Another trip around the sun…..

We welcome any new viewers interested in building community! We’d love to hear from you either here on our blog at https://ctpr.home.blog or on FaceBook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100062599403. This site is a work in progress as we all learn together what it takes to build a strong, protective community in this time of collapse. We thank those of you who have supported our work from the beginning. You are the path to a new way of living – one that takes into consideration every living being on earth, one that preserves and protects, and resists any activity that harms us as a whole community.

Plans for next year include tours and discussions with existing communities regarding the best way to protect your landbase. Watch our FaceBook page for local events and contact us by email if you’d like to request us for your next event. We hope to visit Womyn’s lands first, as they are especially vulnerable and completely foundational when planning sustainable and regenerative communities.

We will be offering new “classroom” wisdom from a variety of experienced and knowledgeable permaculture, conflict resolution, and legal experts.

We are very proud to offer Dr. Fred’s book on Leadership next Spring/Summer! If you haven’t had the time or opportunity to attend our workshops this is an amazing chance to catch up on the latest in Leadership strategies designed especially for Communities.

If you’d like to sign up for our quarterly newsletter just email us at cptr@protonmail.com to get it delivered to your mailbox.

Wishing you all a close, connected, and healthy new year for

the living world,

Communities that Protect and Resist

(CPR)

Readers of our posts are generally familiar with the range of tactical and strategic actions/campaigns resistance activists and radical Communities might use in their work.

Between the options contained in, e.g., the Deep Green Resistance A Taxonomy of Action, and the approaches we discuss in our Leading Communities of Resistance course, you should have quite a range of strategic/tactical possibilities, AND a way to determine what options best fit your circumstances.

There is a complementary analysis you need to undertake, and that is choosing a TARGET for your initiative or campaign.

A convenient, well-known model for choosing a target is the CARVER model (Criticality, Accessibility, Recoverability, Vulnerability, Effect, Recognizability). This tool was developed by US Army Special Forces in Vietnam to select targets optimally, so resources could be efficiently used.

The model, in other words, is a logical way of looking at what action one might want to engage in, and to determine whether the target is possible given your resources.

A Note on Targets vis a vis Tactics.

Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before, but choosing a target (offensive or defensive) cannot be divorced from a consideration of tactics. 

To try to make this clear, let’s introduce a running example. Assume you’re part of the Rebel Alliance. (You are, though we aren’t allied as we should be, but that’s another conversation.) The Alliance may consider the Death Star a potential target (more in a moment). Probably a good choice. However, the decision to choose the Death Star has to be done in tandem with a consideration of available tactics – you probably, for example, wouldn’t choose to file a lawsuit against The Star [TM], or organize a Non-Violent Direct Action like a general strike of neighboring planets. 

We’re guessing the Alliance wants to destroy The Star, or disable it, as part of their larger strategic Plan. In that case, sabotage or an offensive is more appropriate. Now, the Alliance might have better lawyers than they do star fighters. In that case, The Star may still be a target, but the ‘calculations’ leading up to a potential target choice would likely provide a different result.

TARGETS  <—>  TACTICS

Choosing a Target: Revising the CARVER Model.

The model as traditionally presented ain’t broke, but we’re gonna fix it. We’re really just recasting some of the model dimensions so we don’t have to do any reverse scoring or such. Make sense? No? Don’t worry about it, just use the model as we offer it here and you’ll be good to go.

The CARVER Model for Target Selection*
(Highest scored target is the best to strike against)

	TGT / TACTIC 1	TGT / TACTIC 2	TGT / TACTIC 3
Criticality. How important is the target to the existence of the force or entity you’re trying to resist? (1 = least critical; 10 = most critical)	10	10	10
Accessibility. How easy is it to get to the target? (1 = very difficult; 10 = very easy)	2	5	9
Recoverability. How easy is it for the target to be repaired? (1 = very easy; 10 = very difficult)	10	5	7
Vulnerability. How easy is it to damage the target? (1 = very difficult; 10 = very easy)	2	4	6
Effect. How much will striking the target negatively effect your opponent? (1 = very little; 10 = very much)	10	1	7
Recognizability. How easy is the target to identify? (1 = very difficult; 10 = very easy)	10	10	10
TOTAL	44	35	46

*Thanks to Deep Green Resistance for a fuller description of the dimensions. https://deepgreenresistance.net/nl/strategy-tactics/tactics-targets/target-selection-carver-matrix/

At the risk of overthinking this model, we offer potential additional dimensions to the CARVER calculus. Resistance planners, use these or not at your discretion, and add any that help your target analysis fir more closely with your strategic situation.

• Political Significance. How likely is it that your Target/Tactic will lead to political opinions sympathetic to your cause? (1 = very unlikely; 10 = very likely)
• Effect on Others. How likely is it that your Target/Tactic will have a negative effect on others not involved in the campaign or action? (1 = very likely; 10 = very unlikely)

Using the Matrix as Flexible Planning Tool.

The developers of the CARVER model assumed the only tactics to be used were those likely to physically destroy or disable the target. However, it’s possible to expand our thinking with regard to this analysis.

For example, we can use the CARVER technique to compare tactics as well as targets in the same matrix (depending on your comfort level with more complex analyses than the typical 3-column approach).

Our initial analysis compared ‘attacking’ The Death Star with physical and legal means, respectively, The Total Scores of 44 (TGT / TACTIC 1) and 35 (TGT / TACTIC 2) indicate a physical attack is preferred. It also makes for a more entertaining movie.

Let’s say, though, that the strategic resource available to you is the legal system. In this case, you might want to look for the target affording you the best return on your investment. Your TGT / TACTIC 3 score of 46 indicates targeting a pipeline using your legal resources is a better bet than using lawyers (sans guns and money) to attack The Death Star.

These examples are admittedly goofy, but we hope instructive. We resorted to these examples because they allow us to discuss a resistance topic without violating security culture guidelines. We hope you’ll exercise forbearance!

Further “CARVER” Thoughts.

GIGO.

We just made up the numbers for our dimension ratings to illustrate our points. You, though, will want your numbers to be accurate, not based on a gut feel or a hypothetical reaction to a hypothetical situation. 

