Do you reccomend the book Deep Green resistance as a starting place? What books would you reccomend?

Nope. I think Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How by Theodore John Kaczynski is much better. Both books have a nearly identical end goal and share many grand-strategic ideas, but DGR is inconsistent in many places, and does analysis poorly. Though it's not against civilization like the former two books, The Solutions are Already Here by Peter Gelderloos also has valuable analysis and lessons for the anti-civ/anti-tech movement. These are the two books I most recommend as a starting place to anti-civilization strategic thinking.

listening to Lierre Keith talk about creating a women’s country in the radfem zoom on the 29th, i’m thinking about how to really do that we have to have a deep conversation about values, freedom, obligation, fairness. because in all the reading i’ve done on women’s land, it seems that you really have to have an organized set of values to make it work. a common culture. which means we have to discuss, what’s the culture we want to have? how do we want to live? the women going into this have to have some baseline understanding of this question, if it’s going to exist and continue.

How am I just now learning that Lierre Kieth —author of the classic anti-vegan bible The Vegetarian Myth— is also the founder of Women's Liberation Front (WoLF), the anti-trans "feminist" organization funded by religious conservatives. She's truly a jack of all trades on the whole ~regressive conservatism masquerading as brave progressivism~ thing.

Almost like there's a link between deciding you're entitled to animal bodies and reproductive systems and deciding you're entitled to human bodies and reproductive systems.

what do you think of Lierre Kieth and her work? she's a radical feminist but also anti-vegan...

haven't you asked multiple radfems this? or someone has? i feel like i've seen asks about this person recently. don't know her and don't care, i'm not interested in every radfem in existence. kinda too busy mourning the loss of women's freedom in afghanistan at 2.30am at the moment to bother googling some idiot. goodnight.

"putting the radical back in feminism" by gail dines and "radfems respond" by lierre kieth are two lectures on youtube I heavily recommend, looking through your blog you don't seem to know anything about the basics of radical feminism. neither lecture talks about trans people of that helps

the thing is that i don't want to be radical. i don't think it is the answer to solving these issues and extremism of any kind can make you derail into some really dark places and ideologies - and trust me, no ideology is safe from evil, even if its core thoughts are just.

i don't want to follow everything i see or read, and my brain tells me this is the right path to follow, even if it means being hated by both misogynists and radfems 🤷‍♀️

Have you read Pierre Kieth's (of DGR fame) works? Would you say your approach on veganism and environmentalism aligns with them?

I have read Lierre Kieth’s The Vegetarian Myth and I agree with a great number of things in the book. Do I think it’s the best book on the topic? Not at all. Although I really appreciate her analysis of veganism from a radical feminist standpoint that differs from the mainstream. I haven’t read her book in almost 4 years now so I don’t remember everything in it. I follow DGR but I also don’t agree with everything there necessarily. But one point she makes very well in the book is highlighting the failed ecology of veganic farming. She visits a vegan farm in New York and finds they have chickens. Why? Because the chickens eat the bugs that were destroying the crops. Why chickens? Because the farmers felt that diatomaceous earth was a cruel way to kill slugs and bugs and that killing the bugs themselves was mean/served no purpose. But then it’s not a vegan farm, because there are chickens and eggs. And when you’re vegan, you don’t eat the eggs and so nutrient dense food goes uneaten. There are no vegan farms - before I was blocked acti-veg sent me a link of veganic farms but when I clicked through them, all the farms relied on outside inputs (like walnut shells), that were produced with animal inputs or the farms were using animals like chickens/ducks for fertilizer and pest control which goes against a huge number of vegans morals surrounding agriculture. I agree most with the agrarian environmentalism of Allan Savory, Wendell Berry, Aldo Leopold, Nicolette Hahn Niman, Lierre Keith, and others who share the same similar thought. I also think the acceptance of veganism as feminist is short sighted and problematic in many ways. 

Veganism: Is It Enough?

Some certainly call it far fetched. But do far fetched and effective have the same connotations? This is not a debate on the health benefits or potential risks of a non meat and dairy diet but an assessment of the diet's effectiveness as an act of compassion, justice and sustainability.

I endorse and encourage veganism, however as an ecologist I am tolerant of the reality that soil, being composed of dead animals, renders the consumption of all crops a contribution to a life/death cycle. Pick what you will off the vegetable aisles but you'll never break that cycle. You just have to be humble to it and accept that somewhere down the line you are a part of it. Vegansim per sé is an ersatz term.

