I grew up just south of here,
in Puyallup, Washington
We're here today to talk with you a little bit about
indigenous solidarity and some of the work we're doing.
We are with the group called Deep Green
Resistance and I will tell you a little bit more
about what we do, what we think,
and how we are acting on what we think.
But before I get started, it is really important to acknowledge
the fact that we are all settlers on stolen lands.
We wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for 500 years of
genocide against indigenosu peoples on this continent.
I’d also like to acknowledge our friend Waziyatawin who was
supposed to be here with us doing this tour and speaking
but she came down with a case of bronchitis
and unfortunately was not able to make it.
Since she couldn't be here she sent us some
material and we have incorporated it into our talk.
So, we’re losing
 As environmentalists, as people who truly
understand the dire predicaments\ that we face,
as people who really care about our landbases
and the landbases of others…we are losing.
It's been 50 years since Rachel
Carson wrote Silent Spring
which many people credit as the start
to the modern environmental movement.
In the last 30 years there hasn't been a single peer
reviewed scientific article that's been published
that shows a living system that
is improving...let alone stable.
Another way to put this is something that the late
Sierra Club president David Brower said before he died:
“All I have done in my career is slow the
rate at which things are getting worse”.
That bears repeating “All I have done in my career
is slow the rate at which things are getting worse”.
When it comes down to it that's
all we've been able to do.
We’ve made things a little bit less worse…we
haven't really started to improve things.
150-200 species go extinct
every single day.
 According to the most recent US Geological Survey, every river and
stream in the United States is contaminated with carcinogens,
40% of them to the point where
they no longer support life.
Every mother’s breast milk is contaminated with dioxin,
one of the most dangerous chemicals known to science.
90% of the large fish in the ocean are dead. 98%
of native forests, 97% of native grasslands.
Migratory songbird populations are collapsing, mollusk
populations, amphibian populations, fish populations.
Human languages and cultures are
disappearing at an even faster average rate.
 And now, even the most conservative predictions of climate
change are issuing dire dire warning for our future.
Some are predicting that by the end of the century the
earth could be 11degrees warmer in average temperature.
The last time the earth was that warm there
were alligators swimming in the Hudson bay.
So the question becomes, what are the implications?
What does it really mean if we take this all to
heart and take an honest look at where we're at?
Especially in relation to the efforts
of mainstream modern environmentalism.
A place to start is with an understanding
that tangible, lasting, pervasive change
will really only come when people
start to question the system itself.
It's when the participants in this real life Milgram experiment
begin to question the dictates of the men in the white lab coats
that we start to see
a chance for change.
Now to question an entire system is to question a
social structure based on industralism and extraction
that will always be arranged for the benefit
of one party at the expense of another.
This way of relating to the rest of the world requires that
we bury empathy, obscure communication, and distort morality.
To put this another way, we've sacrificed everything that once
made us human in the name of that single god, progress.
I just mentioned a series of experiments
called the Milgram experiments.
I don’t know if folks
have heard about that.
It's a really important way to
look at the situation that we face
and more importantly, the reaction
to the situation that we face.
The Milgram experiments were a series of tests run in the
1950’s by a guy named Stanley Milgram at Yale University.
Milgram put out a call for a “memory test”, brought
in subjects, sat these subjects down in a room,
put actors in another room, and the two were
connected via microphones and speakers.
Then the subject, the person they brought in
off the street, asked the actor questions,
and whenever the actor got a question wrong, the subject was
told to push a little button and give them an electric shock.
They were given increasing amounts of electrocution
as they got more and more questions wrong
until eventually there was a
level labeled “lethal dose”.
The actor would grunt, yell, scream
in pain, and eventually fall silent.
The thing driving this experiement, when the subjects asked “What is going
on? Why do I have to keep doing this? I don't want to keep doing this.”
There were signs of severe stress in these
subjects, but they were told to keep going
by official looking men in white lab coats and clipboards
who were supposed to be the controllers of this experiment.
They were told to keep going all
the way up to that “lethal dose”.
Experts, psychologists in the field, predicted that only a miniscule
percentage of people would actually go all the way up to the lethal dose.
They were astounded to find that a vast majority of
people, when they were told by this authority figure
to apply this lethal dose of
electrocution, they did it.
So most people are going to follow authority,
walk blindly to the ends of the earth,
as long as the men in the white lab
coats tell thim it's for the best.
There is an upshot to all of this.
Some of these participants resisted, they said
no, they stood up for what they believed in,
and they chose to ignore the commands
of those controlling the experiment.
Now, we're talking about
winning and losing,
and we're talking about questioning the
underlying premises of an entire system,
so that brings up an
implication of sides.
One side that's going to win, and
one side that's going to lose.
Like labor organizer and folk
singer Utah Phillips said:
"The planet isn’t dying, she’s being killed, and the
people who are doing it have names and addresses."
So, which side are you on?
At this stage in the struggle
there's a clear line in the sand.
You're either with the living world and by extension every
living being who calls her home, or you're against her.
And once you've decided which side of this line you
stand on, the next question is who stands opposite you?
I hope by now it's clear to you which side of
that line we stand on at Deep Green Resistance.
As those who seek to protect a living, thriving,
replenished healthy world for future generations,
we've identified human civilization
as our enemy in this struggle.
To take this a bit further, we apply Derrick
Jensen’s definition of civilization,
which I feel provides a really great analytical
tool for understanding this situation.
Jensen defines civiliation as a way of life
characterized by the growth of cities.
So the question becomes,
“What's a city?”
A city is a large enough number of
people living on a piece of land
to the extent that they've denuded their
landbase of the resources they need to survive.
So in other words it's people living in place, and they can
no longer support themselves off the land that they live on.
So they have to get
resources from elsewhere.
They have to go and take it from usually other
people, certainly other non-humans.
This organization, this civilization,
started about 10,000 years ago,
really only representing a miniscule
fraction of human existence on this planet.
