people often say that there's a war against nature and that this is the third world war very frightening for what we consider to be industrial civilization i would say is extraordinarily uncivilized actually quite savage people even most scientists continue to underestimate how far down the path to climate catastrophe we've already travelled for the most part we're oblivious to it we don't want to know about it we don't want to hear about it the on thing i'm most afraid of is that we're going to mount a tremendous campaign to sustain the unsustainable at this point scientists are saying that the earth's temperature may increase by as much as ten degrees at that point there may not even be bacteria left when the oil starts to really run dry and when those in power have to assert their power in a time of dwindling resources i think they're going to turn to much more blunt and cruel methods of every day that passes the world is in worse shape the sad looking man you see on the screen is derrick jensen jensen is the best selling author of several non fiction books including a language older than words and the culture of make believe his books deal with topics such as surveillance child abuse the environment and something he calls civilization civilization a hundred years ago people in the pacific northwest could still eat salmon there's going to be people sitting along the columbia fifty years from now they'll be glowing for one thing but they'll be starving to death and they'll be saying i'm starving to death because you didn't take out the dams killed salmon and those dams were used for barging and for electricity for alumninum smelters for beer cans so out his case against civilization by enumerating twenty premises due to time limitations and the fact that most people would not tolerate a twenty hour movie we will explore four of these premises and accompany them with real industrial civilization civilization itself but especially industrial civilization is not and can never be sustainable it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of life that's based on the use of nonrenewable resources w is a way of life characterized by the growth of cities so you've got groups of people living in a dense enough population that the local landbase cannot support them what that means is you have to get your basic resources from somewhere else because you've used them up where you live so you're going to go out into the countryside and gather up whatever it is you want bring it back in there's no way that in the long term you can continue to destroy the land that you need for your survival or the waters that you need to drink and expect to continue to live industrial civilization requires ever increasing amounts of energy and ever increasing amounts of land ever increasing amounts of resources of all kinds in order to perpetuate itself in order to continue to grow in order to just maintain itself and we live on a finite planet and those aren't available of course unfortunately for us and most living creatures that culture won't stop until it's consumed as much as it can or of course until we stop it ourselves if you have a finite amount of anything if you start using it eventually you use it up and so it would seem that if your entire culture is based on i don't know let's take a random resource oil that you would think about what's going to happen happen when the oil runs out we've found energy resources that have allowed us to escape some of the kinds of limits that previous cultures have had to face much more quickly they used to collapse because they ran out of resources easily accessible resources the limit being the distance that people could travel with things like horses or other pack animals that ended with the beginning of the fossil fuel age now they can go all over the planet and take what they want so globalization has only accelerated this tremendously destructive process  our wealth into building an infrastructure for daily life that has no future i do think that oil problem is going to accelerate within the next three to five years maybe even sooner the numbers indicate that we've probably peaked in global production where do you find the break from that i mean all of it is a giant machine or ensemble that just moves forward technology for example never takes a step back this whole thing just keeps going like a cancer i don't know of any civilization that's been there is no clean green path to living in a lifestyle that we're all used to in industrialized nations this way of life is over civilizations are often cutting their own throats very very obviously but they just keep on doing it every civilization is defined by hubris it's defined by its denial to recognize that it lives in a natural world as a matter of fact every civilization in its founding lies elevates itself above nature and claims that it is the controller of the whole world so as a longtime grassroots environmental activist and as a creature living in the thrashing endgame of civilization i am intimately acquainted with the landscape of loss and have grown accustomed to carrying the daily weight of despair walked clearcuts that wrap around mountains and drop into valleys and climb ridges to fragment watershed after watershed and i've sat silent near empty streams that two generations ago were lashed into whiteness by uncountable salmon coming home to spawn and die here in bc and across north america when they do industrial logging they actually take and just remove all the trees they level everything they leave nothing but stumps and slash piles and they burn the slash piles and they take out all the timber and what's left is a wasteland and