About Deep Green Resistance

Why Deep Green Resistance?

• Industrial civilization is killing all life on our planet, driving to extinction 200 species per day, and it won't stop voluntarily.
• Global warming is happening now, at an astounding speed. The only honest solution is to stop industrial civilization from burning fossil fuels.
• Most consumption is based on violence against people (human and non-human) and on degrading landbases across the planet.
• Life on Earth is more important than this insane, temporary culture based on hyper-exploitation of finite resources. This culture needs to be destroyed before it consumes all life on this planet.
• Humanity is not the same as civilization. Humans have developed many sane and sustainable cultures, themselves at risk from civilization.
• Most people know this culture is insane and needs radical change, but don't see any way to bring the change about.
• Unlike most environmental and social justice organizations, Deep Green Resistance questions the existence and necessity of civilization itself. DGR asks "What if we do away with civilization altogether?"
• Unlike most environmental and social justice organizations, DGR asks "What must we do to be effective?", not "What will those in power allow us to do?"
• DGR offers organized, reliable ways to promote sane ways of living and surviving the ongoing crisis.
• DGR has a realistic plan to stop the insanity, Decisive Ecological Warfare.

Listen to Deep Green Resistance members explain why they joined.

What Is 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.

So while DGR is about fighting back, in the end this organization is about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love. They need your heart because they are disappearing, slipping into that longest night of extinction, and the resistance is nowhere in sight. We will have to build that resistance from whatever comes to hand: whispers and prayers, history and dreams, from our bravest words and braver actions. It will be hard, there will be a cost, and in too many implacable dawns it will seem impossible. But we will have to do it anyway. So gather your heart and join with every living being. With love as our First Cause, how can we fail?