This is a fantastic book with a very powerful and necessary message. I can’t be in the DGR organization because we disagree about trans people, but agree with many things in this book.

• we must put our bodies and our lives between the industrial system and life on this planet. we must start to fight back. those who come after, who inherit whatever’s left of the world once this culture has been stopped – whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men resisting in alliance with the natural work – are going to judge us by the health of the land base, by what we leave behind. they’re not going to care how you or i lived our lives. they’re not going to care how hard we tried. they’re not going to care whether we were nice people. they’re not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent. they’re not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet. they’re not going to care whether we were enlightened or not. they’re not going to care what sort of excuses we had to not act (e.g. “I’m too stressed to think about it,” or “It’s too big and scary,” or “I’m too busy,” or “But this in power will kill us if we effectively act against them,” or “If we fight back, we run the risk of becoming like they are,” or “But i recycled,” or any of a thousand other excuses we’ve all heard too many times). They’re not going to care how simply we lived. They’re not going to care if we became the change we wished to see. They’re not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all. They’re not going to care if we wrote really big books about it. They’re not going to care whether we had “compassion” for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy.
  They’re going to care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. We can fantasize all we want about some great turning, but if the people (including the nonhuman people) can’t breath, it doesn’t matter. 
• civilization
• • mechanization has centralized political and economic power by moving the means of production beyond the scale at which human communities function equitably and democratically.
  • Collapse is the typical, not exception, outcome for a civilization
  • most political and corporate leaders are interchangeable, replaceable components.
  • researchers at Cornell University blamed 40 percent of all human deaths on water, air and soil pollution. (Science Daily, “Pollution causes 40 percent of deaths worldwide, study finds”)
  • there are more humans on the planet than the planet can support (industrial or otherwise). when drawdown mechanisms cease, we – especially our hypothetical children – will all have to deal with the consequences.
  • indigenous
  • • indigenous peoples have said that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded Westerners view listening to the natural world as a metaphor as opposed to the way the world really works.
    • they (indigenous cultures) figured out something very simple: they recognize that humans are both social creatures and selfish, and they merge selfishness and altruism by praising behaviors that benefit the group as a whole and disallowing the behaviors that benefit the individual at the expense of the group. the bad cultures socially reward behavior that benefits the individual at the expense of the group. if you reward behavior that benefits  the group, that’s the sort of behavior you will get. if you reward behavior that is selfish, acquisitive, that’s the behavior you will get. this is behavior modification 101.
  • any way of life based on the importation of resources is also functionally based on violence, because if your way of life requires the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable.
  • “an enormous portion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights and destructive of the common happiness of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property”
  • defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it.
  • the stories and myths of a culture provide the matrix for the possible, and only the extraordinary individuals are able to break out of their surrounding context
  • a sustanable and just society cannot be a consumer society, it cannot be driven by market forces, it must have relatively little international trade and no economic growth at all, it must be made up mostly of small local economies, and its driving values cannot be competition and acquisitiveness
  • fish, 90% gone; forests, 98% gone; prairies, 99% gone.
  • hierarchy requires authority, which promotes symmetry, which causes rigidity. the result is awkward, reactionary, and (most importantly) insensitive – and thus inhumane.
  • As both federal and state governments have amply shown, you cannot regulate an abomination. you have got to stop it – wendell berry
  • brining down civilization means depriving the rich of their abiliy to seal from the poor and it means depriving the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet – derrick jensen
    it means thoroughly destroying the political, social, physical, and technological infrastructure that not only permits the rich to steal and the powerful to destroy, but rewards them for doing so.
  • for many people the only inescapable empirical demonstration of the dominant systems’ fundamental unsustainablity would be the collapse of that system.
  • [study where other members of group give wrong answer] some 25 percent of the participants refused to conform in every trial, but 75 percent of the participants gave the consensus answer at least once. interviewing the participants afterward, Asch found that most people saw the lines correctly, but felt that since the rest of the group was in consensus, they themselves must be wrong.
