Do or Die is a journal crammed with reports and analysis from the worldwide ecological frontlines. In these times of concrete alienation here are voices that shine hope from people and movements taking action to defend nature, create revolution and re-wild humanity... Voices from the Ecological Resistance Voices from the Ecological Resistance Issue Ten No. 10 Thoughts ran in me that words and writing were nothing and must die, for action is the essence of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing. ISSN 1462-5989 / ISBN 0-9545662-0-3 — Gerrard Winstanley A Collective Suicide Note... For various very compelling reasons we have decided that this is the last ever issue of Do or Die that will be produced. We’ll continue to work on the distribution of this issue, and are engaged in maintaining the web site and dealing with general requests—as well as various other radical projects. As this is the last ever issue we are not taking any subscribers, submissions or pre-orders, but donations to help us clear our huge printing debts of about £6,000 would be very gratefully received. Any extra (HA!) will be put towards radical ecological direct action. Ten years, gone in a flash… The black helicopters are circling our compound. With our glasses of poison, we salute you, comrades! “Do or Die—Digging out the avalanche of capitalism with the spatula of activism since 1992.” Published by Do or Die c/o Prior House 6 Tilbury Place Brighton BN2 2GY UK Email: [email protected] Web: www.eco-action.org/dod Our email is for orders and specific requests only—no news, discussion lists or mass mailings please. This issue of Do or Die was published in July 2003. ISSN 1462-5989 / ISBN 0-9545662-0-3 @nti-copyright for non-profit Malcontents... 1) Down with Empire! Up with Spring! 164) United Hearts and a Fighting Fist After over a decade of radical ecological The struggles of the landless of resistance in Britain, it’s time to look Guatemala. back on our actions and look forward to 167) Pipeline vs. Treesit? No Contest! our future. Resistance to oil in Ecuador. 102) SHAC Attack! 169) Cloudforest Tree-Sit Journal Targeting companies animal rights style. Account of the Ecuadorian tree-sit One by one the animal abusers are against an oil pipeline. picked off... strategic lessons from the hard-hitting SHAC campaign. 173) Mujeres Creando The anarcho-feminism of the streets in 112) My Heroes Always Killed Cowboys! Bolivia. An interview with Rod Coronado: radical American Indian eco-activist talks about 178) Bolivia: Insurrection Now! sinking whaling ships and the spiritual Young Bolivian anarchists speak out. value of sabotage. 180) No Second Slavery! 125) Reaping the Whirlwind Miners and maroons in Surinam. The Action reports and suggestions for our story of the Jungle Commandos. war of sabotage against the biotech 183) Our Bodies, Our Lives! industry. Feminist health, healing and herbs. 133) Animal Antics 185) Space Invaders Beating the bipeds! Our comrades from Social dis-centres or stable bases for the animal nations hit back... radical political culture? Includes a list of 135) Movement as Monoculture? UK social centres and autonomous Outreaching the cliquè. A personal view spaces. on becoming involved in eco-action. 192) South Pacific Solidarity 137) Fanning the Flames! Actions in support of indigenous The Earth Liberation Front in North ecological and libertarian struggles in America. Why you should jack in your job the Pacific. and start burning shit down. 197) Plunder on the Barbary Coast 140) Columbia The occupation of Western Sahara and The third world war has already started! the resistance to it. 148) Plan Columbia’s New Canal 207) Carry on Kabylia! ‘Empire of death’ for the river people. Report on the anti-state uprising in Algeria. 151) LIfe’s a Beach The archipelago of Kuna Yala. Indigenous 211) Carry on Camping! autonomy in Panama. Up trees, down tunnels and in the face of developers everywhere. The 155) Plan Puebla Panama resurgence of camp based resistance. Grassroots resistance to neoliberalism in Mesoamerica. 213) Fuelling Conflict Taking on the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. A 159) Mapuche Land: Mapuche Life preparatory offensive against global oil’s Indigenous resistance in Chile. latest infrastructure. 215) Without a Trace 287) Prisoners of War The anonymous history of everyday They’re in there for us, we’re out here small scale resistance to the machinery for them. Friends and comrades inside of oppression. who need our support. 218) Return to Paradise 296) The Blake Escape What would really happen if London went In 1966, the most notorious prisoner in back to nature? How would it look in 5, Britain was miraculously sprung from jail. 50 and 500 years? How would nature Here’s the dramatic story. take control again? 299) Zine Scene Revolution 223) SIze Isn’t Everything The world of those Xerox crazy kids The pygmies of the West African sniffing toner in the office after closing rainforest: living with the anarchic hunter- time. gatherers of the Congo basin rainforest. 