Category: Articles

By Jesse D. Palmer

Sometimes when it seems impossible — just in the nick of time — broad-based cultural and political movements can get traction. We’ve reached a breaking point with few options — ruin or zero emissions and a just transition away from fossil fuels and eco-destroying activities. The social and ecological disruption resulting from climate change poses the gravest threat to humans and other species. All movements for civil and economic justice are threatened if drought, crop failures, ocean acidification and sea level rise displace billions of people, which is our future unless dramatic change happens soon. 

Given the overwhelming global scale of the crisis, it is easy to feel discouraged, resigned, doomed or to just to slip into denial. These psychological reactions are understandable, but what we need instead is engagement, mass organizing, and a focus on what can be done to reduce emissions on all levels simultaneously — technologically, globally, individually and in our local community. 

The world’s economic and political systems have their own internal logic and are controlled by tiny minorities whose wealth and power rely on fossil fuels and maintaining current consumption and engineering. These systems have not, will not and cannot reduce emissions. 

Because there are viable technological alternatives to fossil fuels, there’s no reason for us to be on a path to extinction except greed, shortsightedness and our collective inability to force the system to serve the interests of the majority of the world’s people and live within the limits of Earth’s life support systems.

Business as usual will surely destroy us. There are hints of hope — students protesting, divestment campaigns, a few more bikes and windmills. But progress is painfully slow and it feels like it’s always easier to focus on the crisis of the moment — the pandemic, war, right wing nut jobs — and avoid thinking about a problem so big, long-term and scary that it can feel like an invisible background to everything. 

Reducing and ending emissions is different from a lot of mainstream discussion of climate change, which emphasizes achieving “net zero” emissions using “carbon offsets” — concepts that would be laughable greenwashing bullshit it they weren’t catching on so widely in a way that distracts from the urgent need to cut emissions in the first place.

A carbon offset is the idea that a company or country can keep emitting carbon if they pay someone else to either reduce their emissions (think replacing a coal plant with a windmill), or invest money in a project to remove carbon from the atmosphere (think planing trees.) If a company buys offsets, they can claim they are carbon neutral or net zero even while they continue to emit the same amount of carbon. If you hear net zero, carbon offsets or carbon neutral, what you are hearing is that someone is not reducing their own emissions. 

Offsets may work on paper, but they are unlikely to work in real life for numerous reasons. This is particularly when the offset pays to pull CO2 out of the air by planting trees etc. Are these trees just replacing something humans deforested? Will the trees even survive after the company planting them sells the offsets? A lot of tree planting projects are planting the wrong trees in the wrong places — reducing biodiversity, speeding extinction and making ecosystems less resilient. (See NYT 3/14/22.)  Projects in the global south to offset emissions from the north can reinforce colonialism taking land from poor people. Trees are at best a temporary solution, since burning fossil fuels moves carbon that has been buried underground for millions of years to the surface and into the air. When the new trees die and decompose, the added carbon stays in the biosphere.

If someone else is taking fossil fuels off-line that is good, but it would be even better if the offset purchaser took their emissions off-line as well. Offsets suffer from fraud, the profit motive, and ultimately their main purpose is to justify continued emissions whereas what we desperately need is zero emissions. 

Movements for climate justice need to get beyond just being against stuff — blocking pipelines and demanding divestment — and start supporting tangible, specific alternatives to the status quo like community-controlled wind, solar and green alternatives to emissions. When we’re stuck in opposition mode, we’re letting the system set the agenda and define the battles to be fought, which puts us in a weak position. It is much better for us to propose and support a world we want to live in, and let the oil companies try to stop us.

Many climate activists risk falling into outdated rituals of NIMBY thinking that oppose all development and change without thoughtfully weighing what is being proposed against what it aims to replace. This can end up supporting the suicidal status quo by stopping or slowing down the broad-based technological change that is urgently necessary to get to zero emissions. It is naive to argue that we’ll get there through some sort of abstinence — that we can all just stop burning fossil fuels by giving up electricity, motorized transportation, mass production, etc. To me this is another form of psychological denial — one particularly popular with radicals and alternative types — that avoids dealing with the climate crisis while pretending to take it seriously. 

To the contrary, there is no realistic way to convince or force everyone to go cold turkey. Focusing on theory-based utopias that don’t translate to reality wastes what time we have left. The last 35 years have seen no emissions reduction between corporate greenwashing on one side, and activists engaging in magical thinking on the other. More than half of all human CO2 emissions have happened since 1988 when it became clear that global warming was a problem. Emissions keep going up when they could have been going down for the last few decades if practical measures had been taken.

Achieving zero emissions requires very difficult compromises — building massive amounts of new stuff that is less harmful than the stuff people use to meet their needs now. The new stuff is not going to be harm-free or perfect but it can be less harmful than doing nothing. Rather than demand zero technology and zero development, we’re going to have to strive for zero emissions. Every mine or factory involves ecological harm but they aren’t all the same. It isn’t romantic or popular, but I’m not against all mines or factories — I’m against the ones moving us towards our doom. 

Which is why it is discouraging to see climate activists opposing wind farms, transmission lines, lithium mines and solar projects for parochial reasons when much greater overall harm is presented by the decentralized world-wide emissions of our current technology.  You can’t compare a new facility with an open field— you have to compare it to the on-going specific ecological harms it can reduce or avoid.  It is hard to know, but I wonder if in a few years we find out that a lot of criticism of green technology is being secretly supported by the oil industry to cynically slow down change.

Getting to zero emissions is more than a slogan or public relations campaign. It cannot be achieved through any single shift or technology. There are only shades of gray and no simple magic answer — except that climate change only gets worse without sustained social pressure for change. And regular people like ourselves are the only hope we have.

By Teresa 

The words “economy” and “ecology” come from the same Greek root word, oikos, which means household or home. Over the last 500 years, the economy has gotten quite far from home, and today’s economic system is nothing more than a series of death rituals for destroying our true home, the ecology. What would an economy look like that better fits the needs and budgets of our planet’s limited ecology? What would an economics look like that centers ecological and social care at the global scale? 