WHY? GIGO – Garbage in, Garbage Out. Bad data lead to bad decisions. If you don’t populate your matrix with accurate, or reasonable, dimension estimates, you won’t get reasonable target estimations on the back end. And that is not a good contribution to your resistance strategy.

How do you get the information to complete the matrix ratings? 

Targets do not have to be physical structures.

Let’s broaden our thinking a bit when it comes to ‘what’ we could target in resistance work. Targets can be people, businesses and so on. Might you, e.g., target the CEO of a pipeline for some sort of action? Maybe DDS a website devoted to fascist propaganda? 

Broadening our notion of what a target could be also opens the door to a much wider set of actions. Sabotage works in some settings, sure. But what if the President of your nation is highly susceptible to mockery? Rule in the tactical use of humor for your strategic armamentarium. It’s been used before, and serves a wide variety of functions in resistance campaigns, as we discuss in Leading Communities of Resistance.

Targeting can be used for offensive or defensive purposes.

The line between these orientations might be blurred at times, but do not limit your plans to either type. Be ready to plan to attack threats to your Community preemptively and on their turf, as well as to plan and execute actions to defend your land and life. As before, keep open the widest possible range of strategic and tactical options to maximize your flexibility and effectiveness in resistance planning.

A Final Word re Targeting.

In life, success is all about options, or so it’s sometimes said. So with target planning. Expand your view of what targeting entails, and be creative in generating target lists and target actions. You may find your resistance Community is on its way to becoming the feared opponent of the dominant culture you’ve always envisioned.

A somewhat effective, albeit political, example of target selection:

https://www.vox.com/23152123/climate-actions-individuals-can-take

A not-so-effective use of target selection: The eco-sabotage group “Tyre Extinguishers”https://dgrnewsservice.org/resistance/direct-action/britains-new-eco-sabotage-group/

Reflections on Homelessness from the American Northwest

A few years ago, I was discussing the collapse of this civilization with a friend, as one does. We disagreed on how long it might take – I said 5-10 years, he said 50. We were both right. It’s been happening for a while but is now beginning to be obvious to most, even people desperately struggling to ignore it. The increase in homelessness is just one sign of this crumbling system. In 50 years what will be left?
We’ve all seen or heard about the sudden increase in homelessness across the country and around the world. Economic refugees, climate refugees, people who are down on their luck and unable to bounce back are some of the first casualties of this civilization’s collapse. They call these groups “Homeless Communities”, although the only resemblance they bear to true communities is the fact that they tend to gather in groups in public spaces. There is no trust, relationships are transactional or even forced, support is minimal and inconsistent. There is no room in anyone’s head or heart for concern for other people, other animals, or even the ground they walk on. This is not the kind of “Community” I want to leave behind.

“We need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
Desmond Tutu

Those with a roof over their head, sleeping in their own comfortable beds, don’t really understand why there are so many of these groups, or camps. Yes, the economy is bad, but it’s been bad before, right? And Covid caused a lot of people, mostly poor and service workers, to fall behind on rent or mortgage when restaurants and entertainment venues closed down last year. And some of those homeless people are probably mentally ill and just not capable of maintaining any sort of consistent housing.
I hear people say the homeless choose to live on the street because they have complete freedom there. The same critics that believe this is a lifestyle choice also believe that the homeless begging on the corners really have nice houses to go home to and they’re just scamming good-hearted, hardworking citizens like us instead of getting an honest job to make a living. Or maybe they’re just lazy and not willing to work extra shifts or side jobs. They’re probably drug addicts. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the notion that in general people would choose to live in unstable, occasionally violent and unsanitary arrangements is absurd.
Of course, any of these reasons could be true, and there are some for whom it IS true, but the scale of the problem has increased dramatically. And the homeless demographics are changing. We are seeing more elderly, especially older women. Added to that, without adequate health care we are seeing more serious health problems in the homeless population. And the State’s thinly veiled contempt directed toward the homeless exacerbates the threats: I know of a woman who was discharged from the hospital to an underpass where she was camping. She was on oxygen and had some complicated care instructions to follow. A group of concerned laypersons raised money for a hotel room for her, temporarily. While she was gone, city workers “cleaned” her campsite, meaning that they threw out all her belongings.
It’s not just the elderly who suffer, either. Because one paycheck (or even two) is not enough to support a family we are seeing more children sleeping in tents, eating sandwiches when they’re available for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, unable to even heat meals with a campfire in areas where wildfires are out of control.
For years we’ve heard about the “shrinking” middle class. Capitalism rewards the sociopaths at the top of the financial world and uses those at the bottom to serve those at the top and produce. There is no need any more for a middle class to inspire us to work harder or shape the rules that keep the wealthy and their various enterprises protected from the poor. Now that resources are getting scarce (Google it: Water, soil, food, trees – all of what is needed to continue human and animal life on this planet – are being destroyed) the homeless problem will only get worse. The mask has come off. We are a culture of sociopaths. Any talk of community or sharing or love has been co-opted to soften the idea of the neoliberal nightmare, “every man for himself”. This is the ambitious, manipulative, dominating and power-based culture we grew up in and are raising our children in.
Recently, for multiple reasons – none involving drugs or laziness- I spent six months on the streets of Eugene, Oregon here in the U.S. Eugene housing is in crisis and rents have skyrocketed. There are studio apartments here being rented for $1000/month or more. That’s one room. Roommates are a popular solution but that is a delicate balance. Our relationships with others seem to reflect the unhealthy and dysfunctional dynamics many of us grew up with in our first roommates, our families.
And, because we are a nation of “go-getters”, there are plenty of people willing to take advantage of that.
The first time I encountered homelessness was in San Francisco about 25 years ago when I visited my brother. On our way to dinner, a woman asked me for money for tampons and I automatically reached for my purse. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than bleeding on a cold, wet sidewalk with no way to clean up or dry off. My brother was furious. “Never give them money.”, he said. “She could get a job.”
I knew it wasn’t that easy. There were homeless people camped out along with Occupy in a park under the freeway overpass when I moved to Eugene. They were occasionally violent and clashed with the movement at times. I think it must have been hard to share that space with those who had the ability to go to a home.
As the years have gone by, I’ve watched as more and more street corners were taken over by people begging for money or food. The seats at the bus stops were replaced by benches with metal knobs across the surface or strange curves making it impossible for a person to comfortably sit or lie down.
Some intersections have signs prohibiting the exchange of anything from a pedestrian to a vehicle. I thought at first this was to stop drug dealing (which I had never actually seen), but it was to stop people from giving money to someone in need. Some businesses have installed large boulders in random patterns on the lawn around their buildings to prevent camping there. There are cameras installed “for safety” throughout the city, concentrated in areas where homeless people are found. Public restrooms are either closed or locked up and there is often no toilet paper to use if you are lucky enough to find one open. Downtown, the police make the homeless move their few belongings regularly. Even in public spaces they are not allowed to stop and rest. The park that begins under the expressway and goes on for several blocks (including 14 miles of trails) to the river is now packed with tents, homemade lean-tos, cars, trucks, campers and sometimes just individuals lying under the stars with no shelter at all. Up until this year, the police would come to “clean” them out, like vermin, scattering their few belongings or hauling them off to be stored and then eventually trashed.
Much of that ‘trash’ ended in neighborhood yards and was a source of friction to homeowners and renters in the area, as was the presence of feces and uneaten food. As the park filled up and the job got harder and messier someone suggested hygiene stations and port-a-potties. The city brought in dumpsters as well. The homeless residents were told they could stay if they kept the area clean and tidy. Tents were placed in lines rather than the labyrinthine clusters which kept police from viewing the area.