It started in a place we still ironically call “the
fertile crescent” which is not so fertile anymore.
The present day middle east, Iraq, Iran, around
the Mediterranean, where it's hot and dry desert,
 not a lot growing there anymore.
At this point, a group of hunter-gatherers
began to practice a new subsistence method
that led to an increase in
the cultural complexity.
Pulitzer prize winning author Jared Diamond called this
“the worst mistake in the history of the human race”.
Then this onrushing tide of civilization proceeded
outward and it has been going ever since.
It's essential to understand that the beginnings of civilization
were the beginnings of deforestation and species loss.
It was the beginning of heirarchical social structures: Kings, nobles, and priests
dominating the lower classes who couldnt control the food that they produced.
It was the beginning of both standing armies and
of slavery with soldiers controlling the slaves
 and the slaves providing labor so that they could then
in turn provide for the material support for the soldiers.
It was the beginning of patriarchy, it was the beginning
of monotheism, it was the beginning of the nation-state,
and eventually the beginning
of industrial capitalism.
This increased cultural complexity spawned a way of
life predicated on forced enslavement and violence.
It's what we see
around us today.
As Oscar Wilde said "The fact is,
civilization requires slaves."
And today there are more slaves in the world than there
were at the height of the mid-atlantic slave trade.
Now this point can
not be understated:
 A mode of living based on the growth of cities
can be neither equitable nor sustainable.
It never was, and
it never will be.
Like empires, which can be seen as
a microcosm of this civilization,
the exponential expansion can't go on forever, it can’t
last, and we are not beginning to see cracks in this façade.
The unfortunate truth behind that is that these
cracks have the potential to widen into a chasm
large enough to
suck the whole world down with it.
We're currently in the midst of the largest mass
extinction that the world has seen in 65 million years.
It's called the Holocene extinction event, or
alternately the Anthropocene extinction event.
Anthropocene means it is
caused by human activity.
It's population growth, it's urban sprawl, an economic
arrangement preaching infinite growth on a finite planet.
The felling of forests and the plowing of
fields for thousands of years of agriculture.
The human meddling with biological processes developed over millions
of years, all of these present-day hallmarks of civilizations.
If they go unchecked, they
spell doom for our planet.
All this is to say, that Deep Green Resistance, the
group that we are with, is about fighting back,
putting everything on the line, because
at this point we have nothing left.
We are a membership organization and we operate
on a modified decentralized structure.
That means we have local groups that are wholly autonomous as long as
they operate within a statement of principles and a code of conduct
which we have up here on the
table if you're interested.
We were inspired by, clearly, a book of the same name,
and if you're interested we have the book for sale.
They also have the book for sale here;
it sounds like there's a great deal on it.
We also have just the strategy up here in
pamphlet form and it's also for free online.
Val is going to talk a little bit more
about what that strategy looks like.
But we're not here today to talk
specifically about Deep Green Resistance.
We are here, however, to
talk about fighting back.
More importantly, a necessary aspect of that struggle
overlooked by many mainstream and radical environmental groups.
For indigenous people,
living in North America
who once lived free of dependency on
fossil fuels before colonization,
the wholesale destruction of life and land to feed a way of
life that is inherently unsustainable is downright insane.
Yet, because this colonizing society has
systematically attacked indigenous ways of being,
and made living traditionally
increasingly more difficult,
indigenous peoples are fighting
civilization’s 21st century paradigm,
the same paradigm we're all fighting,
because we're all part of it.
We are all part of this fossil fuel economy, hence, we
share responsibility to bring this insanity to an end.
In short, tonight, we're here to
stand with indigenous peoples.
Indigenous folks who are taking a stand in
defense of their land and in defense of life.
Recognizing the
interconnectedness of all life,
most indigenous people understand that civilized humans
cannot continue to destroy the earth and expect to live.
It's insane.
Increasingly, we live in an age when we
need to mobilize across cultural lines
and we need to stand in solidarity with all
land defenders if we hope to succeed in this struggle
In Wet'suwet'n territory in British Columbia the land defenders are not
attempting to save their land only to have companies and governments
cast their eyes on some other
indigenous land for exploitation.
They seek to stop the exploitation
and rape of all indigenous lands.
The hosts at the Unis'tot'en Action Camp
that we are going up to have written:
“Our communities and nations are at the forefront of land defense against resource
extraction, oil and gas development, mining projects, and corporate theft.
These colonial developments have had a devastating impact on
our water, our salmon, our foodbase, our spiritual sites,
our cultural well-being, our traditional livelihoods,
our children, and our future generations.
But we have been resisting since time immemorial,
and by uniting our resistance we are stronger."
Everywhere indigenous peoples still exist, they
are fighting for the right to continue to do so.
Through the course of our lives, members of this culture,
members of this settler culture, the one we're all part of,
 are encouraged to think that
colonization was a thing of the past,
that we now live in harmony
with our indigenous neighbors.
This, frankly, is a lie.
On the Pine Ridge reservation, which has one of
the lowest life-expectancies on this continent,
the Oglala Lakota nation is fighting a genocidal liquor
industry in a town called White Clay just over the border.
These four liquor stores in a town of 14 people violate treaties and are
responsible for sexual violence, violent crime, and deaths every month.
In Brazil, authorities from the Juruna and Arara
nation have detained oil company executives,
(I’m sorry, they're just officials, unfortunately not
the executives) in protest of the Belo Monte Dam.
which will be one of the largest hydroelectric dams
on the planet and is devastating tribal lands.
300 indigenous protestors occupied and destroyed
the unnatural foundations of this dam last month,
prompting the governments to intervene and
to offer concessions which aren't being met.
In California a tribe called the Winnemem
Wintu had to fight tooth and nail
to keep weekend boaters from driving through
and interrupting their tribal ceremony
which has been occuring in the
same place for thousands of years.