Social care and ecological care are deeply intertwined. This is something that has been revealed in the work of countless historians. Our present ecocidal regime is rooted in the trauma created by systematized forms of anti-humanism. 

As each new form of systemic oppression arises, we are all retraumatized and rendered numb to the ecocide happening all around us. The crypto-aristocrats of capitalism are always inventing new ways to trick us into oppressing each other — transphobia, homophobia, ableism, Sinophobia, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, classism (especially against the un-housed), settler colonialism, anti-Indigeneity — the list goes on and on. 

Our economic oppressors trick us into fearing the beautiful diversity of the robust human ecology. They constantly seek to invent new ways for us to traumatize each other, to discount each other’s experiences. When we become numb to each other, we become numb to ourselves, and when we lose touch with ourselves, ecocide becomes easy. What level of self-other care would be needed to make ecocide hard again?

Our differences are taproots that bind us to the planet, that weave us into the social ecology in ways as mysterious as life itself. Life is a deeply anarchist impulse that has propelled us all from a lightning strike in a mud puddle five billion years ago, a lightning strike that organized matter into life, that same spark still pulsing through every living thing on this planet.

Ecological care takes bright eyes and a light spirit, it takes emotional space to be able to be present for the blooming buds, to notice the thirst of taproots, to luxuriate in the smell of luscious, healthy soil rich with microbes. Ecological care takes the ability to be fully present for the living world that cradles us, so that we can hear it when it cries out. When this year’s salmon run is lower than the last, the ecology is crying out. When once damp forests become as dry as tinder, the ecology is crying out. When the swarms of insects that once emerged certain times of year vanish and the birds start falling from the sky, the ecology is crying out.

When we are traumatized, we cannot respond to these cries, even though we feel them in our bodies, bones and cells. Our body-minds know our planet is being killed, that a mass ecocide is underway, that our fates are tied to the fate of all life on Earth.

What level of healing is needed to overcome the trauma that numbs us to the death of our own planet? How do we gain the clarity to perceive the dying animals as our siblings in struggle? How do we re-center the voices of Indigenous people who have deep relationships with the creatures of their ancestral lands? How do we elevate the voices of those who are systemically oppressed so that their beautiful differences can’t be used to make people afraid and cause more trauma?

The ecology is our home. It is time to cast the pretenders from the throne. It is only through deep systemic trauma that a demiurge as feckless as the stock market and other ledger-based death games have been able to stand in for the oikos. It is time to reunite the economy with the ecology, and to rid our societies of the horrific systemic oppressions that make ecocide possible.

Further Reading/Viewing:

• The Salmon People by Children of the Setting Sun Productions thesalmonpeople.com
• Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out by Aph Ko
• The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology; especially the chapter “Jahát Jatítotòdom*: Toward an Indigenous Political Ecology” by Beth Rose Middleton
• The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet by Leah Thomas
• Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici
• Racial Capital by Cedric Robinson

By Lola Leuterio

From my journal, 4/17/21

“…But I also feel like this badly wrapped bundle of all of the most beautiful things in the universe… and it’s all out there and it’s all in here and I’m so excited to like, let the bundle unwrap? You know? Talking to Dakota felt like unwrapping it and so did looking at Casey and listening to Bertha with Max and laughing with Matt and Asha about Woobs and… I don’t know. I’m addicted to unwrapping it. I like being loved because it feels like proof that my guess was right — about all of the good stuff inside of me…”

I am 20 years old and I have spent approximately one quarter of my life — almost 5 years total — in two separate monogamous relationships with two different white, cis men. That’s a lot of time to spend in absolute devotion to another human being — loving, intelligent, and understanding as they might be, there are certain limitations that come with an abundance of privilege. Namely, I have noticed that white cis men tend to view romantic love in strangely narrow, hyper-specific terms. There’s a strictly linear nature to the kind of relationship that mainstream society teaches us to seek (one’s romantic partner should be the most important person in their life; one’s body, flirtations, and deepest displays of love must be reserved for the one partner alone). While all of us fall victim to the hype, it is certainly easier for the people that protocol was written for to subscribe to it. If you don’t feel like following the slew of rules that come with monogamy? No problem: then you can be “single” and have meaningless sex with as many people as you like. 

Recently, it has occurred to me that I have been existing within the single/taken binary — which was not created by me, but undoubtedly created for me — for as long as I can remember. The thing is, I don’t like it very much. I want to be deeply in love and care for someone, or many people, profoundly, romantically; and yet I don’t want to belong to anyone. I don’t want to close my eyes to obvious manifestations of love in the world around me, yet being single so that I can have detached sex with people to whom I owe no emotional responsibility sounds equally unappealing. 

There’s a certain level of trauma attached to this, but I’d rather start with the good part — the reason it matters to me at all. 

It matters to me because a couple of Saturdays ago, I was in the back-back seat of my little sister’s old Toyota Van, driving fast down Topanga Canyon. The whole valley below was bathed in a deceivingly-warm light, but in the van it was hot from the overworked engine and the combined body heat of the seven people inside of it. I sat on his left and when I looked out the window to my right, he caught my eye and held it. And his eyes were dark dark dark with eyelashes long long long and he smelled like the Japanese ginger candies he kept unwrapping. And it had never happened to me before — not quite like that — but I fell in love instantaneously. 

It matters to me because around a year ago, my roommate and I were waiting outside of BevMo while our friend bought up for a party we were having later that night. I was wearing one of her tank tops — blue and ruffly — and had smeared glitter all over my face. And I was complaining about the midterms I had been putting off and she got this look on her face, and considered me for a moment, and then said, “sometimes I think I am in love with you.” I laughed, quickly grabbed and released her hand. And she picked up the conversation where we had left it and we never talked about it again. 

It matters to me because of the dog walker on my street who I’ve hardly spoken two words to in my life, but who I think about often.

