Resist or Die

Dokumentaalfilmid

- People often say that

there's a war against nature

and that this is

the third world war.

- It's getting more stark;

it's getting worse and

the rate of change is accelerating,

whether we're talking about the

extinction of species or

the thoroughness of the techno-culture.

- The world right now is,

frankly, very frightening.

For what we consider

to be industrial civilization,

I would say is extraordinarily uncivilized,

actually quite savage.

- It's not an exaggeration

to say that we're

living in an ecological apocalypse.

- Between years 1980 and 2045

we will lose more species

of plants and animals than

we have lost in the

last 65 million years.

We have two big-picture

time pressures that really mean

we should be acting a lot

more urgently than most of us have.

And one of them is peak oil,

or energy collapse,

and one of them is climate change,

or runaway global warming.

- I think that most 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 one 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 10 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 enforcing their power.

- The whole climate is

changing: the winds,

the ocean currents,

the storm patterns,

snow pack, snow melt,

flooding, droughts.

GAME OVER

Somewhere in northern California

- It's stunning how fast

the destruction is proceeding.

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".

But it's statements like these

that make him so controversial:'

They're thinking of raising

the Shasta Dam in California,

and the reason that

Senator Feinstein gave was…

"It is Californians' God-given

right to water their lawns."

You know, there is no way

to argue with that…

…except with explosives.

'That was Mr. Jensen in 2006, the same year

he published a two-volume set called 'Endgame.'

In 'Endgame' , he argues that there is an

urgent need to bring down civilization.'

- If people would have brought down

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…

…that killed salmon, and

those dams were used for barging,

and for electricity, for alumninum

smelters for beer cans, so

God damn you."

He lays out his case against

civilization by enumerating 20 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-life examples.

Premise I

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 won't last.

But what is civilization?

Civilization 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.

If you require the importation of resources,

it means you've denuded the landscape

of that particular resource.

- 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.

- We've poured 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 sustainable,

I don't believe there ever has been one.

Technology, at its essence,

is really our culture's…

…determination,

that comes from certain

philosophical and historical sources,

that we will be nothing else

but more relentlessly technological.

- 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 visibly, 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.

Figure 1

- The first written myth of this culture

is Gilgamesh deforesting the plains

and hillsides of Iraq.

When people think of Iraq,

what's the first thing they normally

think of? Cedar forests so thick

that sunlight never

touches the ground?

That's how it was, prior to the

arrival of this culture.

Clearcuts

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.

I've 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 clearcut is.

They use them for pulp;

they export them whole

to the United States and to Japan.

There's not very much milling

that happens anymore in BC,

it's just getting exported for pulp and paper

and fibreboard, and plywood, and whatever else.

Not a lot of value added.

This tree has been

selected to be cut and

usually the company will only clearcut

but this tree is in what they call

a stream-side selection zone.

they've got it marked blue,

because it's 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.

- There's still a strong push to harvest

as much of the western

red cedar as they can.

They're bringing in huge

helicopters to do that.

And they're high-grading…

…selecting only the really

good, high-quality timber

and leaving the rest laying there…

…in a junk heap.

So, that's why we keep on,

you know, fighting back.

I think the last straw was when

they wanted to log the Valley of Ista

because of its historical and

spiritual significance to our people.

But they log it in spite, you know,

just to make a point

against our resistance, against our

our overall position,

you know, with regard to treaties

or encroachment of industry development

in our territories.

- In a lot of these areas,

like this clearing behind me

up on the hill,

you can see the soil is exposed,

the ultraviolet kills

off all the mosses,

the funguses that hold

the soil together.

When 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 out the

guts of the land

looking for copper and gold.

And…

… this has to have some

kind of focus to it…

…to address the

injustice to our people,

the injustice to the land,

to the water,

to the wildlife;

the injustice to the

marine life and the salmon life.

And the injustice to the people

that want to stand up for it.

- 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.

Premise II

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.

It follows 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 affirming all of that.

- 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.

- The 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 12,500 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,

any 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 were equal to us.

We weren't about dominating.

- The spiritual relationship

that our peoples had

prior to invasion

with all of creation,

and recognizing that

all beings have a 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 creation.

They made us many promises,

more than I can remember,

but they never kept but one;

they promised to take our land,

and they took it.

-Red Cloud

When Europeans came to this land

it was with…

such a rapacious appetite

it still has not been sated.

- 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.

- The 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.

And the smallpox was vicious,

very vicious.

- When Europeans came,

much of what they

were interested in was

rapid resource exploitation.

They wanted to get

wealthy in the new world.