it's like they take a rainforest and turn it into a desert that's what a selection zone in a clearcut they don't paint the trees that they're going to cut down they only paint the ones that they're going to leave high quality timber and leaving the rest laying there in a junk so that's why we keep on you know fighting back the stumps rot and the roots die then the slopes slide and often there's not much regrowth there's no regeneration of the forest they do some replanting it doesn't always work because there's no soil left it washes down into the streams it kills the salmon it fills up the reservoirs all kinds of flood damage downstream that's terrorism stripping down all the trees ripping out all the trees in the forest and now they're going to rip o when we blocked the road these trees are very valuable and the laws are all profit driven they're all driven by the corporations the police are there to enforce the corporations right to log not to enforce our right to stop them and protect the ecosystem there's so little that's left of the old growth forest like this that we see on the sides here that people are putting their bodies on the line they are willing to make huge sacrifices to stop the forest from being sacrificed and the water and the air quality and the global climate traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed they also do not willingly allow their land bases to be damaged so that other resources gold oil and so on can be extracted that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities our people we say have been there since time immemorial prior to invasion and conquest colonization lands in north america were occupied by populations of people that had a profoundly different relationship with the land they live with the land all the ceremonies that have come up have to do with celebrating the renewal of seasons and life and  one thing about indigenous peoples is that there's always the idea that you have to live in balance you know emotionally physically spiritually you have to have balance and so this same philosophy was applied to the natural world that they lived in tolowa on whose land i now live weren't civilized they didn't live in cities they didn't require the importation of resources they lived in villages camps and lived there for twelve thousand five hundred years if you believe the myths of science if you believe the myths of the tolowa they lived there since the beginning of time i think that what we have had in indigenous societies all along is a very kind of common sense a very practical approach to why it's important to treat the world around you the natural world in a good way our people never exploited more than what we needed we respect the land we respect the animals we respect the water we respect the air the wind the fire all the sacred elements and we believe that they all are living living things so i suspect that's the way it was before contact the stories that we have about our relationship to each other and to the land and to any spiritual aspect  deities arise from our relationship with the land the salmon were considered to be our mentors caregivers lifegivers they were equal to us in fact all things that have form spiritual essence a spiritual entity and that if we want to live in this universe in a good way that it was absolutely essential that we learned how to maintain respectful relations with all of they brought christianity they brought colonization and certainly they did bring civilization they came in and they were sent with this commission they felt apparently to dominate the land and it was  just there for the taking these people would accept beads or just kind of get out of the way and of course they had superior firepower at that time too right off the bat with christopher columbus landing in the caribbean region on what is today haiti and the dominican republic they initiated almost immediately a genocide down there that depopulated most of the nation the taino and the arawaks one of the main things that happened was the introduction of diseases which was basically biological warfare smallpox was spread through tobacco and blankets and given to the indian people so it didn't take them long to be decimated because they were pure worked with indigenous nations to undermine traditional economies and undermine the relationship that indigenous populations have with the lands so that indigenous peoples could then do do the work of resource exploitation and extraction for the europeans so that they could get wealthy in imposing those things on indigenous peoples of course they just destroyed indigenous peoples and their nations and their way of life generally indigenous peoples suffered ninety percent or more  depopulation rate upon having contact with europeans it was a genocide war for territory because the europeans wanted to take the resources settler society has worked to destroy what it needs to live and that's suicidal it's a suicidal mission there's no way that it can be sustainable in the long term gillian absolutely john you're going to want to give us a call to get this beautiful hope diamond necklace this is a forty five point five two carat diamond surrounded by sixteen white diamonds it has a platinum chain bearing second i said okay do you pay rent he's like yeah i said why he said because i don't own i said no no no what would happen if you didn't pay rent he said well the sheriff would come and evict me i said i don't know what that  means what would happen he said well the sheriff would come and he would knock on the door i said okay great what happens if you open the door and you say hey i'm just finishing up making dinner you