It matters to me because of a red-haired girl in my “Grassroots Organizing” class who is brilliant and beautiful and always wears a different bright green sweater to lecture.

It matters to me because of the boy I drove with all the way to Arkansas and back; listening to country music, eating fast food, pretending that we were characters in Smokey and the Bandit. The same boy who made sure I didn’t fail Calculus AB when things were hard my senior year of high school and who takes care of my cat when I am out of town. 

From my journal, 4/20/21

“Love must be so much more complicated than we give it credit for. I feel many layers of love in this moment. That is allowed. If no one else will tell me that it is, I’ll tell it to myself.” 

The anonymously authored anarchist essay “Kill the Couple in Your Head” argues that today’s standard “relationship” is nothing more than a container, where hot, unrefined, and free-flowing emotions cool to a freezing point. In this container — or maybe, it’s a cave — we box ourselves in as a means of protection from the fear of our own irrelevancy that we inevitably feel in a capitalist society. The “couple” is the state’s infiltration of our desire for intimacy — the place where “our desire for companionship and commitment is sucked into the institution of the couple and the family [and] our erotic energies are captured by the institution of sex.” Instead of storing our extensive need to love and to be loved into the static container of coupledom, “Kill the Couple in Your Head” argues that we should attempt to see each other beyond “the economy of exchange value in which the couple and the family are productive units.” To do this, we must instead conceptualize romantic (and non-romantic, why do we always create such a distinction between the two?) love as a spider web of relations. This is not to say that we should all embrace polyamory, which comes with its own set of problematic hierarchies and regulations, but rather that loving another person never warrants separation from the whole — that creation of a distinct, atomized pod, impenetrable by the outside world. In essence, if we want to banish the couple, we must nurture the network. 

If I’m being honest, though? I’ve been texting my boyfriend consistently throughout my writing of this essay, covering a range of topics from “good morning baby <3” to “I’m having SO many revelations about monogamy RN!!” 

The love between us isn’t illegitimate just because it is practiced within an illegitimate framework. It wouldn’t necessarily make anything better if I called him up right now and asked to make our relationship “open.” The couple, similar to the police, is far more pervasive than the forms we see walking hand-in-hand on the sidewalk, or the black-and-blue clad officers patrolling the streets. Both act also as institutions, as ideologies, as methods of social control powerful precisely due to their ability to reside within us, no matter how radical we presume ourselves to be. So, even if I were to practice polyamory, and even if I were to break up with my boyfriend entirely, the couple — that urge to belong to someone, and to be controlled by them — would live inside of me. It’s not all that different from the urge to be a citizen within this society, to work and save money and own property and pay taxes. The urge to be productive.

Forget angels and devils — there’s this good girl living on my shoulder, and while some part of me knows she was methodically placed there by those institutions that control us — gender, race, capital, Euro-rationalism — sometimes, still, I mistake her for myself. 

So: I don’t have a solution in terms of getting out of this strict, rule-bound existence. For now, all I plan on doing is ceasing to blame myself for my frequent inability to produce the way I am told to produce, to love the way I am told to love. I am no longer feeling guilt for my ubiquitous, deep infatuation with the world around me and the people inside of it. In high school, my ex-boyfriend would threaten to break up with me for wearing a low-cut tank top to school, or skinny dipping with my best friends at a fourth of July pool party. I began to associate his intense jealousy with his love for me and ultimately blamed myself when he realized he couldn’t own me. My current boyfriend has helped me to unlearn some of that toxicity — but I have to admit, while the execution is different, the structure of the relationship is generally the same. And I see it all around me, too — with both of my sisters and their boyfriends, three of my best friends and their boyfriends, and undoubtedly countless other women and queer people who are in love, and who are happy, but who, nonetheless, in some small corner of their minds and to various degrees, know that they sometimes must flatten their spirit to become more digestible to the men in their lives. 

Aren’t we a little bigger than that? Isn’t the world a little bigger than that?

Words spoken by the anonymous friend of an anonymous anarchist: 

“…Intimacy is a bandit. I know I need reciprocal forms of care to keep fighting. These days I’ll take it wherever I can find it. Clutching at these fugitive intimacies even as they slip through my fingers, learning to live in these spaces of imperfection…You don’t need to heal yourself to heal the world. You just need to keep yourself going enough to keep burning things down. Who knows what kind of strange and wonderful relationship forms might emerge from this mess?”

The patriarchal structures of productive coupledom, of the nuclear family unit, and of working for the sake of capital growth are necessarily narrow: if they weren’t, this complicated love I am speaking of — what Audre Lorde has called “the erotic” — would drown them out entirely. In Lorde’s words, “There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.” The erotic power of women and queer people has been confined to The Bedroom (not just any bedroom, but the bedroom of The One) due to the fear it garners. 

And so we live in a state of regulation, slip-sliding between boundaries, tirelessly searching for an outlet for the love we can not stop ourselves from exuding. 

Maybe it’s just me, with my self-diagnosed Oppositional Defiant Disorder, but the idea of spending the rest of my life listening to anyone’s random set of rules — even if that person happens to be one of the loves of my life — makes me feel squirmy, claustrophobic. In this life, we have already been subjected to job interviews and oil changes and rent payments and plenty of things much worse — global warming, cancer, heartbreak. Why, then, would we decide to dismiss life when it gives us the best, the most beautiful that it’s got to offer? Falling in love can be the moment that your high school sweetheart proposes with 100 dozen roses, but it can also be a split second of eye contact with a stranger on the bus, a new friend handing you a cold beer with an all-knowing smile, Parliament-kitchen-dance-parties with your sisters, or a serendipitous coffee date with your next-door neighbor. It can be all of those things happening in the same week. 

Falling in love is just code for the moments when you remember you are alive. Sometimes, you can only get there with a little bit of flirtation, or alcohol, or attention. Other times you simply need to take in a deep breath of fresh morning air and look at the pale moon floating next to the Isla Vista oil rig. It doesn’t matter how you fall in love; it matters that you don’t — under any circumstances — let anyone make you believe that it is wrong.