  • those in power constantly promise – or more subtly, imply by their inaction – that everything is fine. that mass poverty is not a problem. that global warming is not an emergency. they claim that people who do talk about such problems are “fear mongers,” and act as though acknowledging the serious global problems they cause would cause chaos and mass panic.
  • the economy has become less equitable, even though the middle rungs of income now have a higher “standard of living.” and all of this is based on a system that systematically destroys natural biomes and rapidly draws down finite resources. it’s not that everyone is getting and equal slice of the pie, or even that the pie is bigger now. if we’re getting more pie, it’s largely because we’re eating tomorrow’s pie today. and next wee’s pie, and next month’s pie.
  • the only reason large scale agriculture even functions is because of cheap oil; without that, large-scale agriculture goes back to depending on slavery and serfdom, as in most of the history of civilization. in the year 1800, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, close to 80 percent of the huan population of this planet was in some from of serfdom or slavery. and that was with a fraction of the current human population of seven billion. that was with the oceans still relatively full of fish, global forests still relatively intact, with prairie and agriculture lands in far better condition than they are now, with water tables practically brimming by modern standards. what do you think is going to happen to social justice concessions when cheap oil – and hence, almost everything else – runs out? without a broad-based and militant resistance movement that can forucs on these urgent threats, the year 1800 is going to look downright cheerful.
  • when someone says, “A lot of people are going to die,” we’ve got to talk about which people. people all over the world are already enduring famines, but for the most part they are not dying of starvation; they’re dying of colonialism, because their land and their economies have been stolen.
  • Collapse, in the most general terms, is a rapid loss of complexity. it is a shift toward smaller and more decentralized structures – social, political, economic – with less social stratification, regulation, behavioral control and regimentation, and so on.
  • Civilizations tend to try and use complexity to address problems,a and as a result their complexity increases over time.
    But complexity has a cost. the decline of a civilization begins when the costs of complexity begin to exceed the benefits – in other words, when increased complexity begins to offer declining returns, at that point, individual people, families, communities, and political and social subunits have a disincentive to participate in that civilization. the complexity keeps increasing, yes, but it keeps getting more expensive. eventually the ballooning costs force that civilization to collapse, and people fall back on smaller and more local political organizaion and social groups.
    part of the job of the resistance movement is to increase the cost and decrease the returns of empire-scale complexity. this doesn’t require instantaneous collapse or global dramatic actions. even small actions can increases the cost of complexity and accelerate the good parts of collapse while tempering the bad.
  • the day-to-day workings of civilization are worse than a nuclear catastrophe. it would be hard to do worse than Chernobyl
  • “The roots abuse are ownership, the truck is entitlement, and the branches are control”
  • remember that the poor are impoverished because the rich are stealing from them. on our planet right now, the wealthiest 20 percent (that would include you and me) account for 76.6 percent of all private consumption. the poorest fifth get just 1.5 percent. the authors of this book have been accused of suggesting genocide: meanwhile, the genociede is happening now. anything that stops the rich can only ease the burdens on the poor, including the burden of starvation.
• ineffective solutions
• • many ineffective suggested solutions are primarily based on token, symbolic, or trivial actions, and a superficial approach. These kinds of solutions are what William R. Catton Jr. calls “cosmeticisms” – “faith that relatively superficial adjustments in our activities” will keep the industrial age going – and they result from an acknowledgement of the fact that industrial civilization is destroying the world, but a refusal to accept the full implications of this problem. through changing compact fluorsents may offer some relief from guilt, to consider that as any kind of a meaningful solution is to ignore the nature of our predicament.
  • Doctors at Auschwitz: they never questioned the existence of Auschwitz itself. They never questioned working the inmates to death. (they advocated for slightly better conditions for inmates)
  • unlike in Europe, there is no real left in the US, as a true left starts with the rejection of capitalism. there is no political party in the US that represents a critique of capitalism. congress is essentially filled with two wings of the Capitalist Party.