want some and the sheriff sits down you feed him you don't poison  it's the same guy who's going to come with a gun and take you away he's a real asshole isn't he so one of the reasons we don't see a lot of the violence is because it's exported another reason we don't see a lot of the violence is because we've been so metabolized into the system that we've bought into this strange notion that it's okay to have to pay to exist on the planet that's really really weird and if you don't pay then some guy with a gun is going to come and bad things are going to happen to you  ninety eight percent of the old growth forests are gone ninety nine percent of the prairies are gone eighty percent of the rivers on this planet do not support life anymore we are out of species we're out of soil and we are out of time and what we are being told by most of the environmental movement is that the way to stop all of this is through personal consumer choices by simply purchasing our product the consumer can make a small easy step to a greener  that one roll and buying that one roll you can help save millions of trees i think we can really look at the history of the environmental movement to tell us a lot about why it hasn't been working there was a lot of pretty radical and militant environmentalism happening especially in the 's and 's in a lot of ways that was kind of a heyday for environmentalism you know greenpeace was founded it started to become very mainstream in some quarters to be an environmentalist and then there was also a shift around that time when corporations realized that they could sell a lot of things by calling them green green washing is an attempt by corporations to put labels on their activity that are popular and  what they think is good and right and then their actions as a society or as a civilization especially as it relates to the natural world have a real problem with a lot of the solutions that are put forward by people because they confuse what is real with what is not real what they do is take the industrial economy as a given how can we save the industrial economy and oh it would be nice if club and the others is rooted in that very same cultural lie that nature is resources nature is things to be used and managed nature is as the philosopher martin heidegger put it just a vast gasoline station that we can endlessly extract from they may say we need to manage it more wisely but as long as they maintain the mindset that we are the lords of creation and creation exists for us as resources to be transformed into commodities for us to buy and sell as long as they maintain that perspective on what it means to be an environmentalist then they're working within the same framework of an ultimately self the marketplace is also going to be very important many cusomers have been pushing for change in the boreal forest the forest product association and its twenty one member companies are responding to the demand for greener products and that marketplace is going to pay close attention if the change isn't happening then they're going to put pressure on the parties who were part of the agreement the environmental organizations the forest products companies to do the things that they've set out to do and the will reward the companies someone else comes and tries to bully us the agreement actually requires that they come and work with us in repelling the attack and we'll be able to say fight me fight my gang i personally have no use for large institutionalized environmental organizations i think they're more of a problem than a help they're just eco bureaucracies and you know i won't name any because i don't like to badmouth organizations except for one which i feel that i can and that's greenpeace and the reason i can criticize greenpeace is i am a co creator of greenpeace and therefore i feel like doctor frankenstein sometimes and i feel that since i helped create the thing i can certainly criticize it and i think that greenpeace has become the world's biggest feel good organization now people join it to feel good to feel i'm part of the solution i'm not part of the problem greenpeace brings in close to three hundred dollars million a year and what do they do with that money generate more money and the people who are at the top of the totem pole now are not environmentalists they're fundraisers accountants they're lawyers they're businesspeople people are voting with their dollars at the checkout stands it's because they know the polling shows that the public cares and ultimately they're going to care about their profit margin and whether they can sell products ethics so what happened was there was direct action there were blockades there was an international market campaign that put a lot of pressure on the companies that were logging in the great bear rainforest but the end result was that it all fed into a closed door negotiation with tzeporah berman as chief negotiator on the conservationists side where a lot of the groups that actually did the work the direct actions and did the market campaigns were shut out of the process public oversight was removed and the protocol agreements that were signed with first nations and with conservation groups were basically shunted aside so the protocol agreements gave the negotiators a mandate to negotiate for forty to sixty percent conservation  but what happened was they agreed to twenty percent it's not strange to me when people tell me that the former president of greenpeace now works for the logging industry of canada the former president of greenpeace australia now works for the mining industry the former president which we'll be judged by those come after is the health of