And as they were seeking that wealth,

they 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

90% 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.

Premise III

- I gave a talk in Oregon a couple years ago,

and this guy afterwards said,

"You know, you talk a lot about

this culture being based

on violence, but I don't see it,

you know, I'm not violent".

I said, "Okay, first off, where is your shirt made?"

He looked and it was made in Bangladesh.

I was like,

"Look, do we even need to talk about that?"

- He's fucking faking he's dead!

- Yeah, he's breathing.

- He's faking he's fucking dead!

GUNSHOT

- He's dead NOW.

- Our way of living,

industrial civilization, is based on,

requires, and would

collapse very quickly

without persistent

and widespread violence.

- A large explosion! A large explosion!

- Wow.

- I'll just take a couple eggs. How many you want?

- Two, two is good.

Okay. Now what next?

- Some ham, tomato.

- Tomato, okay,

how about that?

- Okay, some onion.

Ooh, and cheese!

- Everything, then, right, you want everything.

Okay. I understand, okay.

We'll just pop this on. Now watch!

I'm chopping the ham and veggies,

grating the cheese,

and whipping the eggs all…

…in three seconds.

The machine that just made

those smoothies for Verna and Fred,

can make an omelette.

There's not much time left to get

this beautiful hope diamond necklace,

less than 50 seconds. Gillian?

- Absolutely, John, you're going

to want to give us a call to get

this beautiful hope diamond necklace.

This is a 45.52 carat

diamond surrounded by

16 white diamonds.

It has a platinum chain

bearing 46 MORE diamonds.

- These are twelve four-ounce southern

barbecue chicken breasts.

These Stuffin GourmetÂŹĂ,

farm-fresh chicken breast;

they come from the

barnyard to your backyard.

They're wonderfully marinated

and guaranteed to be tender,

juicy, and downright delicious.

- Fine-tune those measurements,

we keep them on file.

They're saved,

they're on our computer.

Go back into the section

another pair of customized jeans

that we really believe are

going to fit perfectly.

- We're going to do a countdown,

starting from 5.

Everybody got to help me out here,

(explosion)

Ho!

It worked!

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 him

And then, after dinner you say,

you've been somewhat pleasant

company, but not all that pleasant,

so I would like for you to leave

my home now.' What would happen?

He said, "Well, the sheriff would

pull out his gun and say,

'I'm here to evict you,

because you didn't pay rent.'"

I said, "Ahh. So, the reason you pay

rent is because if you don't,

some guy with a gun is going

to come take you away."

He said, "I think I get it."

I said, "Well, let's try again.

What happens if you're hungry,

so you go to the grocery store

and you just start eating.

What's going to happen?"

"someone will call the sheriff."

I said, "Yeah, 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.

Figure II

A few years a go,

I got a call from a friend of mine.

She's an environmental activist.

She was crying, and she said,

"This works just killing me,

it's breaking my heart."

I said, "Yeah, I know. It'll do that."

Then she said,

"The dominant culture

hates everything doesn't it?"

I said, "Yeah, it does. Even itself."

She said, "It has a death urge, doesn't it?"

I said, "Yeah, it does."

She said, "Unless it's stopped, it's going

to kill everything on the planet, isn't it?"

I said, "Yeah it is, unless it's stopped."

Then she said,

"We're not going to make it

to some great, new,

glorious tomorrow, are we?"

Green is the color of money

- 98% of the old-growth forests are gone.

99% of the prairies are gone.

80% 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 Earth.

So, by taking 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 70's and 80'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 that appeal to

people's sensibility about,

and concern for, the

environment and for ecology.

- For the mast majority of

people within society today,

there's a total sense

of denial and disconnect

between 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.

- I 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 we still have a planet."

- It doesn't matter if I buy,

hemp soap if there's a

runaway greenhouse effect

and the planet becomes uninhabitable.

- The modern mainstream

environmental movement of the

big environmental organizations —

Greenpeace, and Sierra 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-destructive

path that the culture is on.

In May 2010, 21 logging companies signed a deal with several major environmental

organizations, including Greenpeace

and the David Suzuki Foundation.

The deal, known as "The Canadian Boreal

Forest Agreement" aimed to silence all

criticism of logging practices

in the boreal forest.

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 21 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

when things begin to be implemented and

the change happens on the ground.

I'm fully confident of that.

- One interesting piece of the agreement is

with Greenpeace,

David Suzuki, Forest Ethics,

Canadian Parks and

Wilderness on our side,

when 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 Dr. 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 $300 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,

they're 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.