  • After the disaster of the Great Depression, liberalism shifted to the idea of government intervention to regulate business in order to assure competition and to enforce safety and labor standards. this was an attempt to make capitalism work, not to dismantle it.
  • at this moment, the liberal basis of most progressive movements is impeding our ability, individually and collectively, to take action. the individualism of liberalism, and of American society generally, renders too many of us unable to think clearly about our dire situation.
  • this in no way implies that individuals are exempt from examine their privilege and behaving honorably. it does mean that antiracism workshops will never end racism: only political struggled to rearrange the fundamentals of power will
  • it is not the lack of examples of sustainable, egalitarian, and peaceful cultures that is the problem and it never has been. the problem is power, and the bottomless well of psycopahtology that is eating the planet alive.
  • withdrawal
  • • p. 84
    • individualist withdrawal: the claim is that our political institution will never respond, and all we can do is prepare ourselves as individuals and maybe as local communities as the system collapses. if our political institutions aren’t working, then we need new ones.
    • a wholesale rejection of leadership means a movement will be stuck at a level of ineffective small groups. it may feel radical but it will change nothing.
    • anti political OIMBYs (only in my backyard)
  • few abolitionist would have suggested that when refraining from personally owning slaves they were posing a serious or fundamental threat to the institution of slavery.
  • they believed, as liberals usually do, that the oppressive horrors perpetrated by those in power were mostly a misunderstanding (rather than an interlocking system of power that rewarded the oppressors for evil). so, of course, they believed that they could correct the mistake by politely arguing their case.
  • well-meaning personal conservation may simply make suppies more available to those would would put them to the worst use
  • it won’t matter if you are the most sustainable eco-village on the planet if you live next door to an externally resource-huntry fascist state
  • the individual has never been the target of any liberation movement for the simple reason that it’s not a feasible strategy
• Oppression
• •  “There can be no really pervasive system of oppression, without the consent of the oppressed.” This does not mean that it is our fault, that the system will crumble if we withdraw consent, or that the oppressed are responsible for their oppression. All it means is that the powerful – capitalists, white supremacists, colonialists, masculinists – can’t stand over vast numbers of people twenty-four hours a day with guns. luckily for them and depressingly for the rest of us, they don’t have to.
  • Andra Dworkin’s 4 elements of subordination: p. 72
  • overcoming learned helplessness is all about understanding and explaining the source of the trauma. people who believed their problems were pervasive, permanent (“things have always been this way, and they always will be”), and personal (“it’s all my fault”) were much more likely to suffer from learned helplessness and depression.
  • again and again, whenever privileged people have tried to ally themselves with oppressed people, we have seen this phenomenon at work. seemingly ignorant of the daily vioence perpetrated by the dominant culture, many people of privilege have wandered off into a strategic and nautical Neverland, which is based off their own personal wishes about how resistance out to be, rather than a hard strategy that is designed to be effective and that draws on the experience of oppressed peoples and their long history of resistance. sometimes the people of privilege listen and learn, and sometimes they don’t.
  • rape and domestic abuse are terrorism; they’re senseless and unprovoked acts of violence against unarmed civilizations, designed to threaten and terrorize women (and men) into compliance.
• Strategy
• • Things to ask ourselves: Does this initiative redistribute power, not just change who is at the top of the pyramid? does it take away the rights of the oppressors and reestablish the rights of the dispossessed? does it let people control more of the material conditions of their lives? dies it name and redress a specific harm? we can stand on the sidelines with a more-radical-than-thou attitude, but attitude will not help a single gasping salmon or invested girl child.
  • is this action tactically sound? does it advance our goal of saving the planet? or does it simply answer an emotional need to do something, to feel something?
  • the four main categories of action discussed here – legal remedies, direct action, withdrawal, and spirituality – can be taken up by either liberals or radicals. what defines all four of these categories as liberal or radical is how they are used. it’s the ultimate goal that will dictate their strategic use, and it’s the goal that’s either liberal or radical.
  • remember, there are no individual solutions to political problems, not ever.