the land and the health of the water the health of the earth they're not going to give a shit as to whether we recycled they're not going to give a shit as to whether we wrote our legislators they're not going to give a shit as to how hard we tried what they're going to care about is whether they can breathe the air and drink the water whether the land will support them and they're not going to care how hard we tried they're not going to care about any of that what they're going to care about is do we live on a living planet so i don't know if you know this but the original draft of the movie star wars was not written by lucas the original draft was written by environmental one thing it wasn't actually called star wars it was called star non violent civil disobedience but the plot of star wars for those of you who don't remember is that the empire has created this giant machine called the death star and it's a machine that's and to blow up the death star once again the first draft of the movie written by environmentalists was a bit different the rebels didn't actually blow up the death star instead they used other methods to slow the intergalactic march of empire for doomed planets the purpose will be to show to one and all that these planets are economically important to the empire and so should not be destroyed in a surprise move that will get viewers to the edges of their seats other groups of rebels will file lawsuits against the empire attempting to show that the environmental impact statement that darth vader was required to file failed to adequately support its decision that blowing up this planet would cause no significant impact viewers will thrill to learn of plans to boycott items produced by corporations that have darth vader on the board of directors and they'll leap to their feet in theaters worldwide when they see bags full of letters written directly to mist himself asking that he please not blow up anymore planets now we all know that all would be enough not only to bring the empire to its knees but to make a damn fine and exciting movie the thing is there's more thousands of renegade rebels unhappy with what they perceive grand moff tarkin to whom they also send wave after wave of loving kindness a the few rebels sneak aboard the death star and lock themselves down to various pieces of equipment and stirring debates are held onscreen as to whether the rebels should voluntarily surrender on approach of the troopers or whether they should remain locked down to the end in a brilliant and brave touch of authenticity the rebels are never able to come to consensus but there's more once inside the death star a splinter group breaks off they burn a couple of transporters and they etch galaxy liberation front and then another group breaks off from that group and they finally make it to darth vader's private room and when they get there they sneak up behind him and then they hit him with a vegan cream pie and the directors decided to cut that because it was way too close to a scene in another movie they were developing at the same time called the plot to pie hitler as the death star looms directly overhead a few of the rebels advocate picking up weapons to fight back and those rebels are generally shouted down by pacifist rebels who argue that attacking those who run the death star is just another example of the empire's harmful philosophy coming in by the back door if we want to change darth vader they say we must all first become that change ourselves to change darth vader's heart we must first change our own we must above all else have compassion for darth vader and remember that he too was  those four from the room and from the film which is not a big deal because they are minor characters anyway but anyway the way the movie ends is that the death star looms closer and closer and then you see the death star and then you see the planet and then you see the death star and then you see the planet and then you see the death star and you see the laser start to glow this hellish red and then you see the planet again and you see this little light and what that is that's the environmentalists getting away before the planet gets blown up and then you see the death star again and then it blows up the planet and then the final shot of the movie which reveals what complete triumph this was for the rebels is a still showing an article on the lower left of page forty three of the new empire times that devotes a full three sentences to the destruction of the planet so it's like yeah we  life the public really needs to understand that no combination of alternative miracle fuels or biodiesel or ethanol or nuclear or sun or solar or used french fry potato oil no combination of these things is going to allow us to keep a happy motoring society going we are using up all the very easily accessed energy sources and we've really built this huge way of life based on cheap oil essentially the world as we know it which relies entirely on oil to function is nearing its end we are headed for the crash that oil is not going to come again sands are probably one of the biggest industrial projects in the history of mankind the tar sands are the largest most destructive environmental project on the planet right now it's oil extraction it's some of the dirtiest oil on the planet which means that it takes the most energy to extract and the reason that we're extracting this this particular brand of dirty dirty oil is because there's no other england is already considered the largest industrial project in human history and it's barely begun they extract it from the sand by steaming and heating water basically boiling it so  sand to produce one