From my journal, 11/6/21

“Life is about big yummy breaths and fat perfect suns and feeling good. It’s about really hilarious jokes and really deep feelings and helping your friends when their car keys are lost and they are too hungover to try to find them. It’s not about those crazy rules they always told us it was about. So if I think I want to be in love with you on a particular foggy Friday night in Isla Vista, and if we lock eyes on the roof of 6867, and if that’s not hurting anybody, I think that that’s okay. Actually, I think it’s kind of perfect.” 

By Little Yew and Big Yew

Walking through Bessie Forest and Upper Rutsatz Forest in Washington State in the springtime, you are held by a thick carpet of ferns and moss. You may spot a rare trillium flower on the forest floor, while the abundant patches of licorice ferns offer their roots as a tasty snack. These forests are among Washington State’s “legacy forests”: they haven’t been logged in over 120 years, and many of their trees date back to the original old growth. While not yet old enough to be classified as old growth, legacy forests contain mature trees which are invaluable carbon sinks, and likewise, if they are left alone for just a few more decades, they will soon be old growth again.

Unfortunately, Bessie Forest, Upper Rutsatz, and fifteen other publicly-owned legacy forests in Washington State have been slated to be logged as early as this year. The forests under threat include the Dashingly Quirky Forest and the Sauerkraut Forest in the Chehalis River basin — which contain many original old growth trees, including giant fir trees with diameters wider than five feet. 

What’s particularly shocking is that all of these forests are on publicly owned land. Shouldn’t public ownership of forests protect them? Apparently not in Washington State. The state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has made it a regular practice to clearcut publicly owned forests with little-to-no public consent, gifting our oldest trees to the logger’s axe.

According to the USDA, a mature tree absorbs at least 48 pounds of carbon dioxide each year, helping draw down this greenhouse gas and cool the climate. Why are we chopping these trees in these times of pending climate chaos? We need all the carbon sinks we can get! Likewise, mature trees provide invaluable flood protection, habitat for wildlife, and are a cultural treasure. 

Sometimes activists will put our attention into the long battle of saving one or two forests; however, while we are putting all our energy into defending those forests, the state will often log a dozen more. We have to get smarter in how we oppose these logging sales. We have to get better at understanding the systems that are allowing these logging sales to happen — and change these systems.

Washington State DNR claims that these forests must be logged to fund schools. However, in a Seattle Times interview from March 2021, a school superintendent revealed that the logging barely covers 5% of the school building budget, which is a subcategory of the overall school budget. 

Sometimes people also make false claims that “we need to log forests to stop wildfires.” This is dangerously false. The reality is that clearcuts make forests more prone to catastrophic fire. If the goal actually was to make the forests less prone to fire, the state would be consulting Indigenous groups, who have used practices like cultural burns to reduce fire hazards since time immemorial. 

You can get involved in the effort to keep Washington State’s legacy forests intact by going to c4rf.org. Or, if you live outside of WA, you might try joining efforts in your region to preserve ecosystems

For a list of all 17 public forests currently under threat of logging in Washington State, go to: c4rf.org and click “Timber Sales.”

By Kat Ackerman

The writer and organizer Dean Spade defines Mutual Aid as “…collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them” (Mutual Aid). The second part of this is really important. Mutual aid arises with the shared understanding that needs are not being met because of highly intentional and specific political and systemic decisions. Poverty is not an accident, and the nonprofit industrial complex will not set us free. Mutual Aid strives to do something different; it meets those needs directly and is always a mutually beneficial relationship. It’s about taking care of each other, and this can come in many different forms. 

The photo I’ve included is one of my two comrades, Molly and Juna. In the photo you can see we have a truckload of food we are getting ready to distribute. This was a food drive that our mutual aid group (Abell Mutual Aid located in Baltimore) was co-organizing with a public housing community in West Baltimore. This is an example of organized mutual aid where we have an established organization that works to build relationships, share resources, and hold regular meetings with like-minded neighbors. There are many different mutual aid organizations that already exist, looking into finding one in your area is a great way to get involved. If there are none, start your own! An important aspect of mutual aid is that it starts on a personal level. It starts with getting to know your neighbors, what resources you or they can share, and letting them know that you have their back. This shared camaraderie meets more than just material needs, it can transform feelings of safety, care, community, and organized resistance. I believe tending to these relationships and experiencing what it feels like to be loved by your community has radical revolutionary potential.

I was recently asked why I got involved in mutual aid. My answers were the same as they have always been, it’s the end of the world and we need to take care of each other, it is a part of my politics, and a natural (human) response to crises. All of these things are very much true, and they all center me and my orientation in this moment of time. However, there is a piece of mutual aid that I’ve failed to name, but one that I feel deeply through the most sacred parts of my body.

I first learned about love, or a version of it, from my parents. Then I learned about it through my childhood friends, and then when I was sixteen, bell hooks taught me about love in ways that shattered and comforted me all at once. bell hooks defines love as, “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. ‘ Love is as love does. Love is an act of will–namely, both an intention and an action” (All About Love). This definition felt truer to me than anything I had ever read or heard before. At that moment I started to understand where love was lacking or lying in my life, and I was able to affirm and follow the parts of myself that had a deep longing to love and be loved. Feeling actual, active, and intentional love and recognizing it as such changed my life.

Mutual aid is A LOT of things, but a part of it is love. Love for yourself, your comrades, your neighbors, and the earth that we live upon. This idea of “mutual”, mutual care, mutual love, mutual respect. That isn’t the love I was always taught about, but it is the love that I needed. We take care of each other. We are deeply invested in each other’s health, safety, fulfillment, and growth. We know that by teaching each other to love we are creating, together, the world we are trying to build. I’ve learned so much from my time sharing resources, ideas, conversation and building together with my neighbors in our mutual aid. Whether it be organizing actions, a food drive, or coming together to help a friend and comrade move, I will be forever grateful for the lesson in love I am continuously being taught. It is sacred, transformative, and life-giving. It is the closest thing to embodied politics (embodied liberation) that I can imagine.

By participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together

Mutual Aid by Dean Spade

The University of California is preparing to obliterate People’s Park in Berkeley by constructing high-rise student dormitories there — construction could start as soon as June when UC students leave for summer break. In their fucking dreams! The university will never get away with it despite the sense of resignation and inevitability hanging in the air like the stench of rancid french fry grease. 

Slingshot does not know and therefore cannot disclose the specifics but People’s Park is magic — it is not governed by the standard laws of physics or social norms. So don’t believe the hype: There will be a mass mobilization to defend the Park the minute the UC moves to install a fence. Or maybe dragons will emerge from volcanos — who the fuck knows but the UC should be careful stirring up the demons that inhabit the park. 

People’s Park, located between Haste and Dwight Streets east of Telegraph Avenue, was constructed without permission in 1969 to create a beautiful community on vacant UC land. UC’s first attempt to seize and destroy the park in 1969 led to rioting, police shootings that left bystander James Rector dead and dozens wounded, and a week-long National Guard occupation of Berkeley. Since its re-opening in 1980 the park stands as a wild and free space that attracts people searching for a different world. A world not predicated on war, racism and exploitation.

The Park wasn’t then and isn’t now about merely a homeless encampment, no matter how UC wants to frame it to our deep disadvantage. If we allow the Park to just be about a homeless encampment, we’ve already lost. The park is about seizing institutional land and returning it to the commons. It is about reorganizing the whole society — a model for collectivizing factories, housing and farms. It’s about recognizing the value of open space and recreation.

UC has always claimed to own the Park, but since 1969 they have never been able to control it. What happens isn’t up to them — their land title is dripping in blood. It’s up to us. 

By some anarchists

The largest forest defense action in Canada continues at Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek) — a generational renewal of so-called British Columbia’s infamous “war in the woods.”

If you desire to participate in subversion of authority and widening a major social rupture, we look forward to seeing you here!

The majestic braids of the San Juan River delta flow into the Pacific Ocean on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island. This watershed and others here on unceded Pacheedaht and Ditidaht territories are home to everything from salmon to giant green sturgeon, and the biggest trees still standing in so-called Canada: the Cheewhat Cedar, the San Juan Spruce and the Red Creek Fir. Ada’itsx (pronounced “ah-dah-itch”) is the last unlogged tributary of the San Juan, and a grassroots, anti-colonial land defense movement has maintained a blockade against logging company Teal Jones here for almost two years.

This ancient, temperate rainforest is high in biodiversity and carbon sequestration, and is an inseperable part of Indigenous land and culture.

Some stands exceed the biomass found in any tropical forest. In response to a militarized police invasion begun in May 2021, thousands of people joined the blockade movement locally, at numerous solidarity actions near and far, and were inspired to start similar blockades in their neck of the woods. 

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has always been a colonial paramilitary force, and recently, their Orwellian “Community Industry Response Group” (CIRG) has stepped up attacks on land defense movements. There have been media-friendly civil disobedience style arrests at Ada’itsx, especially in the first few weeks of the CIRG-led police invasion, but over time the police crackdown has become more arbitrary and hazardous. Wearing banned white supremacist “thin blue line” patches instead of badge numbers, the cops use extra-judicial “exclusion zones” to deny access to media, and illegally card, search, detain or arrest people, many without charge, often releasing them within hours nearby. 

“Nonviolent direct action” in this context is a myth.

Blockading is economic violence. Some logging industry workers have lost their jobs due to the blockades. “Peacefully” obstructing the RCMP’s invasion for month after month is economic violence against the state. Digging trenches in logging roads is economic violence in the form of sabotage. Offering one’s self up to be beaten to a pulp by a cop or a logger while locked down in a trench is violent, to one’s self and one’s community. Blockaders voluntarily suturing their arms together to dissuade arrest is not only violent to themselves, but potentially to other blockaders and police via blood-borne illness.

Courageously, some land defenders are breaking free from the theatre of the absurd that is the cult of nonviolence.

Some folks have been resisting arrest, de-arresting comrades, pushing police as they push past police lines (using a tactic called “the blob” which is somewhat similar to the black bloc), holding steady at a blockade position as needed before vanishing into the bush before they can be arrested, etc. Strategically, gates have been locked, others have been cut free of their locks, and increasingly, the police themselves are the target of the action, whether it’s a clandestine lock on the gate to their compound, or a blockade setup specifically against their vehicles. The brutality of the police has been met with relentless rebellion and fortitude that land defenders bring to the frontlines every single day.

The Ada’itsx blockade movement also has a deep understanding of the need for a holistic approach to resistance, with sanctuary spaces and aftercare services (such as counseling and physical therapies) freely available, and a broad spectrum of frontline and non-frontline activities that people from a diversity of abilities and identities can participate in.

Liberal nonviolence dogma still pervades much of local resistance culture. It contributes to deflection of resistance vs state forces to reformist diversions, such as ill-informed and/or misleading calls for police reform, “accountability”, attempts without precedent to stop the police in the courts, and slogans that reinforce the carceral state like “lock up the real criminals” (ie. the logging industry and its captured politicans). The insidious notions that “bad policing” or “dishonest politicians” are to blame, obscure the reality that this colony’s police and politicians are doing exactly what they’ve been mandated to do. They sharpen their knives and attack, as inequality and repression increase, resources are depleted and the planet dies.

The cops are the army, are the industry, are the government, are the predator, are the enemy, and this is nothing if not a war for our very survival… BC’s perennial “war in the woods” is not just a catchy, metaphorical brand.

We hold the enemy accountable by defending the land, defending ourselves, and fighting back. We are accountable to ourselves when we realize that there is no such thing as justice, only liberation, and do what is necessary to make it happen.

For a diversity of tactics. For unmediated hostility against the state. For total liberation.