In Arizona, the Dene' people of Black Mesa have
been fighting genocidal relocation for over 30 years.
The government wants them out of the way so they can get the coal
and so that they can get the water from their traditional lands.
In British Columbia there are more indigenous children in foster care now
than were being stolen at the height of the residential school program.
In Nigeria, a militant indigeous group called MEND
(Movement for the Emanipation of the Niger Delta)
has reduced oil output
from that country by 30%.
During one serious of attacks
they reduced it by 80%.
These people have told Shell oil
“Leave our lands or die in them.”
In 2010 the Candian government imposed a Band-council
system on the Algonquins of Barriere Lake
which is about 4 hours
north of Montreal.
Just this summer, that Band-council has cooperated with the
government in allowing the clear-cutting of traditional lands
in spite of the opposition
from people in the tribe.
Then there is the fight againnst the tar sands,
which Max is going to talk about here in a moment.
That's just a brief survey, that's just a sampling of
indigenous threats and the corresponding resistance.
This isn’t a mistake. Genocide is not an exception in the
sweeping expansion of civilization, it IS civilization.
This civilization is not only based on, but it necessitates
exploitation, domination, devastation, and violation.
Indigenous author Jack Forbes calls this insanity that
drives civilized humans to destroy ourselves a disease.
A disease akin to cannibalism. He uses the term
wetiko to describe this disease of cannibalism
and then he defines a cannibal
as an evil spirit or person
who terrorizes other creatures by means of evil
acts including the consumption of another’s flesh.
The overriding character of the cannibal is this
consumption, that is, the cannibal is a predator.
This predation, in turn, is disguised by many of
the abstract principles that we take for granted.
Things like patriotism, things like the free
market, production, piety, career advancement.
The fact is, collonization creates
cannibals, it breeds them.
The colonizer looks to plant this disease of
cannibalism among populations he hopes to dominate.
This is necessary.  It makes colonization
seem desirable to these populations.
This in turn keeps the targeted
population divided and helpless.
The colonizer propogates ideas of racial superiority
making the targets feel that colonization is inevitable.
Thus, in many instances, this fight is
over before any blood even need be shed.
In describing the US policy
against indigenous peoples
standing between the settlements of the east, and
the resources of the west, Thomas Jefferson said:
“Two measures ere deemed expedient, first,
to encourage them to abandon hunting,
 and second, to multiply trading houses among them, leading
them thus to agriculture, to manufactures, to civilization”
This inserting of civilized institutions between native peoples
and their connection with the land is a means of subordination.
This is an essential front in the war
against exploitation and violation
and it is long past time for members of the settler culture who
want to see this culture stopped to put our bodies on the line.
This is not an attempt to idealize or trivialize
indigenous peoples or indigenous ways of being.
This is to state the simple fact,
that this fight that we wage
is a fight that indigenous nations have been fighting from
their respective first contacts with the colonizing culture.
This, coupled with the fact that indigenous peoples
across the globe have been able to live sustainably,
in one place, for thousands
upon thousands of years.
This way of life, this civilization that has
unfolded over 10,000 years of genocidal occupation,
illegitimate claims to moral righteousness, and governments that
serve to expedite the flow of wealth into the hands of a few,
This has been 10,000 years of slavery,
militarization, deprivation, and marginalization
And this way of life is killing the planet.
It's killing everything you love.
It's high time we stand with allies who understand
the enemy and understand sustainability
far more than anyone who is a
product of this civilization.
Now I believe someone is going to play
some music for us. Jeremy Serwer...
[silence and setup sounds]
First off I have to say that this is one of the most
exciting things I have played at in a really long time.
I started reading Derrick Jensen back
in 2002, “A Language Older Than Words”
I was living in Portland,
and I was very blown away
by the experiences that he went through in the
book and how he relates that to civilization.
I was very inspired to write a song and I
entitled my fourth record “In the Hour of Our Lords”.
Pretty much everything that Xander
just said is what this is about,
civilization, unfortunately,
praising things that destory us.
So, this is that song, and thank
you so much for listening.
[song begins, soothing, somber ] 
Partial Lyrics:
His master is our own, he was made with human hands, now
he kills and makes demands of our mother all alone.
The savior is not mine, he appears in time to time, not
from nature but from minds, in the hour of our lords
It is after the end, no more reason for pretend, on
our bended knees descend, in the hour of our lords
[clapping]
Thanks very much, it means a lot to me because
it was written for the people who do this
The next song I am going to do is very inspired by the tar
sands and the decimation of apex predators around the world.
I just learned a really horrible fact the other night that the lion
population in the last 50 years has gone from 450,000 to just under 20,000,
in 50 years, its
really devasatating.
It doesn’t stop there, it's just one after
another, bears and wolves around the world.
We need to do something, and
this is what I’m doing I guess…
This is called “What gun
shoots your personality”.
This is not a song that I get to perform
very often so I hope I do an ok job of it.
Partial Lyrics:
Up Above the earth,
the helicopter blades reverse
you feel most like a god.
You shoot to kill the
wounded from above
I’ll kill another one
I’m a brave animal.
All for the love of sport
I’m a brave animal.
No more competition,
I’m a brave animal.
The traps are on my side.
Poison kills their share of course
Cattle feed my kind
I’ll kill another one
I’m a brave animal.
All for the love of sport
I’m a brave animal.
No more competition,
I’m a brave animal.
[song concludes]
Thank you guys very much.
I would love to keep in touch
with folks that are like minded.
Songwriters with songs such as my own a lot of times
cannot find venues who allow us to do this kind of thing.
Thank you so much, I have CD’s, I am giving most of it to Deep Green
Resistance, so if you buy from me you’re actually giving to them.
What was your name again [offscreen]
My name is Jeremy Serwer, thank you.
Thanks a lot [more applause]
That was great. Thanks everyone
for being here, my name is Max.
an organizer with Deep
Green Resistance.
We're on tour right now, this is our
5th city we've stopped in so far.