All in all, these were improvements and much more humane, although they did absolutely nothing to solve the problem itself. Vehicles that have been parked on the street for months are still being towed away, which amounts to a person losing their vehicle permanently if not able to pay fines and towing costs. And they can’t. A new ordinance states a vehicle must be moved every two weeks, at least two full blocks away from its previous site, or be towed. Many of these cars, buses, campers won’t start.
For those without a car, homeless camps can easily turn into permanent situations.
The Federal government has allocated funds for cities to deal with their homeless crisis. The money is spent on programs approved by the local city councils and county programs and the methods vary from city to city. Eugene is focused on providing safe shelter spots. These include an opaque cylindrical tent in a spot that is more easily regulated for safety and has better access to social services. Many of these services are spread around between Eugene and Springfield, making it difficult to get to appointments unless you have internet access or a car and sometimes both. Without a car, it is difficult to look for a more permanent residence or speak to someone in person (often necessary) when applying for rentals.
Although there is a good bus system available it takes time and money to access needed services. The homeless may seem to have a lot of time but it takes hours to do the simplest tasks like bathing, eating, and access medical care. And many suffer from depression and have just given up. Social Workers are being slammed by the sheer numbers, and by the system, because keeping track of applicants and services is not centralized. There are organizations set up to help but they are not connected to each other and do not share information.
Low-cost or rent-controlled apartments have individual wait lists you can apply for online, most with an application fee of around $40 EACH. There is no centralized wait list so it is necessary to find, apply and pay for every one.
Unable to cook without appliances, food costs for the homeless are exorbitant – takeout is too expensive, food pantries offer food that needs to be refrigerated or cooked. Food stamps are cut off if you can’t cook (although I’ve been told that is on hold right now due to Covid), water is covered on food stamps but not ice, so you can’t keep a cooler (roughly $3-6/day for ice), dining rooms have been closed but are open now if you can get to one. And with fires raging all around us there is a ban on fires and grills for the area, even in legitimate camping areas with grills or fire pits provided. Once a week I see a small group from a church bring hot food to the park.

So, are these “Homeless Communities”? Do the people living in these camps pull together for the common good, the good of all? Do they watch out for each other? No. They view each other with suspicion, afraid someone might take what little they have. They are desperate and tired and hungry.
They have no space left within them to care about others or where help comes from, they just need.
These groups are a mirror of society as a whole and what they reflect is greed, avarice, anger and frustration, and fear. This is what happens when the system, which only really offered the illusion of safety, flowers. Safety for all was always an illusion in a ‘civilized society. The system thrives on an underclass desperate enough for food, shelter, and care that they will do anything to procure these necessities. The bonus function they serve is as an object lesson to those who would think they can ‘coast’ (not work themselves to death) in that system and still thrive.
So, what do we do? The good news is that this is a systemic problem and there is a better system. We can start now to build a culture of respect for all of the living. Humans can re-learn how to work responsibly to maintain a just and sustainable way of living that includes ALL life. When we reconnect with the natural world we can see the lies of this civilization clearly and choose a better way. We can start now.

At the outset of this piece, I wondered what would be left in 50 years; homelessness or the system that creates it. If I have anything to do about it, the answer is, neither.

Communities are the Natural Order

True Communities, CPR Collectives as we know them, are the Natural Order.
Industrial civilization doesn’t only destroy the physical world; it destroys the spirit and soul. What indigenous cultures know is that Communities enrich and heal. The effects of industrial civilization manifest as stress, illness, and addiction, among others. These infirmities affect all inhabitants of a Community: air; soil; rocks; water; animals; plants and fungi are compromised, stressed and weakened. Communities offer the intimacy, camaraderie, nurturance, support and the structure needed to survive, grow and thrive.
Let us know if you’re interested in working with Communities that Protect and Resist, building a CPR Collective, or just the work we’re doing. We’d love to hear from other activists and share your stories.
Visit us at our blog https://ctpr.home.blog/ or on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Communities-that-Protect-and-Resist-100969171337864

*Note: This was written in 2021. Since then, the City of Eugene has set up “Safe Spots”, yep, those same plastic cylinder tents, away from the Willamette River and Skinner’s Butte Park, just in time for Tourist Season. Not long after removing the homeless the City announced a multi-million-dollar deal to sell waterfront property on the river to developers. And not too long after THAT, editorials started appearing again complaining about the homeless problem. Fines are now being levied for anyone camping in the park or having their belongings out in the park or city spaces.

by Joshua Clinton

This article was originally published on <a href="http://&lt;!– wp:heading {"level":1} –> <h1><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/01/05/the-green-deceit-of-deep-sea-mining/">The Green Deceit of Deep Sea Mining</a></h1> COUNTERPUNCH, January 5, 2022

“To build a green future, in the next couple of decades the world will need to mine more metal than we’ve mined in our entire history” says Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company.

There’s some truth to that statement – if we wish to meet the rising demand for new technologies, we’d need to see a sharp increase in metal extraction. After all, electric vehicles require 4x the amount of metals found in standard cars, and a single wind turbine requires 340 tonnes of metal.