—

check out Creeker: vol. 1 — the first in a series of autonomous, anti-authoritarian zines of curated art, poetry, reflections and analysis from the frontlines of the Ada’itsx blockades. Grab PDFs for reading or printing at CreekerZine.wordpress.com!

frequent updates are posted on LastStandForForests.com, a public-facing campaign of this diverse grassroots movement.

By Jesse D. Palmer and Tonerhead 

As Slingshot goes to the printing press, war is raging in Ukraine and the senseless loss of life is horrible and should stop. The same applies to the numerous other wars and armed conflicts around the world that aren’t being hyped in the media 24/7 because they don’t involve white people and aren’t happening in Europe or other prosperous areas — Algeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Columbia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Iraq, Kenya, Kurdistan, Libya, Mali, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, Palestine, Philippines, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Uganda, Venezuela, Western Sahara, Yemen…

It is awkward for Slingshot to publish articles about rapidly changing events, because our paper-based process is slow and there will be at least a month gap between when we write this and when you read it. Everything might change.

We can’t just oppose Putin the warmonger — we have to oppose Biden, Trump, Xi, Boris Johnson and all the rest of them. And even more we need to overturn the system of hierarchy and nation states that make war possible in the first place. Imaginary lines on the map empower tiny groups of old men to make war. None of the combatants or civilians being killed have anything against each other — they just want to live. 

Governments are not going to stop war since fear of attack from across the border is the biggest justification for having nation states. People have to stop war — by refusing to participate, refusing to pay for them and refusing to go along with the whole hierarchical system. 

Wars are used by crumbling empires like a short-term sugar high to delay their decay by pumping up nationalism.  You can see this in Russia and NATO right now. The leaders want regular people to pick a side and wave the flag, but this does not help the Ukrainian or the Russian human beings who are being killed. We can refuse to play the ruler’s game because either way, the rulers end up winning and regular people end up paying the price.

NATO — built to fight the cold war which was itself absurd — lacked purpose after the Soviet Union collapsed. What better way to justify its own existence than needlessly escalating tension with Russia by expanding to nations from the old Soviet orbit — Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and placing rockets in Poland and Romania? We are now paying the price for Western capitalist encouragement of privatization of Russia’s economy after the USSR collapsed — which enriched oligarchs, encouraged authoritarian tendencies and failed to improve the lives of ordinary people. NATO supported borders, hierarchy and standing armies that celebrated the triumph over communism — and left a feeling of resentment and vulnerability in Russia. What a lost opportunity over the last 30 years to support human dignity and self-determination.

This is no excuse for Putin’s invasion — the war isn’t a simple result of NATO expansion or provocation. Now is not the time for activist-speak anti-imperialism that discounts the horror we can see with our own eyes unfolding in Ukraine just because the US has unleashed similar horror in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. We have to oppose war and state violence — rather than lecturing people who are having the correct emotional reaction to seeing people get blown up for no reason. Which isn’t to discount the racism inherent in the way Ukrainian refugees are treated with compassion while Syrian or Iraqi refugees are systematically excluded from the Western democracies we are told are so urgent to defend. 

War always makes authoritarianism and nationalism worse for everyone. In Russia, the crackdown on dissent and independent media is intense. The war and sanctions in some twisted ways strengthen Putin’s power. The bravery of Russian anti-war protestors who are risking jail and worse is inspiring. 

For us in the West, there’s a risk of idolizing Ukrainians and dehumanizing Russians. Dehumanizing other people is what starts wars and keeps them going. The US media is filled with barely disguised propaganda — tear-jerking stories that veer into emotional manipulation. Hero worship is also dehumanizing. Meanwhile, the Russian troops dying are also victims — they didn’t make this war. Their wives will be just as widowed, their children just as fatherless as the Ukrainians who are being killed. In the USA, the war is being used by both political parties to consolidate support and obedience. Dissidents everywhere unite! 

Meanwhile, the arms merchants get rich like always. In the US, the biggest portion of taxes go for weapons when there’s so many other pressing needs. Next in line are police and prisons that perpetuate the same forms of violence, hierarchy and control internally. Police seek to dominate along racial and class lines — encouraging divisions between regular people so we cannot unite against our rulers. 

The military system and nation states rely on a self-destructing industrial and economic system of oil, alienated labor, ecological destruction and wealth concentration. To stop war, we’re going to have to stop the everyday war on the earth. Unless the whole world changes quickly, climate change, wealth inequality and environmental collapse will cause more death and destruction world-wide than the Ukraine war. 

Economic sanctions have mostly not included Russian oil and gas sales to Europe because keeping the oil flowing is more important than stopping the war to those in charge — oil is what keeps the whole rotten system going. You have to wonder if the leaders and nation states are really in control, or is it fossil fuels? 

The war is being used to test and deploy slick internet thought-control techniques — both in the West and in Russia. It is easy to imagine fake news spread by elites fueling some form of civil war in the US. Now is the time to stop the slide towards violence by building bridges and connections between different kinds of regular people on a grassroots level. We need to talk to each other and seek understanding of what we have in common so we do not let those in power turn us against each other. Maybe seeing the televised horror in Ukraine war can help shift the narrative away from red state / blue state divisions and provide an opportunity to see that we’re all in this together. We should not go down the path of killing. 

War is part of life for millions of people all over the world. Here in the US, we’re insulated from the terror and destruction, but many of our lives are filled with fear, incarceration, and scarcity. Elites tell us that this is peace, a fragile something to “protect” with war after war. But we know it’s not. People have been opposing war and authority since the dawn of time. The struggle for a new world is a long haul. We don’t have to stop caring or look away. Humans just want to love each other, be loved and live the best they can on the lush earth. Agitate, educate, organize, share power, know the truth, and get in touch with what’s real.

By Hound

Despite the small southern town I worked in, I was lucky enough to work with a crew of young, hip, and savvy baristas at Starbucks. We served cops cold coffee, since we weren’t permitted to tell them to fuck off, took our “collective 10s” to smoke weed together in the parking lot, and we only got worse as the staffing crisis put more pressure on us. But these were the closers, and the gaggle of high schoolers we held under our wings. I was encouraged by a morning shift lead to report stores — especially independent stores — advertising anything that even smelled of Frappuccinos for copyright infringement. It happened to be one of his favorite past-times, he gleefully informed me. Good dog! 