  • As progressives seem content to swap seeds or wring their hands over the collapse of hope and change, the Second Vermont Republic is building a viable movement to withdraw from the United States and create “a moral, sovereign, and sustainable commonwealth of Vermont towns.”
    they’re quite clear as to the reasons. “The United States leadership is no longer amenable to change through representational democracy. It is bent to the desk of preservation of a doomed idea. our elates are committed to full spectrum dominance on the world stage, to a zero-sum game they’re determined to ‘win’ at all costs, a cost of millions of lives and trillions of dollars, in order to preserve for themselves a moribund ‘American way of life’. [p. 233]
  • • somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 worlds as a district size for direct democratic voting. larger than that, the political process must refer to representative democracy. representatives of fifty to one hundred districts are workable for nations, which means an upper limit of 1 million citizens.
    • such models are not, in fact, in short supply. all that we are missing is peo[le willing to believe in the possibilities and to fight for them.
  • Q: how can i do something to help bring down civilization and not just throw my life away in a useless act? p. 275
  • “keeping non-violent discipline is neither an arbitrary nor primarily a moralistic choice. it advances the conduct of strategy
  • “lack of persistence, a major cause of failure in nonviolent conflict, is often the product of a short-term perspective”
  • Napoleon said that “the whole art of war consists of a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive followed by rapid and audacious attack
  • aboveground and underground groups need each other, and they must work in tandem, both organizationally and strategically. it’s a major strategic error for any faction – aboveground or underground – to dismiss the other half of their movement.
  • Brown’s problem, as with many of those who fight injustice, was that we was simply too nice, even when dealing with vicious oppressors. brown himself realized this too late. on the day he was hanged  he wrote the following: “I, John Brown, am not quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. i had, as i now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”
  • evaluating strategy: p. 385
• tactics
• • A Taxonomy of action: p. 243
  • The word strike comes from eighteenth-century English sailors, who struck(removed) their ship’s sails and refused to go to see.
  • “we must spread our principles, now with words but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda” (Bakunin) the intent of the deed is not to commit a symbolic act to get attention, but to carry out a genuinely meaningful action that will serve as an example to others.
  • timid attacks may strengthen the resolve of the enemy, because they constitute a provocation but don’t significantly damage the physical capability or morale of the occupier
• violence
• • i would urge the following distinctions: the violence of hierarchy vs. the violence of self-defense, violence against people vs. violence against property, and the violence as self-actualization vs the violence for political resistance.
  • breakdown of different types of violence: p.80
  • historical strikers often had a pragmatic attitude toward the use of violence. even if opposed to violence, historical strikers planned to defend themselves out of necessity.
  • in resistance movements, offensive violence is rare – virtually all vionce used by historical resistance groups, from revolting slaves to escaping concentration cam prisoiners to women shooting abusive partners, is a response to greater violence from power, and so is both justifiable and defensive.
  • the purpose is to reduce the capacity of those in power to do further violence
  • as we’ve said many times, the incredible level of day-to-day violence inflicted by this culture on human beings and on the natural world means that to refrain from fighting back will not prevent violence. it simply means that those in power will direct their violence at different people and over a much longer period of time. the question, as ever, is which particular strategy – violent or not – will actually work.
  • though only a decade earlier they were taking oaths never to use force, white abolitionists came to agree that use of lethal force against slave catchers, in self-defense, was morally justified.
  • For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon – nelson mandela
  • Sometimes allowing a machine to operate can be more violent than sabotaging it
  • Remember that in North America, 40 percent of all food is simply wasted. of course, poverty and hunger have much more to do with power over people than with the kind of power measured in watts. even now at the peak of energy consumption, a billion people go hungry. so if people are hungry or cold because of selective militant attacks on infrastructure, that will be a direct result of the actions of those in power, not of the resisters.
