Here’s a flashback from the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference in 2016. In this talk, Deep Green Resistance members Jonah Mix and Dillon Thomson speak on the failure of the contemporary environmental movement to meaningfully stop the destruction of the planet.

Using examples from past and current resistance movements, Mix and Thomson chart a more serious, strategic path forward that takes into account the urgency and direness of the ecological crises we face. It is time to resist.

About Deep Green Resistance:

Deep Green Resistance is an analysis, a strategy, and the only organization of its kind. As an analysis, it reveals civilization as the institution that is destroying life on Earth. As a strategy, it offers a concrete plan for how to stop that destruction. As an organization, Deep Green Resistance is implementing that strategy.

The goal of DGR is to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet. This is a vast undertaking but it needs to be said: it can be done. Industrial civilization can be stopped.

DGR is an aboveground organization that uses direct action in the fight to save our planet. We also argue for the necessity of an underground that can target the strategic infrastructure of industrialization. But these actions alone are never a sufficient strategy for achieving a just outcome. Any strategy aiming for a livable future must include a call to build direct democracies based on human rights and sustainable material cultures.

Which means that the different branches of a resistance movement must work in tandem: the aboveground and belowground, the militants and the nonviolent, the frontline activists and the cultural workers. We need it all.

And we need courage. The word “courage” comes from the same root as coeur, the French word for heart. We need all the courage of which the human heart is capable, forged into both weapon and shield to defend what is left of this planet. And the lifeblood of courage is, of course, love.