barrel of oil you have to first after you've cleared off the ground and broken all the trees down and so forth then dig a pit which can be up to two hundred feet deep for each barrel of oil there's four barrels of water used in a process called a slurry it was very very minor in terms of the energy that's inputted to actually get the crude oil out so the ratio that's most important to talk about is a ratio you could use in a country like iraq where for each barrel of oil you use to try to get more oil you'll get about a hundred through northern alberta where you have many different native communities living along the river  community has been seeing all of this rise in rare cancers autoimmune diseases arsenic in the land the moose meat the fish are at high levels of heavy metals mercuries basically the whole environment up there is contaminated how this is effecting my community is that it's killing off the people of fort chipewyan it's what i've called before a slow industrial genocide  fueling the second fastest rate of deforestation in the world outside of the amazon river basin they're already the second fastest contributor to climate change in north america and with the goals of production that they're talking about the co emissions will make it so the only way you desiring oil when we know so well that for example fresh water is just an elemental part of human existence and they're running full force towards extracting these last little bits of oil to sustain this plastic this is actually what it is it is the most insane thing that people are doing we probably agree that civilization's going to crash whether or not we help bring this about if you don't agree with this we probably have nothing to say to each other we probably also agree that this crash will be messy we agree further that since industrial civilization is systematically dismantling the ecological infrastructure of the planet the sooner civilization comes down whether or not we help it crash the more life will remain afterwards to support both humans and nonhumans the genesis of endgame the book was really because i did some talks around the possibility of fighting back and the response by the audience was really predictable if it was an audience made up of sort of mainstream environmentalists and  and social justice activists often they would put up what i've taken to calling a gandhi shield which is they would say the names martin luther king dalai lama and gandhi again and again as fast as they can to keep all evil thoughts at bay and if it was grassroots environmentalists they would do the same thing but then they would come up to me afterwards and they would say whispering thank you so much for bringing especially in north america the pacifists and non violent advocates have had a very defining role and even a censoring role in determining what other people's participation can be in a whole range of social struggles  and that the way that they've affected social struggles has made it very much easier for the state to control those social struggles that non violence plays a function of recuperating social struggles of taking out their teeth and making them harmless so that they can just exist in this cesspool of democratic i wonder what happens to that kind of energy or idealism or faith that something is about to change when it's certainly not going to change at all what are the false hopes that keep us tied to the system what are the false the white house things are going to be ok we've got a couple of myths on the left that i would really encourage us to get over the first is that social change happens by moral suasion it doesn't it happens by force problem with persuasion as a strategy is that it only works on people who can actually be convinced and who can be relied upon to act from their position after their minds have been changed and the problem is that we're not dealing with individuals who can be convinced or persuaded we're dealing mostly with large abstract social organizations and corporations which are basically sociopaths made out of huge numbers of people you can't argue with psychopaths you can't argue with fascists and you can't argue with those who are benefiting from an economic system you have to stop them through some form of force and that force can means the left to a large extent subconsciously has as its primary role to make resistance harmless states have recognized that resistance will never disappear that struggles will never disappear and in the past they tried suppressing struggles the first time that they showed their heads that there was any sign of them and that proved ineffective so nowadays that way that states rule is by accepting inevitability of conflict and resistance and just trying to manage it permanently imposed by the middle class reformists who want to control the movement and dictate how it conducts itself advocates of nonviolence frequently say that nonviolence works and the principal examples that they use of that are gandhi in india and martin luther king in the u s the problem with that is this constitutes a really great historical whitewashing that in fact the resistance in india was incredibly diverse and gandhi was a very important figure within that resistance but the resistance was by no means pacifist in its entirety gandhi gets used as a way to shut down conversation especially in the of resistance for years i really bought into the whole gandhian myth that is really sort of forced down the throats of activists in the united states and the people who disabused me of that myth were when i first actually met some people from india the people i talked to certainly didn't deify him and many