Here’s the problem: the ‘green future’ he’s selling us is a lie, because what Barron fails to divulge in his upbeat sales pitch, is the ecological upheaval that his company’s plans would surely wreak.

The Metals Company plans to mine the seabed for polymetallic nodules; potato-sized objects containing metals like nickel, copper, and cobalt; essential in the production of the lithium-ion batteries being used for electric cars and (so-called) renewable energy storage.

They’re located (among other places) in the Clarion-Clipperton zone, an area of the Pacific Ocean equivalent in size to the entire Indian Subcontinent. The seabed here (despite the claims of company officials) isn’t simply a ‘vast marine desert’, it’s home to a wide variety of species whose existence depends upon the presence of these nodules.

So, what would the mining process actually look like?

They’re building house-sized machines which would indiscriminately vacuum-up the contents of the seabed and send it to a ship on the surface. This includes an estimated 2 to 6 million cubic feet of marine sediment (granulated rock) per day for every machine in operation, only then to be subsequently dumped right back into the ocean.

It’s been stated that the sediment will be returned to a depth below 1200m. That’s called the Bathypelagic zone (Midnight Zone) – and some animals who live there include viperfish, anglerfish, frill sharks, eels, and sperm whales. These would be among the first creatures to acquire a gill-full of gravel.

But furthermore, the floating particles could be carried throughout the entire water column by powerful currents in a natural process called ‘downwelling’ & ‘upwelling’ – damaging (perhaps fatally) the respiratory systems of billions of fish.

This, plus the impact that light & sound disturbances from mining equipment would have on creatures adapted to conditions of silence & darkness, raises the likelihood of ecosystem collapse. Ocean ecosystems are already threatened by multiple stressors like overfishing, ocean acidification, & plastic pollution – do we really want to add anything else to the list?

The Metals Company claims that seabed extraction is a more ‘sustainable’ method of sourcing metal than land-based mining. Whenever anyone pulls-out the ‘sustainability’ buzzword, two premises need to be addressed:

#1: what are they sustaining? – clearly not biodiversity.

#2: how long do they wish to sustain it for?

The answer to the first question: an industrial way of life. The way of life which propels us to greedily squander nature’s bounty.

The answer to the second question: for as long as there’s anything left of the living world to convert into commodities.

This isn’t about saving the planet. It’s about creating new technologies which will prolong & exacerbate the destruction of the planet, and a false narrative that this is all somehow morally justifiable. Here’s a basic rule: if we consume the Earth at a rate faster than it can regenerate – eventually there won’t be anything left to take. Even Gregory Stone (chief scientist at The Metals Company) acknowledges this:

“On-land commodities are being exhausted…and [the deep sea] is the natural next place to look…these are some of the last resources that the Earth has to give us”.

Are we really prepared to blow-through everything that’s left? To leave no stone (or nodule) left unturned, just so that we can continue driving around in cars & tooting our horns?

The ends don’t really justify the means. Any right-minded, white westerner can reflect upon the cruelty of the transatlantic slave trade and conclude: “Yikes, my ancestors should’ve left the people of West Africa alone”.

Jazz music probably wouldn’t have existed without the transatlantic slave trade. Do I like jazz music? Sure, but you know what I like better? Thriving communities living in environments to which they’re socially and biologically adapted.

Communities like the ocean-dwelling phytoplankton who generate 80% of the Earth’s oxygen, who play a crucial role in atmospheric carbon regulation, and whose future hangs in the balance should deep-sea mining go ahead.

So, what can we do to stop this from happening?

The country of Nauru, which (having signed a contract with The Metals Company) would stand to benefit financially from deep sea mining, have declared that operations will go ahead in 2024, within waters assigned to them by the ISA (International Seabed Authority) – that means we have about two years to stop this.

So far, campaigners such as Greenpeace, WWF, and the government of Fiji have collaborated on a proposed 10-year moratorium (temporary ban) on deep sea mining until more is known about its effects on deep sea ecosystems.

Going a step further, organisations like Blue Planet Society and Pacific Blue Line are calling for an outright ban.

You (the reader) can help by educating yourself more on the subject, by spreading awareness, by signing online petitions, and by joining or organizing demonstrations against deep sea mining…but before you go and do those things, let me finish with a final appeal:

As environmentalists, we might not instinctively care quite as much about the deep sea as we do about other landscapes like rainforests or prairies. We’re land mammals after all; we don’t belong down there, and neither should we strive to assimilate. However, it’s important that we look beyond our human bias, because the deep sea comprises 60% of Earth’s surface. This means that the wellbeing of the ocean is crucial for the wellbeing of the planet as a whole.

Industrialists can’t understand this. They look upon the deep sea as a challenge, as another frontier just waiting to be conquered, and none of the native beings who live there will stand in their way.

We can stand in their way.

Help to stop deep sea mining, before it starts.

Joshua Clinton is a long-term environmental devotee, campaign organizer, & freelance writer. He can be reached at: tr33tantra@gmail.com