310) Book reviews 236) Wild Play We take a look at The Battle of Seattle, Radical ecological education for kids. A Language Older than Words, Direct Includes an interview with a Zapatista Action, The Many-Headed Hydra, Running education worker. on Emptiness, My Name is Chellis & I’m 246) Peat Alert! in Recovery from Western Civilisation Digger-diving, machine sabbing and and the anti-war Bloody Hell. carnivorous plants! The successful direct 337) Wrench Your Head action campaign to defend Britain’s Fed up with facts? Had it up to here with world important raised peat bogs. theory? Here’s a bunch of made up stuff 258) Insurrectionary Anarchy! that’s a whole lot more real than most You won’t get your liberation from non-fiction! anyone else. Here’s the theory from 343) Consume these Products! those fighting for themselves, and for Listings of some of the radical books, revolution now! zines and bits of propaganda that have 267) Sense of Place caught our eyes over the last year or so. A meditation on the wild and windswept 355) Lettuce to the Cabbage ridge that is the little-known Stiperstones Our much loved and loathed letters in Shropshire. pages. Increasingly populated by 272) Hunt Sabotage loonies... Getting out in the country, saving foxes 377) Contacts and annoying the land-owning elite. What Six pages of addresses for eco-direct better way to spend your weekends? action groups, anarchist networks, 274) Occupational Hazards radical publications and everything An interview with an activist from the inbetween. International Solidarity Movement about the reality of solidarity work in Palestine. 283) Preparing for Prison Ex-prisoner Mark Barnsley gives some good advice for those who may end up locked up. “We are free from today… Paralyse the country, you are your own leaders. Do or Die.” —MK Gandhi It’s time to celebrate our resistance: digger diving, window smashing, pleasant picnicking, office occupying, hoody wearing, GM crop trashing, squat cracking, sun lit lovin’, machine burning, treeliving—total fucking anarchy. It’s time to mourn for our moment. Over the last decade thousands of species have been wiped out of existence. Vast forests—charred stumps. Coral reefs bleached dead by warmed seas. Millions starved within the prison of civilisation. Wild peoples massacred, enslaved and pauperised. It’s time to strategise how to make a real impact on this apocalypse. Look seriously at our strengths and weaknesses and pull together to resist. The empire is powerful but the spring is growing. It’s a challenge like no other, but with love, luck and hard resolve we can transcend. Part One: Recent Pre-History An Insurgency of Dreams “Defend the Collective Imagination. Beneath the cobblestones, the beach” —Slogan daubed in Paris, May 1968 The radical ecological movement was born from the world-wide revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and ‘70s. Love of the earth and for each other has always been with us, but in that period these feelings exploded across the world in a way they hadn’t for decades. In nearly every land people came together and resisted. In some areas there were decisive victories for people in the battle against power; in others, power won hands down. The epic struggle of the Vietnamese people and the anti-Vietnam war actions across the world; urban guerrillas across Europe; barricades in Paris; the European squatting movement, the brutal end of the Prague Spring; the rise of the Black Power movement. This upsurge brought with it the (re)birth of the feminist, ecological, indigenous and libertarian ideas that now form the basis of our worldview. Authoritarian Communism had dominated the radical movements ever since the Bolshevik Seeing the horrors inflicted on our imprisoned counter-revolution. After having been physically non-human relations—in laboratories, abattoirs and exterminated in country after country, factory farms—the animal liberation movement anarchist/libertarian groups started once again to was born with sabotage at its centre. grow. New generations took up the standard of Industrial development accelerated in the ‘Third Women’s Liberation, challenging not only the World’ following World War Two. The global elite dominant society but also its patriarchal (loyal) extended its tentacles, attempting to assimilate or opposition that forever sidelined women’s lives in exterminate tribes and band societies outside its the cause of the (male) workers struggle. control. In turn ‘indigenous’ peoples fought back. After decades of almost universal techno- In the 1970s the American Indian Movement (AIM) worship, not least by radicals, many people began re-launched indigenous armed resistance in North to see that the earth was being destroyed, and America, reminding us that even the capitalist core started trying both to defend it and regain countries were always colonies.