But there's one problem. That cycle has long been disfigured and abused by humans by means of non natural selection, our sterile environment, sedentary urban lifestyles and the advent of factory farming. To consider the role of humans in the food chain today as balanced would be delusional. Lierre Kieth who is a founding member of the Deep Green Resistance nails the history of agriculture in a couple of sentences defining agriculture as that which props up civilization, the leading cause of desertification, topsoil degradation, the sixth mass extinction in recorded natural history and runaway global warming.

These are things our Neanderthal ancestors would never have needed to worry about however the chances of mankind returning to a hunter gatherer lifestyle are slim considering that the cultivator lifestyle has been at large for over 10 000 years and resulted in the creation of farms, houses, cites and endless forms of human to human and human to non human interaction including concepts such as possession and ownership, rivalry and war.

It was at the time of reaching the top of the food chain and consuming large mammals that humans became humans, developed an indoor or in-cave lifestyle, along with it painting and draughtsmanship, oral communication and subsequently language and numerous concepts, fictions and faiths. I look at religion, art and language as the peaceful products of our genetic evolution despite the way in which religion is framed today as a causing factor of war. War itself is part of our genetic evolution... and it is all because of agriculture and the struggle for land on which to cultivate and resources with which to do so.

Fast forward to today and there are seven billion humans and well over half of them living in cities. Since supermarkets, we in the first world no longer have a relationship with our food and the more our population grows and the more animals are reared in intensive ever more urban conditions, the more detached we become from the animals. The Department of Labor in the United States considers farming a statistically insignificant occupation, less than 2% of the American population live on farms and cities are expanding worldwide. This is why we do not question the source of our food or have a relationship with our food.

A good indicator by which to measure whether or not an animal product merits the label "organic" is to judge whether or not the animal product supports life or destroys life. By eating this food are you yourself creating a hierarchy, or are you joining a web? All products are animal products but the scale on which they are produced has gone from supporting the cycle of life to destroying the cycle of life. Not only that but supermarkets and supply chains don't sell liver, brain, tongue or bone marrow. These are the animal products with which our ancestors nourished themselves and that the hunter gatherers of Africa, Asia and South America today would consider nutrient dense and naturally, these are the parts that we don't eat anymore. So to cut it out makes perfect sense. If you can't do it right, don't do it at all and if it doesn't nourish, what's the point?

Besides some fats, the nutrients humans require from animal products are barely present in the animal products of today. Put simply, eating chickens injected with chlorine or cows fed on fossil fuels, nitrogen, antibiotics and subsidised grain does not make you healthy. This is evident from the prevalence of obesity and cancer in humans as just two examples of illnesses that would have been unheard of prior to 10 000 years ago and that have risen in cases along with the expansion of fossil fuel based agriculture. 

Similarly, eating genetically modified fruit and veg sprayed with neonicotinoids and organophosphates has not made the vegan population the happy, body building crowd you see on Instagram. We call this the Green Revolution. Whether you do or don’t eat meat, humans are sick and the only thing it comes down to is the fact that we allow subsidy farming to exist and that no one has heard of the Green Revolution and no, that's not a positive term. 

You may be wondering why no one questions it. We fail to question the seemingly sacrosanct model that is agriculture because we are all under the impression that it feeds us. But we must question it in order to abolish it and this is not a far fetched call. The first steps required are reform and I'm not talking about Stalinised agrarian reform or GMOs or anything like that. I'm talking about taking permaculture to a new level where we no longer buy food from the corner but grow it on our roofs. Everyone's roofs. I'm talking about doing it underground like in Clapham Junction. Or under the sea like Nemo's Garden in Savona, Italy. I'm talking about restoring the prairies of Europe and North America and the rainforests of South America and South East Asia because North Africa and the Middle East are unrecoverable deserts again thanks to a prehistoric status quo whereby people are forced to militarise against one another in competition for ever expanding patches of land on which to cultivate.  

Veganism and permaculture are consumer based solutions and alternatives to cattle rearing. Alternatives are beautiful and so is advocating them but lifestyle and dietary adjustments are the easy way out. There's a lot more that needs to be done. As far as compassion goes I think people who oppose veganism are massively in denial but I also think it needs to go further than supermarket aisles.