2/21-24/21

by Trinity La Fey

not a gentle planet, but a place of profound symbiosis, our home
a haven of interconnected holies, ancient ones
whose languages diverge and rhyme and converge
in the wind, in the magma, in the thrumming meter
of each pulse, each breath
permeating all, they dictate the boundaries and permissive bounties
of helix, of heart
each place, a part of a pattern in the song inescapable
a legacy legible to anyone who’ll listen
all down the cavern walls, our stories are written
in mineral-rich blood-waters, they tell tales
of floating, sinking, swimming, harmonies seeping
trails form from those who crawl and cling and dangle
cracks grow in the walls from those who slowly stretch their fragile
woody fingers out in all directions
interdependent, creatures of tooth and claw run and fly and sing out
I am here.  Where are you?  Here I am.
glitter, glitter everywhere in the deep, in the darkness
the wind above is not soft when there is strong news
the unfiltered light of our fire heart is not gentle
it beams out, blasting color down
through the water, the leaves, the magnetic layers of skin
in the cold, the water mirrors mineral
and falls a nutritious blanket over all
a biting, bitter buffer from the wind who no longer whispers
but whips urgent against artificial walls, shouting
Something is wrong.  So many things are wrong.
the change is coming too fast
some runners have too long ignored the teaching past
and now pretend the stories they tell
are inevitable and as vast as the real
the wind bellows cold in the wrong direction, warning
Those who don’t know they are sick can never heal.
glitter, glitter everywhere, on the land, in the light
seeping into the sage
whose dead layers are food and shelter
standing gnarled in wind shapes around their daughters
the ravens yell the saga of old to whomever will listen
they say
Stop.
they say
Thicken.
our skins have grown feeble behind unreal walls
powdered stories the builders believe can be made permanent
they say: remember.
we were once as hardy as the moss, velvet black-green
carving life from ice and sediment
and knew change as a spiral
gradual, eventual
in tandem with what has been
as there is no exit from the sphere they see clearly
Over the horizon.
they caw
the heat what’s coming gets harder, the longer we remain obstinately ill
on thermals amidst the dissonance
Thought and Memory rise, circle and dance
singing:         consider.
our only home is ancestor, destiny
divine as any story
not soft, but holy, ever healing
they say
Give up.  Give in.  Death is not the end
but a recycling no walls will prevent or delay.
they say we have our own song in the pattern of is, was and shall be:
little creeks glinting on our way to the ocean
they call for a response
I am me.  Who are you?  Why aren’t you singing along?

*Originally published in protectthackerpass.org
https://www.protectthackerpass.org/ravens-song/

By Trinity La Fey, March 25, 2021

When, concerned for our safety, my husband pressured me to either censor or disguise myself online, I replied, “You keep talking at me like I don’t know what kind of world this is and I am asking you: what kind of a world do you want to live in?”

I-search papers annoy me and I try not to write them, but in this, there can be no dispassionate analysis.  Without relating the experience, how can this story be told?  If Rebecca Wildbear, who recounted, “Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has caused the loss of 80% of wild mammals and 50% of plants.  90% of large fish, 50% of coral reefs and 40% of plankton have been wiped out.  Of all the mammals now on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans.  Only 4% are wild mammals.” couldn’t convince you, or at least pique your curiosity, I doubt I will either.  There are already exceptional writers and reciters of numbers and names of species.  That is not what I am and that is not what this article will be. 

This is about where we live.

When I hear about dams, mining, logging, drilling, fracking and industrial production, I hear about it in numbers and names: this many of that species eradicated (to use the euphemism); this much money for that company; this many jobs for which community; how many years of what material; this many of that habitat displaced.

Are these the questions we really want the answers to?

I live in my body.  When I eat too much or not enough, when I’m ill dressed for the weather, when I’m careless with my movements in relation to my environment, pain and discomfort tell me, in no uncertain terms, what is wrong.

Derrick Jensen once said, “Before you laugh and say a river is just a container through which water flows and happens to be filled with other beings, let me ask you: when was the last time you had a drink of water; and let me ask you: when is the next time you’re gonna’ pee?[  L]et me remind you that more  than 90% of the cells in your body don’t contain your DNA . . .”

I can tell you the kind of world I don’t want to live in and the kind of person I don’t want to be.  That is a world in which dams, mines, drills, deforesters and trawlers go unfettered in their genocidal quests, the kind of person that is complicit in those atrocities by default.

If I were a rich man, maybe it would embarrass me to hear arguments to the effect that environmentalism is a luxury of the privileged. Maybe, if I didn’t know that Bangladesh is one-third under water, I could be spoken over about how, “There’s no point in trying to ‘save the planet,’ how arrogant and self-righteous it is when everything is doomed and Earth has gone through plenty of extinctions.  What’s one more event?”

But I am not a rich man and I live in a country that has displaced more people than water has, so far, in Bangladesh.  Will Falk once said, “Don’t ask, ‘What can I do?’ but, ‘What needs to be done?’”

So I went to Thacker Pass and asked him.

Except it wasn’t as simple as that.  Before Thacker Pass, since September of 2015, my husband and I have spent but one night apart.  We’re the kind of couple that really leans into the whole ‘interdependency’ concept.  Though I have been a passenger near and far, being a late-blooming driver, until Thacker Pass, I’d never myself travelled more than two hours away from my home.  Thacker Pass was two, eight-hour days of driving away from my responsibilities and loves, where I work for a living.  As I told everyone who came to the camp, I cried all the way to Laramie.  I bored everyone else to tears talking them up about him.  All five of us.

Surreal doesn’t touch it.  I had to rent a car, reserve an out of state hotel, two ways, with a card.  I am not a rich man luxuriating in ideology.  I’m at ground level out here, seeing and feeling the dire effects of pollution and poverty.  Both of those acts were things I’d never done before.  They were alien and beyond expensive.  They are things I want gone: emblematic of a way of life that as Max Wilbert so eloquently said, “ . . .we don’t get to vote on . . . .”

Before I left, I kept thinking: this is my ‘real’ car insurance money this year.

Do I really care about the planet, or do I care about the people that I personally know?

This is my tuition for that class I have to take.

Do I really care about the environment, or do I care about my life today?

Am I betraying my relationships by leaving to do this?

Do I really care about the Earth?  What do I care about?

What if something happens to one of us?  I am on my little flippy phone; no use out there in the boonies.

I can barely bring myself to leave the house for work or groceries.  How the hell am I going to leave my life, with my husband, in our apartment and stay away for fifteen days?

I cried

all

the way

to Laramie.

I wasn’t out there because I so much enjoy winter camping.  I wasn’t out there for my good health.  I had to go because I couldn’t live with not going.  It was an emotional allegiance I could either live up to or shrivel.  I didn’t want to leave at all.  My husband had to encourage me to go because I had convinced him with my initial determination and it was too late to back out now.  In one of his videos, Max spoke about native people who rejected horse riding because it moved your body faster than your soul could travel and it took time to catch up.

That is my experience also.

As soon as I got there, I wanted to go back home.  Principle had made me some kind of fool to bring me out in the middle of this beautiful nowhere when I needed to be saving up and hunkering down.  I set up a little calendar to count down the days.  It was February 16^th.  At that time, there were three of us.

It would be inappropriate to speak about the others, by name, who, like me, came and stayed and left.  I will say that true-blue environmentalists are some of the most attractive people it has been my pleasure to meet.  They were an easy crowd to be around, easy on the eyes, easy to fall in love with.  We made coffee and dreamed dreams and walked around and waited for our souls to catch up with us.