  • the divide between militance and nonviolence does not have to destroy the possibility of joint action
• resistance
• • Now, when i talk about a resistance, i’m talking about an organized political resistance. i’m not just talking about something that comes and something that goes. i’m not talking about a feeling. i’m not talking about having your heart in the way things should be and going through a regular day having good, decent, wonderful ideas in your heart. i’m talking about when you put your body and your mind on the line and commit yourself to years of struggle in order to change the society in which you live. this does not mean just changing the mind who you know so that their manners will get better – although that wouldn’t be bad either… But that’s not what a politcia resistance is. a political resistance goes on day and night, under cover and over ground, where people can see it and where people can’t. it is passed from generation to generation. it is taught. it is encouraged. it is celebrated. it is smart. it is savvy. it is committed. and someday it will win. it will win. 
  • Resistance is a simple concept: power, unjust and immoral, is confronted and dismantled. the powerful are denied their right to hurt the less powerful. domination is replaced by equality in a shift or substitution of institutions. that shift eventually forms new human relationships, both personally and across society
  • The spirit of the movement was wonderful. it was joyous and grave at the same time. self seemed to be laid down as the women join us. loyalty that greatest of virtues, was the keynote of the movement – first to the cause, then to those who were leading, and member to member.
  • “the very fact that militant action involved individual sacrifice imposed heavy responsibilities upon the leaders of the campaign. individuals who were ready to make the sacrifices that militantcy had entailed had to be sustained by the assurance of complete unity within the ranks
  • People need a mythic matrix that includes a narrative of courage in the face of power, loyalty to comrades and cause, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. they need the emotional support of a functioning community that believes in resistance. and they need an intellectual atmosphere that encourages analysis, discussion, and the development of political consciousness.
  • a culture of resistance believes in resistance because no amount of love or compassion or earnest education, no shining example of communal sustainability or individual self-respect has ever stopped the powerful.
  • however long the odds, life will life, and people will fight
  • the odds are longer now than they’ve ever been, a shadow stretched with vanishing species and rising carbon. But there are warriors who might yet throw their bodies between the last of our future and its destroyers, if only they have a viable strategy and visible support. so the question is: Will the rest of us help them? will we throw our lot with them, speak in their defense, shelter them in danger, sing songs of their stories, raise our children to take their place, prepare the way for their victory, claim them as our bravest and brightest?
    another 200 species went extinct today. make your choice
  • even though the Nazi state was doomed, the efforts to bring down this evil regime must continue because it was daily murdering more innocent victims. the current vicimizzaiton of both human and nonhuman creatures is an order of magnitude larger, which should imply that our moral responsibility is that much greater.
  • every resistance victory has been won by blood and tears with anguish and sacrifice. our burden is the knowledge that there are only so many ways to resist, that these ways have already been invented, and they all involve profound and dangerous struggle. when the resisters win, it is because they fight harder than they though possible.
  • people can take riskier (and more effective) action if they know that they are their families will be supported.
  • when the whole planet is being destroyed, your inaction will not save you. we must choose the larger life. we must choose to do what is right to protect the planet. it is our only home
  • contesting or disobeying a law on an individual basis is not the same as challenging the authority that makes those laws
  • i wish we had the luxury to worry about whether civilization will rise again in the future, but we don’t have that luxury. right now, we need to stop this culture from killing the planet and let the people who come after worry about whether it’s going to rise again.
  • “you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most prutal facts of your current reality”
  • Thoreau in defense of John Brown: “i hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?” (now is a good time to ask that question of ourselves and our allies, especially if we are waiting for someone else to act.)
  • when a destructive system is deeply entrenched, and when average people are isolated from the costs of that system, real change doesn’t come just from speeches. real change happens – and can only happen – when that system is broken down by force. then the oppressed gain the breathing room needed to fight back, and the apathetic can get their first look at that system’s real face
  • one of the most important jobs of radicals is to push actions across the line from underground to aboveground. that way, more people and larger organizations are able to use what was once a fringe tactic
  • some presume that Malcolm X’s “anger” as ineffective compared to King’s more “reasonable” and conciliatory position. that couldn’t be further from the truth. it was Malcolm X who made King’s demands seem eminently reasonable, by pushing the boundaries of what the status quo would consider extreme.