of them despised him and they felt he was a collaborator and he was somebody whom the british could work with very well known in the west but when you go to india there's a freedom fighter and revolutionary leader called bhagat singh who's in india probably almost as well known as gandhi as a part of the independence movement and a leader in the independence movement but in the west most people probably have never heard his name and the reason why that is is that he used direct action tactics there were generals of the british army that were killed there was a bomb thrown in a british assembly to basically attract the attention of the public there were weapons that people were getting off of railway cars with gandhi and the indian national congress where you had the moderates and the extremists the moderates were legal constitutional reform was their only method and they were criticized for being a middle class clique for being too slow for being too legalistic and for being basically ineffective the extremists on the other hand were accused of being too aggressive of being too fast and reckless and irresponsible gandhi basically got negotiating power from the fact that there were other elements in the struggle which were even more threatening to british dominance so the british specifically chose to dialogue with gandhi because he was perhaps for them the least threatening the important elements of resistance gandhi came in as being the middleman his theory of nonviolent passive resistance seemed to be a bridge between the extremists and the moderates the british were bled white my problem isn't with somebody doing nonviolent actions it never has been i mean i say all the time that we need it all my problem is that so many pacifists especially in the united states end up not supporting more radical or militant work the problem when this debate comes up is that you can't just assume that people that are resisting and are using a means of resistance haven't thought about what they're doing and that's what i think is often the problem when people decide to take certain actions and when people decide that hey you know our marches aren't enough or they're doing this or doing that there's this assumption by a lot of people that want to toe the gandhi line that oh they're just not thinking about it what most states will choose to do in similar circumstances is to find the elements of the resistance that are most easy to control and most easy to co opt to negotiate with them and then to hand over power to them in order to continue the system that had already existed so again you have the state doing the same thing it did with gandhi and martin luther king it does with for example the environmental movement so it invites the responsible leaders of the environmental movement into inquiries government commissions debates it recognizes them they're the legitimate leaders because again it doesn't want the movement to begin to adopt more militant resistance tactics the powerful do not ever give up without a struggle those are the famous words of frederick douglass when he said power concedes nothing without a demand it never has and it never will if we use more efficient electricity appliances we can save this much off of the global warming pollution that would otherwise be put into the atmosphere if we use other end use efficiency this much if we have higher mileage cars this much and all these begin to add up other transport efficiency renewable technology we have everything we need save perhaps political will but you know what in america political will is a renewable resource when we see solutions all the so called solutions put forward to global warming the thing they all have in common is that they take industrial civilization as a given and they take the natural world as the dependent variable it's all about saving civilization and that's entirely backwards what it should be is we need to do whatever it takes to save life on the planet in the next forty to fifty years we're going to see the extinction of more species than we've seen in the past sixty five million years that to me is a red light and a siren going off as a call to people who will cut through the crap and do what is necessary to protect the earth for here and now and for future generations it is you that are going to have to answer to your children years from now when they ask what you did during the eco wars and in that sense each one of us has to live the life today at this very moment doing the things that we would be proud to  are serious about saving life on earth we've got to start fighting back in the ways that people do when they realize they need to form a serious resistance movement most indigenous populations who maintain any sense of a traditional worldview know that the way of life that settlers society has imposed on this land is unsustainable yet there has been a sense that we really need to kind of wait until it collapses or wait until they're done doing or they've reached their limit and they can't continue the way that they've been going on and be patient fuck  i think really the big problem is power and that's something liberals have a lot of trouble kind of thinking about or wrapping their heads around and the problem is that this culture has clearly defined hierarchy there are people who are clearly in power and who benefit from power and benefit from destroying the planet and who benefit from exploiting other people and they've been doing that for a long time and their power is more important to them than anything else there is no personal consumer choice that is going to dismantle the systems of power that are behind the destruction of our