The expectation felt was that we should write some great thing to make us not euphemise genocide and then stop committing it.  I’m a writer.  I write.  So, I know how this works.  You can’t effectively write about what you don’t feel.  If I wanted to be able to listen to the place, I’d have to get all the other stuff out of the way.  I wrote love letters to my husband like it was some bygone wartime.  I wrote every day, sometimes all day.  There was much to get out.

Finally, the walks started yielding phrases and poem snippits.  Then themes from our conversations and firelight stories gave me some language of place.  I started writing love letters of parting to my fellow campers.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time outside in wild, half-wild and deadly domesticated places.  I would describe Thacker Pass as half-wild.  Cattle move through there; we were camped under a weather tower; roads, fences and power-lines are visible in the day; city and ranch house lights are visible at night.  We were completely surrounded by mountains.  From a mountainous place, I didn’t expect the desertous Nevada I remembered to have such landscapes.  It really was a wonderful consolation against the cold and wind and waking up alone to piss in the cold wind to be in such a beautiful place, surrounded by so many impressive kindred.  Everywhere life was teeming around us, in the ice and wind.  Every night the coyotes sang from the valley below.  Every day the ravens cawed and swooped down from the cliffs above.  The kangaroo mice left their tracks and teeth marks on everything.  I made friends with a rat.  The sage was very patient with us.  The rabbit brush was like the sage’s lover.  These others weren’t names on a list.  These are family members in a shared landscape.  Once my soul caught up with me and I got all my stuff out, there wasn’t too much I missed.  The number-one reason I don’t recreate in the mountains of my home is that it is Earth-expensive, but a close second is that it hurts so much to come back.  The longest I’d been out before was a week.  After two weeks at Thacker Pass, I was half-wild again too.  Coming back is some bullshit.

There are good things.  I wept with a soldier’s relief to see my husband again.  Having running water, with soap, next to a toilet is amazing.  Showers.

But.

What does it cost?

Do we want to live in ugly places?

Why are the places we reside and rely on made ugly and despoiled?

Lierre Keith noted, “Right now, we are losing 200 species every single day.  So, all the prairies, all the forests, anyplace that you could grow those crops, has been taken over.  It’s quite grim when you think about it: 99% of the forests are gone and 99% of the original prairies are gone.”  What could I possibly write to convince one who would rationalize or justify?  The Lorax has already been written.  It’s all there.  No need for an argument about numbers as ratio or names as technicality.  There is only: the last one.  Then: none.

Where I live, there is a beer manufacturer polluting the river; a steel refinery, a meat packing plant and a pet food company poisoning the air.  You can tell which way the wind is blowing by them.  There are fracking rigs everywhere.  Really.  Everywhere.  Deserted oil derricks, mine pits, clear cuts: those are mostly in the half-wild places.

Why did I go to Nevada when there’s plenty of work to do here? Because I can’t face down a sea of denial in all human relationships.  I can’t fight this alone, just like Max and Will put out the call for others to come join them: because they understood that it would take the people living in and around Thacker Pass; it would take Canadians holding Lithium Americas to account and it would take total strangers willing to sacrifice, in solidarity, to stop the mine from going through.

What if we worked together to stop all the mines?

What if we invented life insurance?

What if we stopped industrial agriculture?

What if we invented credit cards and rental cars?

What if we ended rape?

What if we charged people to live in endless toil?

What if we murdered every species until they were all driven to extinction?

What if we don’t do that?

That is the only thing that concerns me now.  This is not a passive extinction event, wrought about by the inevitable breaths of algae or touch of comets.  We are doing this, as one species, to every other.  Rather, some humans, with names and addresses, are profiting enormously (short term, of course) from massive social inequality among humans and human indifference or contempt for our only home and fellow Earthlings.  This is not a series of accidents.  These are devastating acts, deliberated over and intentionally carried out by people for whom they have been structurally incentivized.

What if we restructured?

I’ve been back now for longer than I was gone and still, I am not acclimated back into my normalized civilian life, because it is unnatural.  I can’t unpack.  I just walk around in my camping clothes, waiting to go back.

Even in the half-wild, even without my better half, even sometimes feeling pain and discomfort, re-wilding happened effortlessly.  My stance widened.  I grew two inches back from my working years.  It felt good to do a hard, right thing: to put my time and money and body where my mouth was.  My speech grew free and bold among new friends.  I had a good time.

What if we were mammals inexorably bound to and interdependent with a larger, encompassing body?

What if, instead of quantifying, justifying, rationalizing, minimizing or qualifying global genocide, we stopped being genocidal?

What if we continue being genocidal?

What if we call the abuse of women and girls ‘sex’ and feed the footage of it to the limbic systems of men and boys for a few generations?

What will happen?

What has happened?

The expectation is that I should write something to make it stop.

You make it stop.

The Lorax has already been written.

Rebecca, Derrick, Will, Max, Lierre and I are part of an organization trying to do together what we cannot do alone.  We need your help.  In every way, we have to stop extracting and start re-wilding.  There is no effective isolationist approach.  We cannot buy into or out of it.  We cannot escape from civilization anymore than we can the climate.  We have to change.

We have mutilated ourselves into whatever kind of cyborgs we are now. Certainly, we can do something else instead, perhaps extending some humble curiosity toward the other species who do not destroy all life on the planet as a matter of course, but contribute to the possibility and furtherance of life, or our human ancestors who did the same.

I’m not feeling numbers and names when I feel the pull back to the half-wild place, but the same pang of love that is concerning one’s self with another.  Not one inch of that place is appropriate to sacrifice further.  Not one of our kindred species is it okay to push closer to the euphemism.

I don’t want to be the kind of person that says, “I tried to stop the mine at Thacker Pass.  I spent two weeks there, but I had a life and couldn’t afford to go back.”

I want to be the kind of person who can say, “There aren’t mines anymore.  We made sure of it.”

That takes living in the kind of world where you’re prepared to make sure of it too.

