter culture — mostly comprised of the most educated from the current counter culture that is attempting to build (political) parties, study groups, and gestures towards effects — will have anywhere near the skeletal structure shown by even the shadow of the previous counter culture.

Forgive us our internal critiques. This first task of TFT still rings true. We need some place where our probable hostility for each other can look and feel much more like conviviality than a civil war. We need this because if there ever were the requirement for the kind of solidarity and unity of action a radical transformation of this world requires, we don’t currently have it. It is possible that the fragmentation of counter culture (a fragmentation that is largely concurrent to the rise of the Internet) is irreversible. That would mean that the corollary to the First Task may be something like reconciling the irreconcilable of a unitary counter culture vs a diverse one that recognized itself and its boundaries, and had an honest self assessment of the accompanying strategic limitation and opportunities.

Putting Our Thumb in the Dam

Just as counter-cultures must open up space for (r)evolution to grow we must also open up time. The life support systems of the earth are under unprecedented attack. Biological meltdown is accelerating. (R)evolution takes decades to mature. Unless force is used on the margins of the global society to protect the most important biological areas we may simply not have enough time. The last tribal examples of anarchy, from whom we can learn a lot, could be wiped out within decades if not militantly defended. Thumb-in-the-Dam struggles aim to protect ecological diversity understanding that this civilisation WILL be terminated, by either the unlikely possibility of global (r)evolution or the certainty of industrial collapse.

This argument is similar to the assertion by EF! types that there is something metaphysical about wildness, therefore justifying its defense at any cost. This kind of argumentation has fallen out of vogue (alongside, thankfully, the deep vs social ecology debate). There are still a thousand not-radical non-profits that are thumbing dams all over the place: saving rhinos, gorillas, rain forests, and other regions and species that will be eliminated as the violence of global capitalism completes its consumption of resources.

An aspect of the radical version of thumbing dams that wasn’t discussed by DoD that is more likely to “open up time” is green capitalism. Shipping global-north tourists to locations and species in the wild is, perhaps, a more humane and sustainable option to zoos and safaris. The past 20 years has seemed to vindicate this approach more than the one of environmental extremism. Native struggles, which are largely struggles of cultural survival, have been most effective when there are resources under control of natives (whether byways for pipelines or casino revenues) that allow them to get a seat at the table for control of their own destinies. Thumbs in the dam indeed.

The other approach that has some appeal for some radicals (most notably a specific kind of communist) is accelerationism. This perspective is more-or-less the opposite of any kind of ecological concern unless you believe that gaian homeostasis is only possible in the absence of humans. In which case, turning up the heat on human activity, with the resulting crises and collapse, may be the only solution. This is the opposite of putting a thumb in the dam but is one of the interesting propositions since DoD ended.

Preparing for Crises

We must have the ability to defend ourselves, survive, and exploit crises in society including capitalist attempts to destroy us. The divided and industrial nature of today’s society has already deter- mined the instability of tomorrow.

Task Three falls gently from Task One and Two. If we have a place that is something like True Community and we commit to emergency struggles, then we must necessarily prepare for upcoming events. Ecological crises has already been a more salient part of daily life in the past 15 years than in the 50 before it. The only quibble with this Task is that it is necessary but not sufficient to the scale of the crises ahead.

Supporting Rebellion Beyond the Core

The counter culture must act in real solidarity with our struggling sisters and brothers on other islands. Aid them in whatever we can and bring the majority world battlefronts to the boardrooms, bedrooms, and barracks of the bourgeoisie.

Once you have a real fighting force, one committed to doing something meaningful in the world, then of course the list of what you have to do, what different pressure groups will try to get you to do, can get quite long. The main criticism we would make of the Four Tasks is that they bury thousands of tasks in the four. What is an engaging and critically important conversation about “What is to be Done?” is mostly a series of four principles with little to direct a reader. It is largely a list that details the dozens of complicated projects that could be embraced given infinite time and energy.

The challenge of Task Four (which is basically to help others) is the challenge of environmental activism (actually, all activism): how do we help people who are outside of our experience in real material, cultural, and spiritual ways. The usual answer is that our actions should be directed by solidarity and not charity but this distinction is nearly impossible to define and, in practice, hard to find examples for. This is not to say that charity is de facto bad but hoping and wishing an action isn’t charity evades an important principle, which is that the people who have money, resources, and power get to decide who they shower those things upon, not need, value, or the people who actually receive the largesse. This privilege is mostly discussed as a type of crime committed by those who have it which seems to have resulted in less and less generosity from rich people.[2]

At the heart of Task Four is an imperative. We must aid our brothers and sisters. This may be the case if we assume some brutal categorizations. “Brothers and sisters on other islands” seems synonymous with “the poor and huddled masses” of the world. Bringing their fights to the bourgeoisie is a type of restatement of the classic Marxist hagiography with, perhaps, a humanist twist. If we thought categorization of the Marxist variety were a solution to ecological devastation why wouldn’t we be Marxists? Do we really think that bringing new data to the boardrooms and bedrooms would change them one iota? Perhaps what I was hoping for from this Fourth Task was a new model of revolution, a social change movement that was different, but it seemed there wasn’t nearly the imagination about how to do things differently as there was about how many things there are to do.