We've probably talked to
100 people or more so far.
The main reason we're here is to stand in solidarity with a few
clans of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation in central British Columbia.
I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of
what it means to be indigenous to a place.
Obviously, I’m not indigenous
so I can’t fully know
but from my conversations with indigenous folks
and my reading I think part of what it means
 is that you have lived in place long enough
that you know how to live in balance.
The Wet'suwet'en are indigenous to the place where
they live and so part of what that means is that,
like douglas firs, and like chinook salmon, and
like tiger salamanders who also live in this place,
they know how to live there,
in balance, in a good way.
That balance has been under threat for
a long time now, since colonozation.
The latest way this threat has manifested
is through a series of pipelines
that a group of oil corporations wants to put through
from the interor of Alberta and BC out to the coast.
The first one is a natural gas pipeline,
three main companies are involved:
Encana Corporation, EOG resources (formerly known
as ENRON oil and gas), and Apache Corporation.
Collectively those three corporations are
probablsy worth $50 billion dollars or so,
which gives you an idea of the sort
of resources that we're up against.
The first pipeline is actually going
to be a natural gas pipeline,
and of course much of this natural gas is extracted through
the new process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
That's where they take a superheated toxic slurry of
chemicals, inject it into the ground at high pressure,
and it shatters the rock and then
they can extract the natural gas.
Probably this could have no impact on groundwater quality or
anything like that, so don’t be worried [sarcastic, laughter ensues]
Another good note is that
Encana corporation was named
one of the 100 most sustainable corporations
in the world by Corporate Knights Magazine
Not many people read
Corporate Knights [laughter]
Another good study in that magazine
showed that in Alberta in 2010
there were only 18 pipeline ruptures in Alberta
– only 18! – so they're getting pretty reliable.
They only spilled
900,000 gallons of oil.
I’m not sure what
to make of that.
And did you know oil companies no longer use the term "spill"?
They call them "releases" now. [laughter & groaning].
Yes, that’s how the PR
people earn their money.
So, between 1990 and 2005 in Alberta
there were 16,000 “releases”, 16,000.
This first pipeline they are calling the
“trailblazer” and it would bring natural gas in.
The name is apt, it's descriptive, because they are actually going
to put in nine pipelines eventually through this right of way.
For the “trailblazer” they're going to chop the forest and clear the
wetland, and all the other pipelines are going to follow the same path
[question from audience] Can you just tell me
from where to where are these pipelines going?
They're basically going across the center of British Columbia out to
the coast, mid-way between southeast Alaska and Washington state
We have a map somewhere…we
can pull it out later.
They're starting in NE British
Columbia and central Alberta.
[audience question:] So how many miles is that? 
[Max:] About 900 miles long.
The most famous one they're going to put
in is called the Northern Gateway Pipeline
 and that's going to run from the tars ands to the
coast, and the tar sands are in central Alberta.
Does anyone here know the difference between tar sands oil
and regular oil? I know they don’t teach this stuff but…
[audience] it's thicker
Yeah, it's not actually liquid oil. What you find in the
ground at the tars ands is tar, they call it bitumen.
It’s a sticky tarry substance that's mixed in with
sand and all kinds of other materials in the ground.
Ii's the stuff that would become liquid oil if it were
sitting in the ground for another few million years.
So they have to artificially go through the process of making it
liquid oil that you could put in your car or something like that.
There are two main ways that it's extracted
and the first is just brute force.
They clear all the forestl, bulldoze
the wetlands, rip up the grasslands
and then they bring in massive
trucks three stories tall.
Here's a map so we
can take a look.
Exhibit A here.
This is the tar sands spiderweb.
The tar sands are right up here in
central Alberta, just north of Montana.
Here we are. There's already a pipeline that runs from the
Alberta tar sands to a couple of refineries in Washington.
So the purple is existing
major pipelines,
the red lines are proposed
major pipeline expansions,
and the green are entireley
new pipelines that are proposed.
The ones we are talking about are the two
going right here out to central BC there.
The strip mining is the first
way that they extract it.
Some of these trucks burn 100
gallons of diesel in an hour,
which is kind of an important point because even at
an economic level the tar sands are pretty crazy.
Back in the day in Pennsylvania when
they first started drilling for oil
you would basically poke a hole in the
ground and it came gushing out in a geyser.
They called them gushers. So you had to put in
very little energy to get tons of energy out.
But nowadays all that
easy stuff is gone
and that's why they are going to deep
water drilling and to the tarsands.
These methods are way more expensive
and much less profitable to them.
Eventually it's going to get to a point where it actually costs
more energy to get the oil out than the oil has in energy.
That's the point when it's no longer
economically feasible at all.
It's kind of like growing food.
 If you're plowing a field and the work
is so exhausting and back-breaking
that you can't actually grow enough food to
support yourself and your ravenous hunger,
then the only way you can do it is
through slavery or through fossil fuels.
That's pretty much the history of human
civilization right there, the last 10,000 years.
We're kind of down to the
bottom of the barrel.
So back to the tar sands. The second way
they extract it is called “in situ”.
 The land is left “intact”…
 those PR people again.
So this technique is kind of
similar to hydraulic fracking.
They drill holes in the ground.
They inject superheated steam,
and it kind of liquifies the bitumen
and then they can suck it out.
The first method, stripmining, leaves
nothing, just leaves open pits in the ground.
This method leaves the
ghost of a forest.
There are pipelines criscrossing it,
access roads, and toxic spills.
There is essentially
no wildlife.
So after it has been extracted it has
to be refined, it has to be upgraded.
The first thing they
do is they wash it.
They take massive amounts of water to wash away the impurities,
the heavy metals, all the sand, and the material that is mixed in.
It takes about 5 gallons of water to produce
one gallon of oil at the tar sands.