As Chumbawamba said it best:

“when the system starts to crack

we’ll have to be ready to give it all back

and when the system starts to crack

we’ll have to be ready to give it all back

and when the system starts to crack

we’ll have to be ready to give it all back”

____
*Originally published by protectthackerpass.org
https://www.protectthackerpass.org/where-we-live/

Why all permaculture designs should include supporting a culture of resistance

by Jennifer Murnan

Currently, permaculture operates in the realm of bright green environmental activism and adherents seemingly believe that the current culture can be transformed. Why should permaculturalists choose to align themselves with the deep green environmentalists that support dismantling civilization?

Here are the few reasons that have occurred to me:

The Permaculture movement has always run counter to the beliefs and principles of global civilization. It views nature as a partner, a teacher, and a guide whom we honor and are completely dependent on. This is completely contrary to the cultural view of western civilization; that the natural world is here to serve us, to be used and abused at will, and that this abuse is justifiable.

Permaculture practice, by definition, is an attempt to depart from the model of exploitation and importation of resources necessitated by civilization. To live permanently in one place is the antithesis of the pattern exhibited repeatedly by civilizations. Civilizations cannot live in place. They violently import and exploit human and natural resources, exhaust their ecosystems, experience population overshoot, and collapse leaving an impoverished land base in their wake. Western industrial civilization is currently playing this scenario out on a global scale. Permaculture not only cannot exist within the confines of civilization, it also cannot coexist with a civilization that is devouring the world. It is neither ethical nor practical on the part of permaculturalists to attempt to do so.

Another reason lies in the common visions of the primacy of the earth shared by deep green and permaculture activists. The first ethic in permaculture is ’Care for the Earth’. Without this basis, the second and third ethics, ’Care for people’, and ‘Redistribute surplus to one’s needs’, are impossible. Healthy organisms produce a surplus to feed and enrich the ecosystem in which they exist. Simply put, there is no health unless Earth is cared for first.

As Derrick Jensen states in premise 16 of Endgame “The Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything.”

There are attitudes shared by Permaculture and the Deep Green movement. Permaculturalists believe in working with nature and not against it. Fostering a respect for all life is inherent in permaculture practice. Valuing people and their skills creates more diversity, creativity and productivity in permaculture and deep green communities. Alignment between Deep Green and the Permaculture movements is especially apparent in two permaculture design principles. 

Seeking to preserve, regenerate and extend all natural and traditional
permanent landscapes is a goal of both communities.

Preserving and increasing biodiversity of all types is recognized as being
essential for survival by both Deep Greens and Permaculturalists.

A primary reason for permaculture to become part of a culture of resistance is that permaculture’s two guiding principles logically mandate dismantling civilization. The precautionary principle states that we should take seriously and act on any serious or destructive diagnosis unless it is proven erroneous.

Civilization has proven itself to be destructive to ecosystems since its inception. Western industrial civilization is causing the wholesale destruction of every ecosystem on Earth.

“The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship; This culture doesn’t just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it’s long past time we recognize the pattern.
-Aric McBay

A large scale and effective response to this destruction is necessary. The tactics of the environmental movement up to this point have been insufficient. We are losing. It is time to change our strategy. Therefore, the Deep Green movement is advocating for all tactics to be considered to stop the murder of the Earth.  This includes, but is not limited to, practicing permaculture, legislation, legal action, civil-disobedience, and industrial sabotage. 

There are problems with holding the permaculture movement as the sole solution to global destruction. While transitioning to sustainability in our personal lives is important,

even more important is confronting and dismantling the oppressive systems of power that promote unsustainability, exploitation, and injustice on a global scale. In fact, if these systems are left in place, the gains made by the practice of permaculture will be washed away in civilization’s tidal wave of destruction.

“Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral and stupid. Sustainability, morality and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.”
– Derrick Jensen

The second guiding principle of permaculture, ‘intergenerational equity’, also necessitates immediate action in response to the destructive force of civilization.  This principle states that future generations have the same rights as we do to food, clean air, water, and resources. This statement applies to all humans and non-humans equally. Daily, entire species are being eliminated from this planet as result of the activities of industrial civilization. ‘Intergenerational equity’ for them has ceased to exist and every day this destruction continues more species go extinct. Allowing this to continue is unconscionable.

Permaculture is based on close observation of the natural world, and I believe it can only realize its full potential in a human community that acknowledges the natural laws of its land base as primary. Practicing permaculture in any context other than this necessitates subverting our principles and betraying everything that nurtures and sustains us, all that is sacred, our living earth. We can only truly belong in a culture of resistance, and in communities of resistance. 

Both permaculturalists and deep greens know that the earth is everything, that there is no greater good than this planet, than life itself. We owe her everything and without her, we die.

This is it; we need each other, everyone, every tactic we can muster in defense of the earth.  We have never been able to afford civilization. 

“The task of an activist is not to navigate around systems of oppression with as much personal integrity as possible. It’s to bring those systems down.”
-Lierre Keith

by Jennifer Murnan

Note: An edited version of this presentation was a part of the Deep Green Resistance Girls and the Grasses Ecofeminism Event on November 20, 2021. Deep Gratitude to Deep Green Resistance and all the wise and eloquent women whose commitment and hard work and love of life made that event possible. https://www.facebook.com/deepgreenresistance/videos/444914580532366 https://givebutter.com/girlsandgrasses

Bio
Jennifer lives on the occupied lands of the Cheyenne Arapahoe and Ute peoples on the front range of the Colorado Rockies.  She is a mother and grandmother, a permaculture gardener with a lifelong love of plants.  She became a radical environmental and social activist ten years ago.  Ever since she has been involved with DGR and is now a core organizer with CPR, Communities that Protect and Resist.

From the Beginning, Community Resistance and Survival

Do we know who we are?    In Mothers and Others Sarah Blaffer Hrdy delves into the core question of what makes us human.  So many answers to that question have been debunked.  In Hardy’s words “Time and time again anthropologists have drawn lines in the sand dividing humans from other animals, only to see the discoveries blur the boundaries.  We drew up these lists of uniquely human attributes without realizing how much more they revealed about our ignorance of other animals than about the special attributes of our species.”  