When I was first hired at Starbucks, I was told by another employee that she was happy to be working for a company that “really aligned with her values.” I did not think that was an unfair assessment, and I certainly didn’t know enough about her job history or her life to criticize her definition of “alignment.” From the outside, if you believe the hype, and no brave soul has tagged your local Starbies recently, it seems like a pretty solid company. They’re inclusive, diverse, eco-friendly! And they want to be your Third Place (home, work, Starbucks). 

How does this measure up for the people who keep the stores running? It’s estimated that the average Starbucks worker would have to work for over 100 years to earn what the ex-CEO, Kevin Johnson, made in a single month. I recall reading company memos in October of 2021, congratulating us for the uptick in sales and promising that the company was doing everything in their power to get us to a $15/hr minimum wage within “the next couple years.” As if they were some mom-and-pop shop scraping the bottoms of their pockets to offer us pennies. Starbucks is supposed to be one of the better food service institutions to staff, but I had only recently had my wage increased to $12/hr, while the Jack in the Box down the street was advertising that impossible $15/hr starting pay. 

How well can you trust those you work with? The seeds of dissent are already planted in your workplace. Long hours with short staff, telling the 15th oblivious crustomer that, yes, we are still out of Very Berry Acai Refresher Base. Your break room is claustrophobic, brightly lit, inhospitable to human life. Cigarette breaks just aren’t long enough. You can’t remember the last time you had two days off in a row, but somehow you’re still struggling to afford your basic necessities. If day shift and night shift are fighting over scraps, when do we stop to ask, “Why are we only being given scraps? Aren’t we supposed to be partners?”

“Partners” becoming partners — real, actual participants in the management of the company we’re staffing. If Starbucks presents a set of values, it’s about damn time they live up to them. The first ever Starbucks union was founded in Buffalo, NY in early December of 2021, after months of organizing. At the time of writing, there are over 140 Starbucks stores in the United States that have petitioned for union status. These stores are organizing through the Starbucks campaign of Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). These organizations trace a long and shared history through other, historic union groups- from the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, to UNITE HERE, a combined labor effort of textile and hospitality workers. Now, a dedicated arm of Workers United fights for fair labor practices of Starbucks partners: Starbucks Workers United (SBWU).

Green-apron unionization efforts on the ground are being met with punitive action. SBWU filed a complaint to the National Labor Relations Bureau (NLRB) about the Starbucks corporation cutting 2 to 15 hours a week from labor organizing partners’ schedules. For some, this puts them under the requirements for health and tuition benefits, for which partners must work at least 20 hours per week. On top of this, organizers are forced to find second jobs or terminate their employment at Starbucks to cover their cost of living. Workers who missed shifts during hospital stays are being punished months later, entirely unrelated to their organizing efforts (that’s sarcasm). The #SaveOurStarbucks tag on Twitter is boiling over with firsthand accounts from Starbucks partners facing intimidation and coercion from company higher-ups. 

Clearly, the union wave has Starbucks management scared shitless. Disgraced Kevin Johnson stepped down, setting his last day as April 4th, and union-buster Howard Schultz, the company’s previous overlord, is stepping back into the ring. They’ve begun to contour their union-busting with a company FAQ, encouraging employees to vote “no” on union elections. The company tells several lies in their “informative” anti-union crusade. They threaten the loss of benefits for unionized locations (despite robbing partners of benefits and employment at this very moment in retaliation), insist that union partners will be unable to swap shifts or transfer stores, and encourages employees to report “annoying” pro-union coworkers to management. This is classic union-busting, depicting unions as entities that exist solely to collect their dues and drown out your individual voice.

Starbucks is far from the only company engaging in duplicitous PR campaigns and slimy anti-union action. Monopolies dominate our neighborhoods, and small business owners are not immune from gaming the same systems to bleed profits from their workers. Workers United is running, alongside the Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) push, campaigns to protect the rights of Lush workers, and manufacturers for Canada Goose (a Canadian outerwear company). The Global Lush Union and Canada Goose Unions are similarly fighting for fair wages, benefit protections, and a voice in the directions of the companies that they carry on their backs.

The Starbucks website claimes that their first guiding principle in response to Covid-19 is “Prioritizing the health and well-being of our partners and customers,” which is funny, because back at my store in the eastern U.S., the manager willfully kept knowledge of Covid-positive workers a secret until two others on the night shift also tested positive. And then, for some reason, he sent the morning shift home, and forced anyone on night shift that was exposed to return to work as normal — even while their own Covid test results were pending. Sure, we had two paid sick leaves at the beginning of the pandemic — any following mandated isolations were to be unpaid leave — but this pandemic has been going on for over two years. Most of us, just in the course of working with the roiling public, have been exposed and required isolation leave more than twice. This is particularly true in states where you might find yourself the only person masked up in your local grocery store in the Fall of 2021 — well, you and the workers.

The process of sinking my teeth into this story has illuminated several blind spots in my prior union knowledge. My motivation sprung primarily from my piss-poor experience working for the ‘bucks during the pandemic — working hard, thankless hours during constant supply shortages, all while combating the perpetual schism between openers and closers. Even if we, exhausted, desperate, starving, had any clue about the illegality of managements’ decisions, we didn’t have a clue how to address it. And that benefited the management alone. When baristas quit, that just means the shift leads would work entire weeks without break. And we loved our store. You can’t pour that much sweat, tears, and, yes, blood, into a workplace without feeling some semblance of ownership. But the majority of my shift (since I was rarely a star of the morning shift) were young, either still in high school or nowhere near completion of a degree. Unions were a fantasy. 

