It’s much more fun to read others’ blogs than to write posts on this one, which I readily acknowledge promises more than it delivers. Oh well. One day it’ll hit its straps, so to speak, and make for good permie advocacy.
In the meantime I have spasming lower back muscles due to a false move while taping over ceiling nails in our Gingerbread House (rat, chicken and asbestos infested, turn-of- last-century holiday cottage) in preparation for its conversion to a hang out by teen cousins, for teen cousins: the girls’ summer holiday project.
So while bed-resting, I’m going to update the progress of the kumara, bananas and avocado here in our cool temperate garden, cos they’re topics searched quite a bit. And I’ll post on other permaculture and simpler-living stuff.
Now, you might like to call such stuff “OIMBY - Only In My Back Yard”, as does Lierre Keith of DGR or Deep Green Resistance, during this recorded call to arms. I came to this via Transition Times, a fantastically researched and written blog by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez.
Lierre is very troubling. She’s a credible historian and feminist, actively inciting people to violence, and that would be about THE last thing this planet needs.
To paraphrase, Lierre believes we’ve run out of time. Two hundred species become extinct daily, and she’s angry because these are “her kin”. She and the DGR want to take out Industrial Civilization before it takes out the planet.
Protests won’t work, she claims, even though window smashing is gratifying. Afterall, women really achieved suffrage by blowing up public utilities, not that we learn that at school. (I must check that. Is it true, Liz?)
Lierre doesn’t want violence, but it was necessary for the IRA and other insurrectionists, and as democracy is corrupted by the ownership of governments by the oil companies and their affiliates, we have no choice but to learn from the IRA’s successes and mistakes. (The mistake being to show a little compassion to hostages for a day and end up outwitted, or something. I’m doing this from memory.)
Lierre understands that not everyone will have the constitution for the violent bits, so she proposes a tiered structure of frontline activists, with a massive support contingent, all with unquestioning loyalty to the leaders and, behind them all as an afterthought, we OIMBY permaculturalists and Transition-Towners will be ready to slot in the alternative, de-industrialised world order.
Right.
Just a detail; who will cure a sick child in need of specialist care the day after the new world commences?
I get it. That child (hypothetical to Lierre, but very real to me) will have to join the collateral damage ranks? Damned war…. But, I’d like to ask, Lierre, what about your friends/loved ones? Them too? Well, then, what about your own medical problems, if, say, comfrey fails to knit the bones of your damaged spine, arising I understand from years of “vegan” diet (even if it was your own unique version, where you “binged on egg and dairy” every chance you got) before you had an epiphany and wrote The Vegetarian Myth, which was a great success - in selling out on your kin by giving the pro-meat lobby pure manna from heaven on a stick. I’m hoping you’re enjoying the public reaction; increased meat consumption, justified by the need to avert some idiosyncratic constitutional problem of yours with zero medical links to veganism (see review at bottom). Are you proud of your contribution to the derailment of a fledgling movement which works to prevent the barbarisms of modern meat production? You have materially consigned your kin to lives and deaths of unmitigated torture.
Oops, digressive and inflammatory rant.
But I don’t understand why Lierre Keith now advocates killing people as part of an activism to save her animal kin, when her book has all but demolished any animal welfare achievements to date, coming as it does as a gift from the left. And she insist on loyalty to her new cause after this betrayal?
Her pleasant, considered intellectualism, her “kitten” vulnerability and hurt that people on “my side” would stick a pie in her face during a promotion of that book, don’t stack up.
I’ve muddied the waters here. Lierre’s previous “form” on vegetarianism is not really at issue. But charismatic people who agitate for violence against an unnamed enemy are disingenuous. War on Industrialism is as stupid as War on Drugs or Terror, but as Lierre well knows, will appeal to scared people, and to people who enjoy violence.
Yes, things are getting desperate. Yes, we need leadership in the transition to viable human settlement on this planet. Yes, our leaders lack conviction/courage/will. But, there is one massive difference between this point in history and the many others where people had to take up arms against injustice; we have an internet.
No matter how ham-strung are our governments in the West by their impending loss of power should they fail to kow-tow to the earth-wreckers, nothing will clarify their decision-making more than online petitions and the associated public shows of protest which demonstrate in simple numbers the electorate’s voting intention. So that is where Lierre and the DGR should put their energies. Negotiating precise policy demands with the politicians and getting the info to the people. Blowing up refineries? Not clever. Galvanizing resistance through organisations like AVAAZ? There the attainable “revolutions” foment.
Lierre will need to honestly examine her evident drive for fame at any cost, and her bloodlustful exasperation, before she turns her attention thus. I really hope she does get on board, though. She could help, constructively.
So I’m not a writer’s bottom, and would never normally brave a critique of an intellectual, not without a gazillion hours of scrutinising the material, loads of qualifying statements to ward off rebuttals, and editing, editing, for clearer writing.
Thanks Lierre, this OIMBY was sufficiently concerned to venture an opinion - beyond my own backyard.
PS. I think meat-eating is an individual choice issue, but I reckon many people would choose to reduce/replace it if they knew the environmental costs, and the suffering of the animals. If you can stomach the footage from the feed-lots and abattoirs and still enjoy the steak, I suppose that’s your business.
(And here is what I’d like to have written about Lierre’s pro-meatist drive: http://www.zcommunications.org/blood-and-soil-lierre-keith-michael-pollan-and-the-trouble-with-locavore-politics-by-john-sanbonmatsu ).
She tells me “Blogging is social suicide” (as if I don’t know that!) but she’s sweet enough to allow me to put her out there, along with Lucy, as living proof that we can (incrementally) shift our privileged, first-world children towards resilience and adaptation.
has become a 
Angie
Drew
Lucy