The last time I checked the numbers about 4 years ago they were
pulling 10% of the water flow of the entire Athabasca River
 which is the most important wetland in North America
for migratory birds headed up to the arctic. 10%
And the production has gone up quite a bit
since then so I’m sure they're using more.
This water is left as toxic sludge essentially
full of arsenic and benzenes and nasty stuff.
They've got a great way of getting rid of it.  They dig a
hole in the ground and they dump it in, pretty high tech.
They don't really bother with lining these holes
with anything or any safety process whatsoever.
So they are leaching
into the groundwater.
Birds who land in these ponds tend to be
dead within a few minutes of landing.
There are two refineries in Washington
State which process tar sands oil.
One just outside Anacortes adjacent
to the Snohomish reservation and
one just outside Bellingham
adjacent to the Lummi reservation.
Both of these are indigenous
communities that are being told
“Don’t eat your traditional foods.
They're not healthy; they're full of heavy metals.
Don’t eat your fish.
Don’t eat your shellfish”.
That's the destruction of a culture, that's the destruction of
a way of life, that's the definition of genocide right there.
It reminds me of a story that
our friend Waziyatawin told me.
She couldn't be here tonight, but she lives
on a small reservation in Minnesota.
There is one man in her tribe who goes
out fishing on the river every day.
There is a coal power plant upstream, so the river is
extremely toxified, mercury and all kinds of stuff.
This man gets the fish, he eats them
himself, he feeds them to his family,
and people ask him “Why do you do it? This
is crazy, you're poisoning yourself.”
And he says “I am indigenous to this place, which
means you can't separate me from the river.
 If the river is sick
then I am sick.”.
To me that is a big part of what it means to be indigenous
to a place, you can’t be separated from the land.
The tar sands is growing like crazy. There are new leases,
new areas, that they're leasing off all the time.
It's projected to devastate an area the size of
Florida in the end, about the size of the UK.
The economic interests are worth
hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Canadian government has
bowed down to all of them.
The US government has been very complicit in it, and actually
a lot of the tar sands work is at the behest of the US
 because of the free trade agreements NAFTA and others the US gets
first dibs on all the oil that's extracted from the tar sands.
So it's not even benefitting the
people of Canada that much.
[audience question] Are all those
US companies, the three you named?
I believe two of those are based
in Houston and one in Calgary,
but the tar sands have companies in there from
China, Norway, all over the world basically.
The tar sands of course mostly benefits rich people;
they're making an obscene amount of money off this.
It's kind of like a capitalist's dream. An entry level truck
driver can go up there and make $100,000 dollars easily.
The culture in these Canadian boom towns out in the bush where
the tar sands are has been described as being like the Wild West.
Hard drugs, alcoholism, prostitution, and
the costs can be measured in the rising numbers of
overdoses, and traffic deaths, and missing women.
Many of the workers are immigrants who are
brought in on these restrictive work contracts.
They're told that they're gonna get citizenship and get to live
in Canada and enjoy the benefits of first world privilege
but when their contracts end they're told they are not
going to get citizenship and then they're shipped out
and often they have to pay their own plane tickets
home from their hard earned money that they made.
 The impacts on the First Nations
peoples in this area are pretty bad,
especially because it's pretty remote country . A lot of these
folks are fishing and hunting and gathering their food.
That’s what they do, that's what
they've done, they never stopped.
Now, the'ill pull a fish out of the river and
it will have no eyes or it will have tumors
or they'll cut open a moose and the liver will be so full of
heavy metals that you can smell it when you cut the body open.
There are forms of cancer that are not
rare anymore in these communities.
Of course the Canadian government has tried to bottle
up all the health studies that are showing this.
They really need to maintain the illusion
that they're upstanding citizens and that
they're trying to avoid this really unpleasant
reality which is that they're profiting from murder
and they're getting away
with it at this point.
This has been a lot of heavy
stuff, with good reason.
The tar sands are considered the most destructive
industrial project in the world and in human history.
They're trying to put in all those
pipelines you saw on the map.
The good news is that the
fight is kind of heating up.
Some friends of ours are
down in Texas right now
and they're organizing a blockade of the southern leg of the
Keystone XL pipeline, the huge one you’ve probably heard about.
Some folks on the Pine Ridge reservation, indigenous
folks, organized by one of TR’s buddies out there,
did a blockade of some parts headed
for that pipeline earlier this year.
Just to give you an idea of the dedication that we are seeing in
indigenous communities fighting against extraction and civilization
 some of the people doing the
blockade were in their 90’s.
So, that's humbling.
Of course, these corporations all work together,
these are multinational conglomerates,
they often have stock in all kinds of other
companies. They're all really interlinked.
And really, what is it, it's a legal
fiction that provides a veil between
the people who are profiting, making billions and billions
of dollars, and the people who are getting killed.
It's hard to break
through that legal veil.
One method that some friends of ours
have been using, effectively so far,
is from this group called the Community
Environmental Legal Defense Fund, CELDF.
They're organizing in Bellingham right
now, they've been organizing in Spokane.
Most of their work has been in rural, conservative
communities in Pennsylvania and the northeast.
Their model is: they go into a community
and they organize around a specific issue.
A factory farm, a mine, an oil pipeline, natural
gas fracking, a big box store, whatever it is.
They pass a local law that not only bans the
project but it revokes corporate rights
so within that municipality: no more free speech,
no more limited liability, none of that stuff.
Then it also gives
rights to nature.
It's kind of similar to the model used
in the civil rights movement where
they were trying to get rights and get the
rights of personhood for people of color.
This is the same for nature,
so in these communities,
 I, Max Wilbert, could go sue WalMart on behalf
of the wetland that they want to destroy.
That wetland would have the
same standing as the “person”,
I guess it wouldn't be a person any longer in these communities, it
would be the actual people who own the corporation who would be liable.
So, it’s a pretty cool model
[audience] What are they called again?
