Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet [Paperback]

This is hardly the first book to acknowledge the desperation of our current predicament. Many books have addressed the devastation of our planet's oceans, soil, and forests, have pointed out that we are living in the midst of an anthropogenic mass extinction of unprecedented speed and voracity. It's easy to find books discussing the ongoing genocide against indigenous peoples, and the ongoing devastation of their landbases and rivers for the profits of the rich, working under the malicious banner of "progress". We have many books about soil erosion turning farmland to desert, and pesticide effluents killing rivers and leaving dead zones in our oceans. Many books are available that acknowledge we live in a pornographic culture and a rape culture, a culture with little respect for women and children. For decades books have been telling us that toxic chemicals from factories have entered our bodies, that women can no longer even nurse without passing along dioxins to their children, toxins dangerous at even at a few parts per trillion. We have books that recognize that corporations, as persons, are genocidal maniacs who will profit from any atrocity they can possibly get away with, will leave our planet a barren husk so long as we do not stop them. Nor is this even the first book to argue that we must stop them.

What is different about Deep Green Resistance is that it is the first book that offers a solution that is scaled to the size of our predicament. In the past, books have usually suggested answers such as getting involved in your community, making better consumer choices, writing letters to the editor, planting gardens, donating to worthy charities, and spreading awareness of the problems we're facing. These are good moral decisions to make, but as political tools for change they are not effective, and it becomes an immense problem when these sort of actions become the backbone of our movement for a saner world. Self-improvement and token actions, although they might help us to relieve guilt, are not going to cut it. If we are going to save this sickly planet, we are going to need to organize ourselves squarely against systems of power, and fight them as hard as we can. The authors of this book have clearly thought long and hard about how we need to organize, how we need to strategize, and what sort of pitfalls we need to watch out for. If you love this planet as much as I do, I hope you read this book and take what it has to say to heart. We will need all the heart and courage that we can muster.

Deep Green Resistance is without doubt the most important book I've read since Zinn's A People's History. DGR is the completion of A People's History in that it's three authors, Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Aric McBay, give us the tools we need to oppose and resist the injustices of today that Zinn knew well and opposed until his death. This book should be read by every person who understands that the Forces of Greed have captured our government, our institutions and our media and are busy taking away everything that was once good in this country and leaving us with corporatism, militarism, empire and ultimately a failed country and a ruined planet. The premise that 10,000 years of civilization is what dooms us is not only compelling, but I believe it is true. This book gives us not only a history lesson in what did and did not work for past social movements, but lays out in specific detail what we need to do to create a new world for individual human beings based on our common needs and interests. This is the book I did not know I was waiting for and I cannot put it down. I am recommending it to everyone I know, especially committed activists, as essential reading. If you say you despair, but don't know what to do, read Deep Green Resistance. If you know you want to resist, but don't know how, read this book. And then make sure that everyone you know reads it and acts upon the ideas within to resist.

"Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet" is filled with fiercely intelligent strategy on how to take effective action to save the planet. Written by three of the greatest thinkers on environmental justice, it is well worth the lengthy, yet well written read. The book reviews the history of resistance organizations, why some were effective and others were not and how we, people working as a collective can apply this towards successful action in saving the environment.

The book is urgently needed and is the best, and sadly, the only of its kind. Read it, then put it down, go into the world and take action.