We’ve drifted again towards having a critical analysis of The Four Tasks but that is only because this nearly 20-year old document is still entirely relevant to the form and function of radical activity today. Almost none of this document feels dated. Today there would be sections on Global Warming and Intersectionality but fundamentally this text is still a relevant starting point for any group attempting to answer the questions herein. This is an incredible feat and for that I’d place it at the head of the pack of articles that attempt a similar feat— but much more modestly— like Desert, “Earth First Means Social War,” “The Issues are not the Issue,” “You Make Plans – We Make History,” and various pieces by the Green Anarchy Collective.

But What If It is Too Late?

If you will indulge us for a few minutes we’d feel remiss if we didn’t mention a topic that DoD didn’t emphasize. What if we are too late? This question of “lateness” has a material, cultural, and metaphysical component that we will address. There were people in the eco-scene that were asserting something along the lines of this question but they made the mistake of confusing means and ends and as a result blamed the first victims of our lateness rather than keeping the conversation abstract. Abstraction has the benefit of not summoning emotions, of seeming to be removed from a particular interest group or daily life, which allows us, strangers, to discuss something big and profound. It is an abstraction to say that the world is going to end and there is no hope of redemption (just as saying the opposite is also an abstraction). But of course endings will impact a great deal of people and are incredibly dramatic and even cataclysmic. For the sake of talking to strangers and talking about something impossibly difficult, for the rest of this section let us ride the line between abstraction and something real.

It is very much in the ecological tradition to abandon hope: in human agency, in our capacity to slow the gears of Empire’s machinery, that we could make a difference on any stage we’d think worth our energy. This tradition tends to argue for a return to nature, for a withdrawal from the affairs of man (or civilization or society), or towards a spiritual life. Of course there is no escape but there is a principle that is at odds with the Four Tasks and doesn’t require its fundamental hope. What if instead of building a counter culture that doesn’t appear possible — in order to effect a holding action to the decay of this civilization, to prepare for crises, and to (poorly) support the actions of others around the world who are doing the same — what if instead of all that, we just live our lives. What if we accept that we are just a few human creatures among billions?

Instead of becoming activists, or politicians with no constituency, we do something else. We don’t try to run and hide (as if that were possible), but instead live as a native to our habitats, do something horrific to bourgeoisie society, live quietly, outside of the organizational model of the Christian sects. Let people be and live on the land, perhaps wildly, perhaps in all the counter-cultural glory you possess.

If it is too late to save humanity from itself then it may be time to wrap up our affairs. In that cause, a more nihilistic ecological perspective has a few modern faces that make sense to mention as a way of concluding. Two of them are publishing projects, inheritors of the DoD legacy but perhaps, in addition to The Four Tasks, also participants in a Fifth Task. Dark Mountain, a publishing project from the UK, is comprised of dozens of authors, many of whom participated in the anti-road activities of the 90. They are best summed up by this, The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them (Dark Mountain Manifesto).

The second project, in which the editors of this book have some involvement, is Black Seed, a newsprint project somewhere in the intersection of indigeneity, green anarchism, and direct action. And the third, non-publication project is the actions of eco-extremists, especially in Mexico, like Individuals Tending Towards the Wild, or Wild Reaction, tendencies that attempt to treat human life as if it is not, in fact, at the center of creation. The influence of The Four Tasks weighs heavily on all these projects.

Conclusion

While we have spent most of our energy here focusing on the impressive and influential conclusionary documents “Down with the Empire, Up with the Spring” and “The Four Tasks,” we intended only to highlight what was great about DoD. By maintaining some semblance of an editorial line, a set of high-quality production efforts, and a theoretical axis around a broad green anarchist perspective, it has maintained its position as one of the most important radical green publications ever. We found the lack of memory of this great publication to be offensive and put forward this book take to remedy that situation. We hope in the following four hundred plus pages you will find agreement with us as well as your own uses for the great material of Do or Die: Voices from the Ecological Resistance.

 

Footnotes

[1] Interesting but partial examples http://www.complex.com/style/2015/03/photographers-prove-that-the-internet-has-killed-individual-style https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061008/153603.shtml

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiasavchuk/2014/10/06/wealthy-americans-are-giving-less-of-their-incomes-to-charity-while-poor-are-donating-more/