They are called the Community Environmental
Legal Defense Fund, CELDF, or CELDF.org
[audience member comments on
CELDF initiative in Seattle]
They're working really hard and their latest idea 
– we were just on the phone with them the other week –
Their latest idea is to take it to the next
step and add to the law something that says:
“This community now has the authority to
use civil disobedience to enforce the law.”
So if they try to send the coal train
through and Bellingham has passed this law,
then the Bellingham police wouldn't go get the protestors off
the tracks, they would protect them essentially, ideally.
 It’s a pretty cool model, because it
redistributes power, it redefines power.
It's not just tinkering
around edges of the system.
They went to Ecuador and helped get rights for
nature written into the Ecuadorian constitution.
[audience] Is there a
legal basis for it?
Essentially they go back to a lot of
the original constitutional stuff
about community self-determination
and community right to govern.
When they go into these communities,
under the law as it is now,
a community has no right to say no to a
project like an oil pipeline going through.
100% of the people of Bellingham could say “we do
not want coal trains coming through our town”
and because of the commerce clause of the constitution
they have no right to do anything about it whatsoever.
Corporation's rights trump
people’s rights every time.
So essentially it's an assertion
of self-determination.
They're under no illusions that the Federal Government isn’t
going to sue them, because the Federal Government is going to.
That's actually the conflict that they want to force,
because it shows how much of a sham this democracy is
 and how there actually is no
community self-determination.
There is no democracy, there
is no representation.
Bellingham has seven people
on the city council.
They're all pretty liberal, it's a very
progressive city council, and they said:
"We don’t want this coal train to come
through but we can’t do anything about it."
The government players have no leeway essentially
within the rules as they're structured.
So this progressive city council 
– individually none of them want the coal train –
they sued the organizers in Bellingham who are trying to
do this ordinance to try and stop it going to the ballot.
That's in court right now...
[audience member] The City Council sued?
[Max] Well, the City of Bellingham, but the City Council instructed them to do so.
Anyway, CELDF is a pretty cool model,
so I urge you all to look into them.
So back to the pipeline here.
After going through some of the last
intact ancient forests on the west coast
– there are some pictures
right here of the area –
Here's an idea of the forest this
pipeline would be going through.
It would be loaded into tankers 10 times
the size of the Exxon Valdeez tanker.
which would then have to navigate through a
series of narrow waterways, valleys, reefs.
It's an area that's not
even safe for small boats.
There was a ferry boat that struck a reef there
and sank in 2006 I believe, two people died.
These tankers would be going past
those same rocks 225 times a years.
[sarcastically] That can’t
be dangerous at all.
This area is called the
Great Bear rain forest.
It's one of the last places in the world where you
have a wild forest and a wild ocean meeting each other.
It’s a place where the wolves eat the salmon, the bears eat the
salmon, the whales eat the salmon, and the trees eat the salmon.
[in response to audience comment or question] 
Yes, there are healthy Salmon runs
It’s the only place in the world
that is home to the Spirit Bear,
which is not a polar bear; it's actually a black bear
with a genetic trait which causes it to have white fur.
They're not albinos; they
just have white fur.
There's estimated to
be 200 of them left.
They're sacred to
the First Nations.
The only reason they're still around at all is
because they were kept secret for 200 years
 from the fur traders and the trappers who probably
would have taken them all as quickly as they could.
I want to read a short quote
from the fellow Danny Danes
from the Gitga’at First Nation which is on the coast
a little further west of where we'll be and he says:
“The ocean here is like a fridge to us native people. If we want
something to eat, we hop on a boat and we go out and get it.
 That ferry sinking,
to me was a warning”
That, to me, kind of gets to the
essence of how this culture consumes.
becaause if I could go out in a boat and get salmon,
and get crabs, and get halibut and get all my food
then I sure as hell wouldn't go work my
crappy job and go down to the grocery store
if I could be out in the beautiful rain forest
and surviving off what the land gives willingly.
It's not a question of if a spill would happen,
but when a spill would happen in this place.
And then that’s the end of the
salmon, that's the end of the bears,
it's the end of the way of life
of the First Nations there.
These tankers are so huge that an oil spill
could spread a slick from Juneau to Seattle.
So where we're going – it's
the Unis'tot'en action camp –
The organizers of this camp mean to
stop this pipeline and they have literally said
"This will only go through
over our dead bodies."
And so they're asking for help
because they are very serious.
The camp is located
along the Morice River.
It's a strategic choke point, the
pipeline has to go through there.
They can build the whole rest of the pipeline but if
they can’t build this one section that oil will not flow.
They've set up blockades, they've set up cabins,
they've set up gardens, they’ve been there for 3 years
and the pipeline construction is supposed to
start in about a week or a week and a half.
That's why they're having the third annual
gathering up there, it starts on August 6th.
We'll be taking part in trainings, sharing stories,
taking part in workshops, building their defenses,
bringing supplies, bringing food, bringing money,
bringing camping gear and all sorts of useful stuff.
We're going to stand
with these people.
They need our support, they need words of support, they
need material support, they need everything we can give.
I think Mads is going to play here in a minute, but I just
want to read a short quote from the organizers of the camp.
To preface this, they use the term NIMBY
which is 'Not In My Back Yard", NIMBY.
That is referring to people who will only fight a
project like this when it's coming through their area.
So, as long as it's out of sight out of mind, other people are getting
sick, other streams are getting destroyed, then they won’t worry about it.
This is their statement:
“The grassroots Wet'suwet'en will stop
all pipelines by any means necessary.
In solidarity with nations also opposing
pipelines in their territories,
we do not take any NIMBY approaches in our strong
stance against poisoning waters for money and greed.
We stand beside communities in all directions,
taking action to stop the pipelines.”
If I want to get through one
thing from my whole talk,
it's that we need to fight with the same
urgency that these people are showing
because in the end it's all
life that's on the line.
So that's the end of my talk, and I think Mads
is going to play a couple songs, is that right?
“Yeah”, “Cool.”  And then Val will finish us off.