In Britain we have taken to the streets to demand a commitment to zero fossil fuels from two governments over the past four years by means of four consecutive People's Climate marches and endless divestment campaigns aimed at our government and the private sector. We as a population have proven just how "over it" we are but since when has this mattered to the industry that keeps churning out crude oil and fracking out shale? Now take that reality and turn your attention to factory farming which is in itself dependent on the fossil fuel industry. This is not a cry of despair. To base one's hopes on others is an act of despair. This is a call to sabotage.

The boycott is based on a "hit em where it hurts" mentality. Or at least it used to be. Today it's more of a feel better about yourself approach which is entirely internalising and a means to withdraw from the fight itself. The boycott in its original form not only lacks the momentum of the powerful industries it claims to target today such as factory farming but the actual thought process behind the boycott has softened over the years. The question we need to ask ourselves is, "is it direct action?". When I decide to take action "am I engaging with the issue or am I walking away from it?"

It is easy to opt out of a system without attempting to dismantle it. I can go to the pub for dinner and order a mushroom burger while my five friends order hamburgers. Better yet, you can invite me to dinner and prepare a spaghetti bolognese with meatballs for my family but serve me an alternative with tofu. But what are you actually achieving? Well I'll tell you what you've achieved. You've increased the amount of food by providing not just one option but two options, therefore doubling your overall consumption and forgetting that planting soy is responsible for immeasurable habitat loss in South America, Asia and what's left of North America.

Radical environmentalism, a school of philosophy to which I pertain, requires you to be analytical and decisive and leads us away from oversimplifying our actions. What we in the environmental movement have suffered ever since Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth is the oversimplification of our actions. That is to say the pragmatism of our actions and how realistic they are. Until the Deep Green Resistance was published in 2011 no one actually analysed how we could render our actions more decisive in taking down these industries. But we can. And we must analyse this in order to face extinction with all the tools we have and not just a bunch of ideologies based on what we buy because the one thing we cannot buy is time.

As individuals we do not have the capacity to overthrow factory farming without engaging in sabotage which is a risk to our security but a risk activists are willing to take. It is hard to support an underground resistance group without going undercover yourself. Similarly we cannot battle extinction when adhering to a system that perpetuates it. We may have to get our hands dirty and we may have to forego our own safety. Or maybe if we've got a bit of money to spare, we can help out someone else that's already forgoing their safety. So we ask ourselves... what can we do about the disappearing species?

We can focus on numbers. We can try and replenish their colonies. We can conduct rescue programmes to increase their populations. We can also be more radical and indeed we must. We can stand in the way of their perpetrators. We don't even need to break the law to sabotage the meat and dairy industry's unscientific culling of badgers in Britain. It's legal to stand in the way of the gunmen and it's effective. They cannot shoot badgers when there are people on the paths but there's one problem. There aren't enough people on those paths. So what are you waiting for? Refraining from eating animals is a commitment but protecting animals is a vocation.

In light of this I would like to introduce CoalitionWILD, a group of over forty field activists which I recently joined, each of whom are in some way tackling extinction in different parts of the world.

I firmly believe that it is commencing acts that is going to contribute to salvaging what's left of our planet and not simply refraining from acts of consumption. Two hundred species will have gone extinct by the end of today. The same thing happened yesterday. Refraining from acts of consumption or the "boycott" as we know it, is unlikely to keep up with the pace of extinction.