What's happened in British Columbia with the

environmental movement, it's been stalemated.

The big leaders there compromised;

they went in bed

and it snuffed out that movement.

- 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 40 to 60

percent conservation

but what happened was

they agreed to 20 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 of Greenpeace Norway works for the

whaling industry. See, because it's

just one corporate job to the next.

In 1975 Greenpeace launched

its anti-whaling campaign,

confronting whaling fleets on the high seas.

In June 2010, Greenpeace agreed

to a deal that would allow

nations like Japan to continue hunting

whales for commercial purposes.

The only measure in 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?

Figure III

OK, 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 environmentalists

and it's a little bit different.

For 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

capable of destroying entire planets.

In the movie the rebels find a

way to destroy the Death Star,

and then at the very

end, Luke Skywalker

uses the force to get past all the

tie fighters and to drop a torpedo

down a thermal exhaust port,

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 example, they set up programs for

people on planets about to be destroyed,

to produce luxury items like hemp

hacky sacks and gourmet coffee

for sale to inhabitants of the Death Star.

Audience members will also

discover that there are plans afoot

to encourage loads of troopers

and other citizens of the empire

to take eco-tours of 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 Mr. Vader 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 as toadying on

the part of the mainstream rebels

decide, in a scene guaranteed

to bring tears to even the eyes

of the most cold-hearted

theatergoers, to stand on

the planets to be destroyed, link

arms, and sing "Give Peace a Chance."

They send DVDs of that

to Darth Vader and his

boss the 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.

And 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 once a child."

So finally Leia, Luke, Han, Chewbacca,

and a couple of robots show up

and tell these others they've found a

way to blow up the whole Death Star.

And the rest of the rebels,

of course, are just horrified.

A scuffle breaks out between Leia,

Luke, Han, and Chewbacca and the two

robots on one side and the

pacifists on the other.

And the pacifists chase 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 43 of the New Empire Times

that devotes a full 3 sentences

to the destruction of the planet.

So it's like, "Yeah we got some press!"

Premise IV

The culture as a whole and

most of its members

are insane.

The culture is driven by a death urge,

an urge to destroy 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.

Fort McMurray

Alberta, Canada

- The tar 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 oil left to extract.

- Tar sands really aren't oil.

Effectively, the process by which you

mine and refine tar sands

is adding about a hundred

million years of development

through a synthetic process.

The tar sands deposit

is an area that covers

the size of the state of

New York, or larger than 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 the oil sits on top of the water like a froth,

then they scrape it off, and that's the bitumen.

- There's mining processes

and in situ processes,

and both of them are pretty

much trying to extract

bitumen out of the 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

where you spin it at a high speed,

high velocity, with high

temperatures of water,

to separate the bitumen,

which is the pre-synthetic oil,

from the sands itself,

and all the clays and silts.

But that's after you've already

dug out what has to be

to be hundreds of tons of Earth.

- The energy that's required to

actually do that is approximately,

people say for almost every barrel of oil you need

about a half a barrel of energy just

to produce this,

so for every barrel of energy input,

two barrels of oil are produced,

whereas with conventional

crude 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 barrels back.

Fort Chipewyan

Alberta, Canada

- The Athabasca River, which runs

through northern Alberta,

where you have many different native

communities living along the river,

is being sucked of its water to

fuel the tar sands operations.

- Because of the contamination of the river

from oil sands discharges

of things like oil and grease and

untreated sewage into the Athabasca River,

and sometimes there's accidents,

spills of these toxic chemicals

directly into the Athabasca Rivers.

- The community of Fort Chipewyan,

both the Mikisew Cree

and the Dene Chipewyan First Nation,

who have been fighting

and really at the front

of raising the alarm about what's happening,

and their 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."

I buried my auntie,

I buried my uncle, I got

an auntie living with it.

And this is a war for our lives,

because the government is allowing

the people of Fort Chip to die.

- The tar sands are not only 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 CO2 emissions

will make it so the only way

you could outstrip a

climate change contributor

for North America would

be to combine all

the coal-fired power plants from

Alberta to Arizona and in between,

across all of North America.

- I think that the tar

sands is the absurdity

of still 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 culture,

this plastic civilization,

to the destruction of the environment

in which we can live.

- People say it's like the

world's addicted to crack,

and this is like the dirtiest

and most disgusting form of crack

that'll keep it addicted

for a lot longer, right.

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.

Figure IV

- 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 peace 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 this up."

Pacifying Resistance

- 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 plurality.

- 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

hopes that bind us to

unlivable situations and

blind us to real possibilities?