Do you want to introduce yourself?
Yeah, my name's Mads Jacobsen. I missed
the talk. I'm kind of friends with T.R.
I'm just gonna play a few songs.
I missed the talk but my opinion is that until we
abolish the government we can't save the earth.
We can resist as much as we want but as long as the government
is here we're just going to be arrested and put into cells.
And there's not enough of us to
really stop civilization yet I think.
That’s my opinion,
I’m an anarchist.
I’m for direct action, I just think we
need a mass movement that challenges…
I think manmade laws can’t
solve this problem.
I have a question, what's the point in legalizing civil
disobedience or waiting for it to be passed as a law?
Shouldn’t we just do what we know is
right without it being a law?
I don’t know if that
was a bad question.
[offscreen] No… it's a
perfectly good question.
I want to thank TR
for inviting me.
[lyrics about police and how
they “serve and protect”]
[Song Ends]
How did that blockade go? That
your friend was a part of?
[offscreen] The one in White Clay?
Did it work?
[offscreen] It worked for a while.
The tribal police…
[offscreen] They took the trucks and escorted
them through tribal land and then off.
[offscreen] Some people got arrested in the
process because they wouldn't leave the roads.
[Song Begins]
[lyrics about pollution everywhere, nobody seemed to care, and I
could not tell, whether this was mother earth or hell. I cried…]
[people’s hunger roared, animals were simply no more,
and everything was burned, bombs were dropped…]
[changes tune/tempo]
Last night the devil entered my head so I
fell upon my knees and I prayed beside my bed
but then I thought about my
dad’s [?] and all that he said.
So I screamed to the
sky, God is dead !
I woke in my terror
still [?] the dream.
I took refuge in words, precisely
nothing is as it seems
[fast singing]
[about the war being waged on the poor...but
the news always choose to ignore]
1:12:02 I can tell a man is good if he eats no
meat, because a man who cares for animals ... [?]
[Song ends]
[applause]
[New Song Begins]
This song is like ½ mine
and ½ somebody elses.
[Song Ends] 
[applause]
[Max?] That was great, thanks.
[Mads] Yeah, thanks
for listening.
[offscreen discussion of Mads'
music available online and on CDs]
My name is Val, I’m also an organizer
with Deep Green Resistance.
I think that Xander and Max made some really clear points that
as long as there's been oppression, there's been resistance.
So, in that sense, what we're
talking about here is nothing new.
Despite what I imagine were the first colonizer’s most vicious attempts, there have
been no treaties made to surrender or cede the Wet'suwet'en territory to Canada.
There are only a couple of indiginous nations in BC that have given
up their claims to their land, and the rest have not made treaties,
and they were never defeated in war
or driven from their territories.
The land is still, and will always be, indigenous land, and
the relationship to Canada is considered nation to nation.
We've heard the stories and we've seen the tragic results of
other treaties that have been made with groups in North America
but the people of the Wet’suwet’en have
resisted these lies from the beginning.
When we go up to join the Unis'tot’en in their battle we know that
it's not a new one, it's not even one that's specific to this pipeline,
but it's one that has been raging far
longer than any one of us has been alive.
When we join them in their fight we're
joining a long line of honorable resistance.
In this long history of indigenous struggle I
see an understanding that the people in power,
the very few people who are benefitting
from the devasation of so many,
they're not going to give up
their power with a kind request.
The powerful are unmoved by
compliant, symbolic actions.
They're going to continue poisoning our air, our water,
and our soil no matter how many petitions are signed.
In this indigenous struggle I see a dedication and loyalty to the natural
world that is unparalleled in the modern environmental movement.
As comfortably privileged environmentalists congratulate
each other on the purchase of a get hip, go green coffee mug
there are people out there putting their lives on
the line for the preservation of the natural world.
So as a comfortable privileged environmentalist myself, it's necessary
for me to learn from and promote these facets of indigenous struggle
and incoporate them into the
work I do in solidarity.
I have to understand that I can't
just ask nicely for things to change.
I have to commit myself to the
preservation of the land.
These goals are what brought me to support a
strategy called Decisive Ecological Warfare
that's written by Lierre Keith,
Aric McBay, and Derrick Jensen.
It proposes effective action
centered around these ideas.
The most significant aspect of Decisive
Ecological Warfare ( DEW) strategy
is that it is made up of two distinct and very separate
kinds of resisters: aboveground and underground.
The aboveground is made up of people who resist
within the taming limits of state repression.
They engage in things like education, building
sustainable communities, outreach and public speaking.
Under those criteria you can tell that I am an above
ground organizer here speaking with you today.
But another vital part of the work that I
and my fellow aboveground organizers do
is taking part in direct action in the
form of non-violent civil disobedience.
Which is what we are on our way up to
join the Unis'to'ten clan in doing.
These aboveground direct actions can still be done with only
relatively minor repercussions from the state for now anyways.
These risks are some that we have to
take to bring awareness to issues.
To shut down an extraction
site even for just one day.
To make sure the powerful know that we're here, and we're
not just going to sit by and watch what we love be killed.
Direct action is something that cannot be forgotten
in the work of those who are aboveground,
those who are the public faces
of the struggle for life.
There's still a burning question
that we have to ask, “Is it enough”.
If we acknowledge that we can’t
just ask kindly for change,
and we must have unquestioning loyalty to
the living beings who continue to suffer
can I be satisfied with
just this kind of action?
The answer that I have found to this question is what makes
up another essential task of an aboveground organizer
which is to publically advocate
underground resistance.
Underground resisters would work outside of
the realm of what state repression allows.
It's easy for me to guess
why it's not allowed.
Underground resistance would look like sabotage,
physical dismantling of destructive infrastructure,
even the spreading of suppressed or
sensitive information is underground work.
Historically we can see that this two-sided approach
is what makes so many resistance movements effective.
But only one side of the story is talked about and so
much of the resistance that we know the most about.