Hardy presents convincing evidence that out of the family of primates, our species evolved in uniquely hyper social ways due to two major factors.  First: our young are extraordinarily slow in maturing and the needs of these young cannot be met by her mother alone.  It truly takes a village to raise our children.  Second: Without a way to store food, with no guarantee in the success of the hunt, with few of our kind in existence, Hrdy posits that our earliest hunter gatherer Pleistocene ancestors relied on their reputations and the stored goodwill of others.  It wasn’t our brain size, nor tool making, or walking upright. We evolved into homo sapiens by developing the emotional skills whose foundational understanding is, as Hrdy comments “To care and to share is to survive”.  While this is a surprising insight considering the sad state of civilized humans today, there is absolutely no reason to think that caring and sharing is an unusual or exceptional strategy for survival.  Suzanne Simard’s first book, Finding the Mother Tree, brings humans an intimate look at forests revealing vital truths—– trees are cooperative creatures connected through networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not unlike our own.  And at the center of it all are Mother Trees: the mysterious powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

Sharing and caring is the nature of life.  

For all of you fortunate enough have watched our keynote address, Heide Goettner-Abendroth’s research into Matriarchal Societies reveals how perfectly these societies are structured to support the innate nature of that which made us human, and that which sustains life. Matriarchies are based on caring and sharing, kinship, centering and supporting mothers, gifting, consensus decision making, the maintenance of mutually beneficial relationships between humans and all the members of their biological communities and the feminine divine. These communities constitute the most elemental unit of humanity.  Together we are whole.

Why am I reminding you and myself of such elemental truths, about our species and about the nature of life?  Because we are so far from home, so far from nature and we desperately need to sustain life giving communities. 

We need to return home and to fight the forces that are destroying our only home. 

I don’t have any answers as to what happened that severed us from nature and our true nature.  The practice of agriculture is quite likely the beginning of our descent into madness, however patriarchy may well predate agriculture. What is certain is that patriarchy supports agricultural production as surely as capitalism enables industrial extraction.   It is so very important to understand our history, the structures behaviors and practices that have all of us and our kin on the brink of oblivion.  Women need to tell that story in our own voices. Women telling our own story is one form of resistance. Remembering is resistance. To give an example: after a two-year labor of love Renee Gerlich recently published her A Brief Complete Herstory series.  In volume 4 Capitalism Gerlich references Rebecca Hall’s book Wake: The Hidden History of Women Led Slave Revolts.  In researching her book Hall discovered remarkable data.  The more women on board a slave ship, the more likely a revolt.  

 Women are fierce and critical resisters. 

I have been fascinated by Community as the nexus of resistance since reading Deep Green Resistance a decade ago.  The stories of women, Maude Gonne, the suffragette movement in Chapter Four, Culture of Resistance by Lierre Keith inspired me. The history of failures in the formation of a culture of resistance informed me.  Here is a short passage from Cultures of Resistance that exemplifies the importance of women and community. “Communities that are used to taking care of each other have a much easier time mobilizing those existing networks into a culture of resistance.  Such established networks could be called a culture of survival. For instance, the men who worked as Pullman porters often found themselves stranded in southern towns where walking on the wrong street would get them killed. There were black women along the rail lines who would open their homes to porters.  Even if all they had for a bed was a mat in the pantry, at least it was safe and there’d be a meal to go with it. Usually, these women had a husband or son who was also a porter, and they understood firsthand the literal terrors in being a black man in an unknown and segregated town.  These women later became the heart, soul and foot soldiers of the civil rights movement.”

My dedication to community and culture as the cradle of resistance has resulted in becoming a core member of Communities that Protect and Resist (CPR), a coalition of and for communities (virtual and land-based) working together to actively and directly resist the forces destroying the planet, including:

• Patriarchy and misogyny
• Capitalism and consumerism
• Racism
• Militarism
• Environmental destruction

Community provides a home and makes us that so much stronger in battle against the forces that are destroying our only home.  

In addition to the structures of oppression which we must confront that I’ve already mentioned there is one more I think we must grapple with.  I believe this threat it has potential to destroy our life-giving nature completely, to destroy our ability to form and support community and build relationships.   

In Renee Gerlich’s second book, Matriarchy, and the Birth of Patriarchy, in her 7-book series, A Brief Complete Herstory Series, she writes:

“Remember that our species is characterized by a long period of dependency in childhood, and that three-quarters of our brain growth and almost 90 percent of brain development take place after birth, mostly in the first three years of life.  This means that human beings are profoundly affected by the attitudes and ideas around us when we are little.  The prevailing systems and ideas of a culture ‘condition’ children from infancy because of our utter dependency on adults and caregivers.” 

 What do infants encounter? What do women encounter? What have civilized humans been conditioned by for hundreds if not thousands of years now?   A brutal hierarchy, pervasive violence, and oppression. 

Near the end of her book Mothers and Others Hrdy comments: 

“To all the reasons people might have to worry about the future of our species – including the usual depressing litany of nuclear proliferation, global warming, emerging infectious disease, or crashing meteorites – add one more having to do with just what sort of species our descendants millennia hence might belong to.  If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an ever-increasing population of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won’t matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish.”

In the destruction wrought by the technological revolution, as all final connections with our mother, Earth and each other are being severed, empathy is disappearing, master corporate manipulators are selling body hatred by way of trans ideology and trans humanism to well-conditioned consumers. 

To quote Jennifer Bilek, researcher, and writer of the 11^th Hour Blog.  In her words, Jennifer writes at the intersection of humanity, technology, and capitalism.  At this intersection stands transgenderism. 

“We have got to come out of the trance we are in and face the truth of what is happening to us as a species and what is happening to our children. If we don’t own the truth, that we are too tied into a technological structure that is destroying our ability to think and respond to abuse, we can’t stand up for them. Our children will continue to be fed into the meat grinder of the vast techno medical complex bioengineering our melding to technology. This system that is tied to a totalitarian market, will stop for no one. Unless we make it stop. First, we must wake up from the trance they have us in.”  from the article Gender Identity: The Techno Medical Complex and Twerking Men in Monkey Suits, Jennifer Bilek August 16 2021  

As surely as our planet is being terminated our species is being conditioned out of existence. I completely agree with Jennifer, we must wake up.  I believe that we must turn away from the screen and reconnect and commune before the capacity to do so disappears. 

I do not agree with Hardy in her assertion that we as a species will survive the horrors of industrial civilization and the technological revolution.  If there is any promise for resistance and a future, community is our the most basic unit of humanity and of resistance. We are quite assuredly not human without community.