by Liam Campbell

This summer, all too many rivers have turned into vast graveyards for the corpses of an unfathomable number of salmon; these critical life givers cannot survive the searing heat. In turn, they will not feed the bears, who will not feed the trees nitrogen with their leftovers, and this will accelerate the death and burning of forests in a vicious cycle of destruction. The fires have already started and we all watch with horror as the Amazon, Central Africa, and the Arctic ignite into tower plumes of greenhouse gases, which again perpetuates a vicious cycle of destruction. At some point, these feedback systems will reach a critical tipping point and they will become unstoppable. When we exceed the “point of no return” it will seem like any other day, no alarm bells will ring, no governments will declare the passing of hope, and no magical saviour will ride down from the sky to protect the world against this endless appetite for carnage.

You are our only hope. You and me. You and me, and other indivuduals who are intelligent enough to see what’s in front of us, compassionate enough to care, and courageous enough to take action. What needs to be done is relatively straightforward: we must stop industrial civilization from destroying life on Earth. In the spirit of cutesy, clickbaity articles here are 4 ways you can help stop global extinction.

1. Stop Electricity Consumption

Most articles will tell you to buy solar panels, which are manufactured using fossil fuels. Or they’ll tell you to install a gimmicky technology in your house to reduce electrical use. Pardon my language, but f-ck that consumer bullsh!t. Changing individual consumer decisions will not save us from annihilation, we need to abolish consumerism as a culture and turn it off at its sources. There are dozens of strategies for reducing electrical use; some groups call for shooting high-capacity power lines with rifles, which causes them to overload and results in widespread blackouts. Other groups call for using electromagnetic pulse (EMP) devices to shut down transformer stations and other critial utility nodes. Another approach is to shut down the raw energy sources: coal, gas, oil, etc. Some people choose to block coal trains, other people blockade essential fracking equipment, and others choose open military action (nod to the Niger Delta Avengers).

If those most effective tactics aren’t possible given your situation, you might consider blockading or sabotaging local oil and gas vehicles to disrupt their regional supply chains. Some people choose to do this by dropping caltrops to puncture their tires, others add sugar to their fuel tanks to cripple their engines, or others choose to burn them when they’re empty. The smallest scale efforts involve locking their gates at night to delay their departure.

2. Send Funds to Resistance Movements

If you’re too busy working a job, or too averse to personal risk due to personal constraints, you should donate a certain number of hours of work per month toward funding those courageous people who are willing to put their lives on the line. Donate one full day of work per month, or half a day if you’re in dire financial straits. That amount of effort and commitment per month is enough to support much, if not all, of the essential needs of a resistance member. It covers their food, water, shelter, equipment, medicine, and legal aid. It’s always disappointing when someone professes to care deeply about preventing global extinction while continuing to prioritise their own consumer activities over either taking action or meaningfully supporting action.

There are many worthwhile groups to donate to, and Deep Green Resistance is among them [donate here]. Some of these groups can be more difficult to donate to due to local government oppression and restrictions to banking, so you may need to use an intermediary to get funds to them safely and privately. If you have any questions about these processes please contact Deep Green Resistance and we’ll help you figure it out.

3. Cripple the Economy

Economic recessions result in reduced rates of consumption, and consumption is at the heart of this global crisis. The simplest possible way to anonymously and effectively make a difference is by inhibiting local, regional, and national commerce. You should obviously target large corporations and not local businesses. Possible tactics include locking front doors and parking gates, causing disruption to shopping activities, blockading stores, disabling shipping vehicles while they’re in docks, spraying fox urine, damaging goods, and a million other small and large tactics. When you start looking for opportunities to disrupt the economy you will begin to see endless approaches and you should take advantage of as many of them as possible. Build and foster cultures of economic sabotage, make it part of your daily life.

Another option, discovered in Washington State during a major snow storm, is to intentionally slow or stop major freeways and interstates. This can be especially effective in large cities during rush hour conditions. It may not seem like it, but the cumulative effect of delaying traffic, even relatively briefly, is immense. A small and coordinated group of people could easily have millions of dollars worth of economic impact by simply driving under the speed limit and blocking all lanes for an extended distance. Studies in Japan have demonstrated that these types of alterations in the speed of traffic can result in massive traffic jams.

4. Prepare Communities

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to widespread action is our dependency on ecocidal systems for our survival. People have been colonized, intentionally, by these systems and part of that process involved systematically stripping us of the ancestral skills and knowledge which allowed us to live independently. Our children have been processed by “education” systems which stripped them of the capacity to source their own food, build their own homes, and build independent communities. Young minds were filled with the birth dates of presidents instead of the names and uses of local plants. Young minds were saturated with abstract figures in place of local knowledge of soil and water. We were prepared for work and reliance on factories because industrial civilization knew that self sufficiency empowers people to resist.

One of the greatest acts of resistance is to recover that ancestral knowledge; with it comes the strength and resilience to fight back, to build alternatives, and to actively fight back. Our communities will turn against us if they believe that their survival is dependent on the continuation of industrial civilization; from that perspective the defenders of life are the harbingers of death. Therefore, we must recognize that radical self sufficiency is the first step toward radical acts of resistance. Teaching communities to grow their own food empowers them to shut down fossil fuel infrastructure. Teaching communities to respect and love nature, as the giver of life, empowers them to fight against the destruction of our shared natural world.