planet what we need is organized political resistance you cannot just simply ask the state for these reforms or for any kind of gains or concessions you have to force them to do it and that's the power of disruption it was a bloody day at the mohawk indian community in oka quebec near montreal provincial police in riot gear storm the barricades the mohawks had set up there were clouds of tear gas a hail of bullets and in the midst of the battle a policeman was killed all this because of a dispute over a piece of forest the indians claim is theirs a forest town council wants to bulldoze to expand the local golf course police retreated as abruptly as they'd attacked leaving behind their cruisers they also left a heavy front end loader which the mohawks immediately put to their own use the police cruisers crushed and useless became barricades themselves we treat these trees and the land like our mother these people are raping our mother what would you do if they raped your mother these politicians are servants of the system it's their job to keep it going it's their job to keep profit rolling in for the ruling class and they will never ever act in the people's interests or the interests of the planet it doesn't matter what we say the only thing that they will respond to is force and the threat of social disruption and if we allow them to stay in power they will always take back any gain that we manage to get from them it's really important to recognize that no struggle is done that there's not any possibility of any lasting victory as long as the state still exists but we can definitely see in the histories of struggle small gains have been won and ways in which we've empowered ourselves by the use of all tactics and i think it's not even important to  really say if a particular tactic is violent or not because this is just kind of a moral category meant to restrict action i think it's more important to look at which tactics can be empowering and liberating and useful  purely above ground means are designed to facilitate the expansion of global capitalism these are serious power structures that are making vast sums of money they are backed up by the power of the armed state in every way imaginable they've got armies on their side they own the mass media the banks all the money is on their side if there's any doubt about the leadership that our military is showing you just need to look at this f eighteen fighter and the light armored vehicle behind it the army and marine corps have been testing this vehicle on a mixture of biofuels and this navy fighter jet appropriately called the green hornet will be flown for the first time in just a few days on earth day thing and they'll have to do the right thing by breaking the law and that precedent has been set many times throughout our history the people who saved the jews from the german nazis broke the law for higher ethical purpose the people who liberated slaves in our country through the underground railroad system to protect them from slave masters and a very barbaric law in the united states at that time they did the right thing they broke the law for higher ethical purpose we need to start and get out there and go beyond hitting like on facebook and signing online petitions we need to be out there in the real world fighting back i think one of the things that we really have to accept and internalize is that the majority of institutions and the majority of people are never going to be on our side and so we have to sit down as individual activists and as communities of resistance as a culture of resistance and we have to say okay well what will it take to stop this culture from destroying the planet you know part of the answer is obviously that persuasion hasn't worked and persuasion is not going to work if we want to be successful then we have to look at what resistance movements in the past have done and what they've learned and kind of the different phases that they've gone through as they've tried to assert themselves and try to be successful when i say organize political resistance i mean we need to face power head on once you name power you will find that the people in charge will do whatever it takes to shut you up the thing about when you enter into a greater period of social conflict what you don't want is people promoting non violence because that's going to disarm the people it's going to disarm the people in the face of an aggressive enemy and in the face of hard social conditions you want them to have a stronger fighting spirit because without a fighting spirit you lack the will to resist a cattle car or do you want to resist and possibly get killed you want to take a shower or do you want to resist and possibly get killed at every step of the way it was in their rational self interest to not resist but i'll tell you something very important the culture of industrial civilization as if it's a culture of occupation because  vi if nazis or other fascists took over north america what if this occupied country called itself a democracy but most everyone understood elections to be shams with citizens allowed to choose between different wings of the same fascists or following mussolini corporate party what if anti government activity was opposed by storm troopers and secret police would you fight back if there already existed a resistance movement would you join it would you resist if the fascists irradiated the countryside poisoned food supplies made rivers unfit for swimming and so filthy you wouldn't even dream of drinking from anymore give me a threshold give me a specific point at which you'll finally take a stand if you can't or won't give that threshold why not