Does anybody really think that

Weyerhauser's going to stop,

deforesting because we asked nicely

that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing

because we ask nicely?

I was talking to this person in the

States several years ago and they said,

"If we can just get a Democrat in 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.

- The 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 be violent or nonviolent.

Could you have stopped Ted

Bundy by peaceful 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 the inevitability

of conflict and resistance,

and just trying to manage it permanently.

"Keep the march going,

there's nothing happening here!

There's nothing happening,

just one more line of police,

so please keep the march going!"

- Social movements in North America are locked

into this pacifist doctrine that is 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 West,

Gandhi is used as a way

to quell any ideas of

either direct action or what's

perceived as violence or,

sort of, you know, resistance that

goes beyond what is seen as a sort of a

pacifist or a peaceful means 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.

- Gandhi's 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 of 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 after WWII,

and didn't have the

morale left anymore for

a big fight, and they

helped choose somebody

that they could work with.

They knew a revolution was coming and they

wanted to blunt it as much as they could.

- India went from being

a colony to a neocolony.

The British were still able to

maintain their interests, less directly,

with Indians being in

positions of management.

- 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."

Figure V

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 40 to 50 years,

we're going to see the

extinction of more species

than we've seen in the past

65 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, 50-75 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 tell our ancestors about.

If we 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 patience

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 stormed

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-18 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.

- Crazy Horse one-eight,

request permission to engage.

- Picking up the wounded?

- Yeah, we're trying to

get permission to engage.

- Come on, let us shoot!

- Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

- They're taking him.

- Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

- This is Bushmaster seven, go ahead.

- Roger. We have a black SUV,

or Bongo truck picking

up the bodies. Request

permission to engage.

- Bushmaster seven, roger. This is

Bushmaster seven, roger. Engage.

- One-eight, engage. Clear.

- Come on!

- Clear.

So if the law will

not do the right thing,

other people will have

to do the right 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

power is sociopathic,

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.

- The smartest thing the Nazis did was

they made it so that at every

step of the way, it was in the Jews'

rational best interest to not resist.

Would you rather get an ID card,

or do you want to resist

and possibly get killed?

Do you want to move to a ghetto,

or do you want to resist

and possibly get killed?

Do you want to get on 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,

which is: the Jews who participated

in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

had a higher rate of survival

than those who went along.

- I think that if any of us were

alive in Nazi Germany right now,

we would know what a resistance

movement should be doing.

And we need to think about

the culture of industrial civilization

as if it's a culture of occupation,

because it is.

Figure VI

- If Nazis or other fascists

took over North America,

what would we all do?

What would we do if they implemented

Mussolini's definition of fascism:

"Fascism should more appropriately

be called corporatism

because it is a merger of

state and corporate power."

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?

If fascists systematically

deforested the continent, would you join

an underground army of resistance,

head to the forests, and from there

to boardrooms and the halls of the

Reichstag to pick off the occupying deforesters

and, most especially, those that

give them their marching orders?

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?

Directed, filmed, produced, and edited

by Franklin Lopez

Inspired by Endgame

Volumes I and II by Derrick Jensen

LYRICS: When I face the page,

I place the rage,

place it into stasis

rather than erase it.

That's the basis

cover all the bases,

watch what you say on the cell,

they gonna trace it.

Stacked deck

don't expect any aces,

camera eyes watch you

in public places,

and I hate this,

so I take this

mic and I write

like these words,

and my legs and they walk me through my paces,

people chase it, glittery lights but I've seen the heights.

My time is not wasted, I'm tracing the sky,

I read all the smoke

that I toke to meet

all the spaces of mind in time.

Look, just face it,

this life is mine,

that's why I'm not

racing the finish line.

Will come the time, the moment designed

to shine i won't replace it

So I take my time, grind it up and break it,

roll it up so fine, light it up and blaze it.

Smoking blunts, smoke 'em up,

end times

on the grind training for the signs

Take your fist and raise it up to the sky.

See the fire in her eye.

Do or do not do there is no try.

Hard to find what's true, that is no life.

They clipped your wings, how you gonna fly?

You gonna lie?

You gonna die,

so until that day,

are you gonna try?

One by one

we multiply.

Eyes to the sun,

just let it shine now.

to do it,

can do it

it's do or die.

to fight?

no peace,

and I'm a

you know,

people, trees,

gonna fear it.

start tryin' to kill it.

Until it dies,

a violent day.

to pray.

all they say is:

display."

them pay.

games —

they take us away.

Monkeywrench machines

and write communiques

on walls with spraypaint

Only you can do it