  • To gain what is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else – Bernadette Delvin, Irish activist and politician
  • whatever work you are called to do, the world can wait no longer. power in all its version – the arrogant, the sadistic, the stupid – is poised to kill every last living being. if we falter, it will win. gather your heart and all its courage; fletch love into an arrow that will not bend; and take aim.
• what a resistance would look like – practical
• • we need to be discussing resistance and we need to be discussing it openly.one of the absolutely necessary precursors to resistance is to talk about it. this has been true of every resistance movement in the past and it will be true as long as there are restance movements. we use put all the options on the table and discuss them openly, honestly, earnestly.
  • solid recruitment overcomes the bystander effect by addressing specific people and giving them specific means to act.
  • the ANC preferred to militarize radicals, rather than radicalize militants
  • decision making structures: p. 308
  • handling guns is important in demystifying them
  • even people participating in outwardly innocuous actions are vulnerable to malicious persecution, as long as that action is effective or perceived as a thereat by those in power.
  • security: “If an agent knocks: federal investigators and your rights” or “Operation backfire: a survival guide for environmental and animal rights activists”
  • it is important to recognize that the purpose of security culture isn’t to make people fee “safe” (since working against those in power never is), it’s to make people more effective. People can’t be very effective if they’re in jail or caught up in the courts.
  • Principles of War and Strategy: p. 356
  • if someone would have taken out some important piece of infrastructure in years past, those in power would have been able to replace it. but now the governments of the world don’t have the money. they more they spend on rebuilding, the less primary damage they can do.
  • never engage in any operation unless you think success is certain. Small resistance units don’t have the numbers or morale to absorb unnecessary losses.
  • “most people will struggle and sacrifice only for goals that are concrete enough to be reasonably attainable.” As such, if the ultimate strategic goal is something that would requirer a prolonged and ongoing effort, the strategy should be subdivided into multiple intermediate goals. these goals help the resistance movement to evaluate its own success, grow support and improve morale, and keep the movement on course in terms of its overall strategy.
  • “The tendency to view the dominant power as omnipotent can be undermined by a steady stream of modest, concrete achievements. “
  • the 5 big strategic failures of resistance groups:
  • • a failure to adhere to the principles of asymmetric struggle
    • a faliure to divise a consistent strategy and goal
    • an inappropriate excess of hope; ignoring the scope of the problem
    • a failure to adequately negotiate the relationship between aboveground and underground operations
    • an unwillingness or inability to use the required tactics.
  • a resistance movement that is fighting to win considers every operation and every tactic it can possibly employ.
  • we must make sure that certain ideas are in place before [collapse]. that’s why we have emphasized zero tolerance for horizontal hostility, zero tolerance for violence against women, zero tolerance for racism . because as civic society collapses – no matter the cause of this collapse – men will rape more, and the time to defend against that is not then, but now.
  • after collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.
  • our activists are not trying to change consciousness. they’re not trying to get press. they’re not after a new government or a seat at a political table. they rare trying to stop the burning of fossil fuels and industrial-scale destruction of the life-support systems of their planet. that is the goal of DGR, and DEW is their strategy
  • the infrastructure of industrial civilization is both vulnerable and accessible, but the environmental movement is not used to think in terms of infastructiore. this is the language of war, not petitions. but it is long past time for this war to have two sides. to date, environmentalist have not suggested the level of engagement that we’re discussing here, though surely in the long hours between midnight and down others have longed for it.
  • vision of the start of resistance: p. 504
• world we want
• • what would it be like if police and prosecutors were not enforcing the dictates of distant corporations instead of the wised of the local communities. what if they were enforcing cancer-free zones? or clear-cut-free zones? or rape-free zones? and then everyone laughed, because everyone knows it’s not going to happen. but what if we in our communities started to form community defense groups and said, “this is going to be a ___-free zone”. what would happen if we did that?
  • Our Best Hope: p. 477
• other
• • Even a broken heart is still made of love