Some of the suffragettes in the
UK protested, very effectively,
but some of them were burning down the houses of
politicians that opposed women’s right to vote.
Martin luther King Jr.
advocated only non-violence
but there was also Malcom X who pushed the civil
rights movement a step further with his militancy.
Ghandi became the figurehead for passivism
but his dialogue with British colonizers
was only possible through the diversity of tactics
of another indian revolutionary, Bhagat Singh.
The African National Congress in South Africa called
for strikes, boycotts, and defiance against apartheid
but their leadership also recognized
the necessity for a military wing
of the very same party called Umkhonto
we Sizwe, or the Spear of the Nation.
Underground action isn’t allowed
because it can create material change
and that's a really scary thought for those
who are profiting from the way things are.
To make it very clear, we need an
organized, underground movement
 with the strength and strategic saavy to pull off decisive
attacks on industrial infrastructure on a continental scale.
We needed this yesterday.
It's long past time for such a movement.
150-200 species went extinct
today, it's too late for them.
The reason they teach attacks on infrastructure in military
academies and officer training is because it's very very effective.
So with these two kinds of resistance
working in their own arenas,
there are four phases described in the DEW strategy
that an effective resistance movement would move along
in order to achieve the ultimate goal of ending
the destruction of life once and for all.
Starting with Networking and
Mobilization as the first phase,
resisters would put down strong roots and gather
those who are willing to fight in phases to come.
Then moving up to Sabotage and Asymmetric Action
where the aboveground creates a strong presense
and engages in campaigns that will pave the way for
large and decisive actions in the next phases.
Continuing on to the third
phase, Systems Disruption,
the larger, interconnected arrangements of power would be targeted and
held accountable through both aboveground and underground actions.
In the fourth and final phase, the
Decisive Dismantling of Infrastructure,
all of the framework of civilization
as it is now would be crumbled
by well-coordinated, decisive actions
of an underground resistance.
I can only dream of the phase that would come
after that, as earth breathes a deep sigh of relief,
and living communities of all kinds move
forward to learn how to live in balance again.
The progression through these phases will look different for every local
community working with all the different needs of their respective landbases.
It's impossible for us to predict what
this life-changing path will look like
but we have to realize that it's up to us to
tear down the systems that are in place.
It's time for those who are the beneficiaries of the settler
culture to seriously take responsibility for what this culture does.
Aboveground work of rebuildling equitable and sustainable
communities cannot happen with these systems in place.
And the underground work of dismantling these systems cannot happen without
equitable and sustainable communities around for whatever comes after.
With these two forms of dynamic resistance happening
in harmony with one another it can be done.
The systems of power that are dominating
our lives right now can be stopped.
They're brittle and
they can be broken.
As we take part in this upcoming aboveground action camp we need to
remember the lessons that we can learn from the generations long resistance
that's been going on way before we arrived
to work in solidarity with the Unis'tot'en.
It's essential to dedicate ourselves to stopping the
pipeline from coming through Wet’suwet’en territory.
At the same time, it's essential to remember as Max
read in the statement from the grassroots Wet’suwet’en
that there are other pipelines, injection
wells, strip mines, nuclear waste sites
oil spills (or I guess we're supposed
to call them oil releases now),
The list goes on and on. As we fight the battle in
one place we must also remember the big picture
of so many issues that are all connected to the same
system of power that needs to brought down in the end.
So with this strategy, and the guidance of those who
have come before us, we know what we need to do.
There are a lot of changes that need
to be made, and we need your help.
The two things that any resistance movement
needs are loyalty, and material support.
We need loyalty, allies, friends who are willing to defend us,
organize with us, stand with us, and talk about this movement.
We need material support, food,
money, supplies, and shelter.
It's been observed that in any given population, the majority of people
remain passive about the political state of things even in times of conflict.
It's estimated that only 20% of a population will either actively
support or oppose something like a movement in their area.
So if we assume that about ½ of these people,
so 10%, would actively support a movement,
then it's estimated that only 2% of those
people will be taking part in direct conflict.
The rest of that 10% is taking action in the
form of public backing, feeding their allies,
housing them, donating whatever
they can to keep the movement alive.
This movement that's been brewing and growing for generations
now needs your support in whatever form it may take.
Not everyone will be
out getting arrested.
Not everyone will be writing
books or speaking in public.
Not everyone will be able
to make large donations
but anyone who is motivated to be part of this
movement has something really valuable to offer.
If you want to be part of that actively supportive 10% for this action
there are lots of ways for your gifts and energy to be put to good use.
Our allies at the camp have requested that we bring
things like non-perishable food, camping gear,
rope, white gas fuel, blankets, and other
useful items for a camp like that.
We need as much as we can to keep that camp
going as long as necessary until we win.
If anyone wishes to send a statement of solidarity
on behalf of yourself, a tribe, or an organization
please talk to us and
we can write this down.
That kind of loyalty is invaluable. It keeps us
fighting even when our allies can’t be there beside us.
You can also support this tour and the action
camp by buying the books that we brought along.
Loyalty and material support
can look really different.
We ask each of you to think on these concepts and come to
us or others in this struggle and donate whatever you can.
Now that you’ve heard us speak tonight, you have the
opportunity to take that awareness with you after this.
We're only passing through here today, but each
of you living here can spread this knowledge
and passion to your communities
and the work that you do.
That's a way to keep this movement alive too.
This movement is still breathing right now.
There are only a few of us, but we’re
growing, and we have truth on our side.
The struggle has been long,
and it's been tough,
but we can be sure that our victory will be well underway
when the loudest sound on crumbling highways is birdsong.
When there are wolves prowling the
re-greening canyons of New York City
When oak trees wrap their thick roots around the
buildings of Los Angeles and pull them to the ground.
That long-sought dream of
so many is within reach.
Once we realize that it can be done, once we
dedicate our hearts and our lives to the fight.