It seems an odd system to me that requires a workplace to opt-in to having their rights protected by a federal agency, but is there a better way to support ourselves and our peers today? I’m not qualified to say. I’m a loudmouthed, low-wage mercenary. I’ve scarcely lived in one place long enough to unionize, let alone see how that all shakes out. When a job starts to trouble me, I jump ship. It would be simple enough to wave it all away, but I’ve got comrades still working for the Siren. People I love. They are passionate, brilliant, creative, hilarious people, and I’ve seen them sucked dry by this company. For their sake, as always, I’ve got my focus trained on the SBWU socials. If the Worker’s United track record is to be believed, we might finally be witnessing the power of service workers leveraged properly during this economic crisis.

We don’t have to sacrifice our bodies and our lives to the meat grinder. No matter which way you play it, all things boil down to one fact: there are more of us than there are of them. I don’t want to go “back to normal.” I want to look in the face of this worldwide health crisis and ask, “How many people died for this economy?” Can any of us even afford a fucking place to live? How long before the government is trying to get us to reproduce faster, raise children we can’t afford, to “correct” the labor shortage? Idaho just tried to pass a law that would sentence parents to life in prison for seeking gender-affirming treatment. In February, historically black colleges were flooded with bomb threats. It’s hard not to see these disparate tragedies as points in a gigantic net, drawing closer. The leaders of our country, the wealth-owners and the policy makers in their pockets, want us tired, desperate, and scared. We need each other now more than ever. 

I’ve got a new food service job out here in the Bay. I’m no longer working under the Siren, but the industry is the same. This new gig holds itself up as a hip and with-it sorta company, but a corp’s a corp. Let’s just say, this time, I’m thinking “unionize.”

By DD

The idea of free will and the incessant wanting to fully understand, define, and explain everything can be frustrating and exhausting, especially when we inevitably realize we cannot. I think free will is both a freeing and destructive idea. With free will comes expectations and disappointment, motivation and hopelessness, solace and pressure; it can invigorate you in one moment and overwhelm you in the next. It is the contradictory mindset of our society. 

We often try to ignore the arbitrary nature of life, how the environment we are born into and our surroundings have such an overwhelming impact on and control over our lives. The way in which we view economic poverty is in relation to where we live, how the society functions there, and what commodities are seen as necessary beyond fundamental needs such as food, water, and shelter. How each of us has arrived at this present moment in this specific way is a reflection of our environment which we are arbitrarily placed into or find through random causation – the butterfly effect in action. 

The contradiction lies in that the capitalist society we live in wants us to believe we have the free will to overcome our environment through hard labor and dedication to being a cog in the machine, yet it discourages the belief in the level of free will to transcend the system itself and not play by its rules. At what cost do people attempt to overcome their environments through the current economic system? Resources are not infinite and constant economic growth is not sustainable. Our society conditions us to believe that we can continue to climb up the never-ending ladder of “success” or unsustainable “progress” (on account of our free will to work, study, seek monetary goals…), yet it also wants us to rest our entire lives on the imagined existence of this ladder and think it inconceivable to stop climbing or even step off it altogether. This, coupled with overwhelming individualism, makes the demand for change seem impossible. 

We think that since we personally cannot do anything to challenge the systems at hand, we may as well participate since there seems to be no other choice. Solidarity in numbers is forgotten. Revolt and rebellion on a powerful scale are portrayed as virtually inconceivable. How do we make change in a society so complicit and caught up in the individualistic pursuit of “freedom”? A society that has been so desensitized to the contradictions of capitalism, that it seems nothing will move them to demand change. 

The overwhelming system and the conflict between the desire for free will and its experienced absence produces a numbing effect. We know the system is wrong, but in an effort to rally a population against capitalism’s exploitations, we desensitize that population to it out of the sheer perceived impossibility. We tell ourselves that we individually cannot make much change, it’s the big corporations’ fault. Yet, the system is so complex and bureaucratic that the outside entity to blame seems faceless. It resides in the minds of our society, we are socialized into it and we must re-socialize ourselves out of it. I don’t believe in blaming the consumers of this systemic capitalist ideology, but there should be an effort to make our collective consciousness transcend its privileged hopelessness and be willing to act against the systems and institutions at hand. 

Radical thought is often supplemented with anger (at the current economic, political, and societal situation), and that anger is justified. It is an emotion that naturally arises out of frustration with the current state, but it should not be uncontrolled. Overwhelming anger is unsustainable, it is the reason why so many organizers experience burn-out, and the activist scene has such a high turnover rate. Anger at the system is most effective when collectively expressed through organized mass action rather than contained within the individual. While anger can be a powerful motivator, an even stronger and lasting one is hope.

We can better sustain contentedness if we simultaneously work towards improving our situation and not letting the current state of it mentally drain us or put us in a state of despair. Not through conformism, but rather an avoidance of individual emotional turmoil that merely wears us out. Best not to fixate or get too overwhelmed and mentally exhausted by the system. Instead we can have a calm and collected, yet headstrong attitude. Action is most effective not within the individual but through the collective.

I think we individually experience strong desires to feel a sense of free will, or at least the thrill of escaping from the monotony of daily life. It’s why spontaneity is so intoxicating. We crave that feeling of control over our lives and attempt to gain some by breaking away from the schedules and deadlines that both govern and alienate us from our time. Even the decisions we so defiantly make to deviate from the norms of our society or upbringing can be interpreted as essentially just a negation of the norm, informed by this norm, and not truly a decision we make ourselves. But perhaps this idea of free will presupposes the notion of “the self” which we tend to hold on to in our individualized society (an inherently contradictory term). We want to believe we have free will because of this learned idea that we are separate from our community. Perhaps the important question isn’t if we truly have personal free will or not, since we do not actually live individually. We know we are a reflection of our environment and that we are socialized from birth, but we can also exercise some form of self-determinism through decisions about what kinds of people we surround ourselves with and the community that we create. By becoming so preoccupied with ourselves as individuals, we miss out on the beauty of community organizing, discussion, and even some commiseration that can reinvigorate you in times of hopelessness. So go out, create your community, join radical spaces around you, and be vocal about your ideas with friends. It is only through community that we can make change in our society and environment, and forming our community is something that we can influence.