Season 2, Episode 1 “Hate Thy Neighbor” series- In this episode, comedian Jamali Maddix takes a trip to Hollywood, CA for the Slut Walk and also to Chicago, IL for a women’s convention and to speak with an anti-3rd wave feminist group. A female by the name of Destiny Love who was pro-Slut Walk stated her views about feminism. As a worker in the sex industry, she was discouraged from doing porn because of her small body type. Much like the walk advocates for, she was made to feel badly about her body because she had little breasts and butt, and she strayed away from calling herself a feminist because she feels like feminists often leave out the “hoes”, prostitutes, and women who choose to embrace their sexuality/bodies. She also states that she thinks feminism is classist when it comes to sex workers. Her issue with feminism and feminists is a reason why there was 2nd & 3rd wave feminism, but both have proved to exclude someone even though they were meant to be inclusive to anyone. A radical feminist named Lierre Kieth was another feminist interviewed, and she thought that feminists like Slut Walk’ers “dilute their argument” as feminists. In both types of feminism, it seems that one group feels like they aren’t being included or listened to, and the other group wants nothing to do with movements whose views don't align with theirs. This is deja vu in my opinion because much like when feminism first began, one movement oppresses the other and questions their validity. There is a certain type of trauma involved in blaming sex workers for what assault happens to them because of how they dress. In the end of the episode, one man says that, “Its about the consequences, they're provoking sexual assault on themselves.” In Brown’s article, “Not Outside the Range”, she discusses feminism and the traumas faced by women. This episode shows the trauma of being sexually expressive, as the women are met with criticism from both men and even other women. Brown speaks on the human experience as “gendered terminology, which caters to the dominant social order” (Brown 101). This is shown by the white women and even religious group who blames the women for not being “real feminists who are selfless and sacrificial”. The religious group named Church of Militant shared their idea that women can't be respected if they dress a certain type of way. The group states, “Women ask to be respected, but are objectifying themselves dresses as vaginas, it is contradictory.” This implies that women have to dress according to men’s standards or conservatively in order to avoid attack. It dehumanizes and desensitizes our society when rape or assault does happen and pushes the idea of someone deserving it based off of appearance. This is traumatizing women, and sex workers because they are told to dress and act a certain way, even though that STILL will not guarantee they will avoid traumatic experiences as women because clothing is not the problem; toxic masculinity and a toxic American society/culture is the problem. Rape culture being normalizing is the problem. Sexism and a patriarchal society is the problem.

i love people like lierre kieth and nina teicholz because it just shows how fucking easy it is to be a morally rotted, ignorant, lying, unscientific pundit for the meat and dairy industry and still go unchallenged

Finished reading DGR by Jensen, Kieth and McBay, and I have some thoughts. A manualfesto, it first briefly outlines why we need to get rid of civilisation, and then proceeds to discus different possible courses of action, relying mostly on historic analysis of other movements to learn from mistakes and successes and assemble a strategic blueprint. The first few chapters were by Lierre Keith and I genuinely think the book, though still lacking in other places, would've been much better off without the stuff she wrote. She's grossly smug, e.g. by outright dismissing any possibility that younger adults could have good ideas (because of "undeveloped brain"), so they should just shut up and let themselves be lead (by her & co). Much of the book comes off as the authors trying to justify why they should have a leading role - when it comes to discussions of hierarchy there are barely any examples or thorough explanations given to back up their enthusiasm, and they just pretend it's common sense. When historic analysis is employed, the choice of movements and/or events is very narrow and shallow compared to other books dealing with these topics. The authors most often use the French WW2 Resistance, Black Panthers, ANC, the IRA.., while neglecting actually relevant groups like MEND and ELF. Even where comparisons are appropriate, one can't help but feel like he's reading a rushed highchool assignment. Furthermore, there's a persistent emphasis on how movements need to have a clearly defined goal, yet McBay consistently fails at this himself by conflating three different things, setting them as DGR's targets: civilisation, industrial civilisation, industrial capitalism. The oddest thing about this piece is that it's over 500 pages, yet has so little substance

DGR: Transphobe cop lovers

In addition to the disgusting and actually jaw-dropping level of transphobia and transmisogyny in DGR, they are cultish as fuck and take down people's FULL NAMES and information, and if people act in a way that DGR and Derrick Jensen (see: salmon fucker) don't approve of, they THREATEN TO GIVE THEIR PERSONAL INFORMATION TO THE POLICE.

I'm Laughing My Ass Off: Author of "The Vegetarian Myth" Attacked with Cayenne Pepper Pie

So a pair of black-bloc rip-off dickwads attack this crazy Lierre Keith lady with a cayenne pepper pie, knocking her from the podium and causing her to fall to the ground covered in a spicy surprise, making vegans look more like meat-eaters: angry and antagonistic due to excruciating butthurt over the lifestyles of others. 

While its true we vegans ADVOCATE veganism, sometimes VIGOROUSLY, its another story to mimic the outrageous behavior of angry cow-eaters and perpetuate violence. Violence against people is something for people who enjoy violence against animals. One of the first signs of a fucking sociopath is animal-battering that graduates into human-battering.

What's easier to picture? A bunch of steak-eating lugnuts beating up a "skinny little" "vegan boy", or some skinny little "protein deficient" vegans beating up huge 200 pound beef guzzlers? Seriously. Come on. See the unbelievable shit video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woFD8pp3rRU

What a fucking embarrassment! but hey, one of the chicks in the front row is a hottie. Miss Keith mentioned how the whole thing was staged. "There were people...in the front row...with smug looks on their faces" waiting for the grand show. Well, that's what happens when you talk shit about veganism at an Anarchist fair where there will be a helluva lot of vegans, naturally, because the bulk of people bound to be present will be counterculture youths and environmentalists. But whatever. This is an irrelevant event and this lady is not going to make a big splash. She's not going to stunt the herbivore revolution at any point in time. She will be ignored. 

The only people that will probably suck down her book like they suck down fast food propaganda are the people who already eat meat and hate vegetarians or vegetarians and vegans who were 1: in it for the wrong reasons and 2: Not doing it the fuck right.

Now lets talk about the wrong reasons:

1: My friends do it. I should too. 2: Its cool. Its the hottest new trend 3: My friends dared me to do it and see if I can win! 4: I heard its healthier. Hmm let me switch all my meals with Caesar salads (BTW folks, CAESAR SALAD IS NOT VEGETARIAN. IT CONTAINS ANCHOVIES)  5: Liiiiiiiiike I'm going to lose weight!!!!

Say what you will. 

-Pleather

Derrick, come home.

One time I got booked to speak on this great public access TV show in Eugene, OR. called Cascadia Alive. The show's motto was "It isn't just entertainment, it's evidence!" and a diverse crew of rabble rousers had been associated with the project from its very start. After we filmed that night I ended up at a bar with some of the show's small crew and their friends. One guy who ended up sitting at our table started talking about dams, and I recognized some of his ideas from an article I'd read in Earth First! Journal. That was the first, and only time, I ever met Derrick Jensen. 

Over time I read some of his books and the interviews he conducted with various movement figures. I especially appreciated "Strangely Like War," the book he wrote with George Draffan about the global history of deforestation. Some of his other writings felt less solid, but I found valuable ideas in many of them anyway, and when I went to prison I thought I'd enjoy carrying on a correspondence with him. 

I was right.

One of my support team members wrote to Derrick and asked if he would like to exchange some letters with me. I have to say that he really came through despite our many differences. I am a vegan, an anarchist, and an animal liberationist, Derrick is not, but even so he took the time to send me books and long, handwritten letters. His support meant a lot to me, and even though we had plenty of arguments my feeling was "our movement is not a cult, it is okay to think differently and disagree at times."

The problem? Over time Derrick started making weirder and weirder claims about having the telepathic ability to communicate with plants and animals. He talked about feeding his own feces to dogs, having sex with trees, and about his qualifications to lead a movement to destroy civilization based only on his history as an author. He set himself up as an anti-establishment guru who at once wants to destroy the system, but who is also allowed to work with law enforcement when it benefits him. His online tirades became less and less logical and more arrogant as time went on. Now days his personality is so tinged with messiah complex that I can't hardly believe he is the same person I once exchanged letters with. 

There has been an explosion of commentary on the internet about his increasingly odd politics and beliefs in the last few years, and about the transphobia of Deep Green Resistance (an authoritarian Marxist organization he co-founded) in the last few days. Much of it calls for him to disappear from the movement, but personally I'd like to see him do something better: come back home to being the Derrick he once was!

We are all human, we all fuck up, and sometimes we fuck up badly, but this rarely means we are irredeemable. Derrick is a good author, a humorous and intense public speaker, and someone who was capable of making the most unlikely of people consider the most radical ideas. There was a time when he contributed greatly to the dialogue about colonization, industrialism, sexual abuse, the human destruction of wilderness, and many other topics that demand serious consideration and revolutionary action. Now days, well, he mostly seems to be a punchline at best, or a pied piper for bigots in activists clothing at worst. My hope is that he will pull out of his nosedive before it is too late, apologize for that brief period when he went off the rails a bit, and go back to doing what he does best. Barring that, transphobia is not something that our movement can tolerate, and it may become necessary for good people everywhere to show DGR, and Derrick by extension, the extent to which they are not welcome in our struggle. 

Here's to hoping my old pen pal makes the right decision.