OPED: Every Tool in the Box

by Rod Coronado

The use of a diversity of tactics is vital to every movements' success. In our movement, such diversity is necessary to adequately respond to the extremity of assault on Mother Earth. By discussing strategies that recognize each environmental struggle as part of the opposition to a larger corporate game plan, we begin to integrate our efforts into a cohesive battle plan. In this way, every action can be viewed as part of a united human resistance to the destruction of the planet. Rather than appear fragmented, we can break past the diversion. When our opponents begin to see the inner-city working class, indigenous peoples, farm workers, rural residents and college-educated youth all working together to oppose timber sales, incinerators, radioactive waste storage plans and factory-farm pollution, they will be threatened. Once potential allies realize our campaigns are in the best interests of all, they will not only support us, but also accept that it is sometimes necessary to break unjust laws and risk going to prison. This will help us nurture solidarity with allies who have sacrificed much in fighting the same political and economic interests we fight.

We must learn to live like the Coyote Nation that, despite the genocide against its race, has actually increased its territory and birth rate. We need to embrace our resistance with the same vigor that every wild animal does in order to survive attack from the enemy. Wild life is a hard life, and we need to realize it as much as romanticize it, recognizing that the struggle requires an ever-increasing degree of personal sacrifice. This means practicing the ecologically balanced life we propose for others while also fighting as if our very lives depended on it, because sooner or later they will.

So when did it change for us? When did we begin to determine tactics based on their ability to obtain media coverage? When did we begin to distance ourselves from illegal direct action? Why not welcome every strike against corporations that, with sanctions and subsidies from the government, destroying the planet we all fight for? And, when did we as human animals begin to believe that we no longer had to risk our own lives for what we believe in? Tactical decisions should not be based on a political ideology that maintains hope for acceptance and comfort from the society we oppose.

Many of us choose a purely nonviolent philosophy without realizing it's a luxury that many activists around the world do not share. Very few of us face government repression at home for our actions and beliefs. By enforcing a dogma that labels any slightly aggressive acts as violent and counterproductive, we relegate our movement to the confines of a privileged society. An effective strategy requires the acceptance of individual underground action as part of the path to victory. As a movement, we struggle to be perceived as nonviolent in the hope that we will not alienate the public which might not support aggressive defense of the Earth. But it is the media which has a vested interest in portraying our movement as isolated from mass support, that defines our struggle to the outside world, not us.

CD preserves privilege because it does not threaten the power structure for longer than the time it takes to physically remove us from our action sites. When we allow passive resistance to separate us from those whose goals are the same, but whose tactics are more aggressive, we isolate allies, making it easier to capture and persecute them as "criminal and terrorist." It's the old strategy of divide and conquer. The state exploits dissident citizens who share a common ground with less passive elements; passive resisters are threatened with repression and harassment, leading them to condemn direct action tactics. Such behavior separates privileged and educated members of a dominant culture from others who, by choice or as victims of oppression, resist in a more aggressive fashion.

Because someone chooses to burn a bulldozer or Forest Service office, rather than chain themselves to it, we should not distance ourselves from their action. Such behavior forsakes our intention to utilize a diversity of tactics. There is no need to fear losing respectability or acceptance because we embrace illegal action. The history of movements tells us such actions are the one thing that gains attention from our opponents and respect for less aggressive elements of the same struggle.

Passive resistance in China failed in Tiennennmen Square when thousands of peaceful protesters were pitted against a morally vacant government, which used the army to murder and imprison hundreds who stood in the way of tanks. In China, you would have had to peel Ghandi from a tank tread. With increasingly immoral opponents, it is not enough to say we support tactics that break free from state control. We must also emulate those movements that are in solidarity with and provide for their militant elements while pursuing their own chosen path of action.

A friend told me about his trip to Northern Ireland with a tour group of Irish-Americans. While driving through some of the most heavily policed and militarized regions, where peaceful supporters of Irish independence are beaten and harassed by British forces and murdered by pro-British death squads, the Irish nationalists flashed three fingers at the bus load of tourists. When asked what it meant, the guide replied, "That means Irish Republican Army Third Battalion, the division which defends this area." The covert hand signal was a silent expression of support for the direct action contingent.

We tend to draw from history only what will reinforce what we already think. In the case of the radical environmental movement, we believe in tactics and strategy practiced by Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. but overlook less passive elements of their struggles. Martin Luther King's strategy of nonviolent resistance was drawn from Ghandi's principles used against British colonialism in India. In the struggle for India's freedom, Ghandi's tactics were not the complete strategy used to achieve victory. MLK said, "The principle of self defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has never been condemned, even by Ghandi, who sanctioned it for those unable to master pure nonviolence." Beyond Ghandi's adherence to a nonviolent campaign were revolutionaries such as Aruna Asaf Ali, who led a violent underground resistance in the 1940s long after Ghandi had ceased his campaign. Indian Freedom Fighters knew that if it had been the Soviets or Nazis who occupied India, they would have executed Ghandi long before he became effective.

Many of the elements of India's independence movement that did not adhere to Ghandi's principles were, in fact, inspired by the young Irish Republican Army. In 1930, Bengali revolutionaries even launched an armed uprising in India on the anniversary of an Irish revolt in 1916. They carried on their guerrilla campaign for four years.

In 1921, the IRA, opposing the very same British colonialism, had driven them from the majority of Ireland after the Anglo-Irish War (1919-1921). The IRA's guerrilla strategy, striking where and when their opponents least expected it, is the same strategy used today in the six counties still occupied by Britain in the Northern Ireland today. Inspired by MLK's campaigns, Irish Nationalists in the 1960s began their own civil rights campaign. marches. They repeatedly were met with violence, until the repression culminated in the shooting of 13 peaceful marchers during a civil rights march in 1972. This act led many passive resisters to accept the modern IRA's guerrilla tactics and spurred the largest resurgence in IRA membership since the Anglo-Irish War.

You might say Earth First!ers are not indigenous warriors fighting to win freedom like the Irish or native people here, but the struggle to protect Earth's remaining biodiversity knows no radical boundary. Maybe it's time we ask ourselves why we are not willing to risk as much as warriors fighting the same enemy in other lands. I do not believe we need to use physical violence now, but we should fight a guerrilla war that places intact ecosystems and all that lives there above machines built for their destruction.

Earth First!ers are the last line of defense, the last line of resistance when all other tactics fail, the last line before bulldozers rip into the homes of bears and salamanders, lynx and salmon and every other race. After we fail, there is only the sorrow that we did not do more and the memory of how beautiful this land once was. We must fight now to defend all of it as we would for our own family and home. The animal and plant nations have no army except for people like you and me. Environmentalists in three-piece suits aren't going to lay their lives and freedom on the line. There is only us. Humans and non-humans will die if we burn out, surrender to fear or do only what preserves our level of comfort in this society.

Within Earth First! I pray there are warriors who are not afraid of a few years in prison for pursuing the righteous wild passion that tells us to fight a guerrilla war against the evil powers destroying Earth. That war need not be violent to be successful; it need only place more faith in our love of the Earth than our fear of a government-sponsored vacation like the one I'm enjoying now. We are the warrior generation that Earth depends on most. On every front, let's all work together without criticizing each others' tactics, while encouraging constant discussion of the best strategy, with only one goal in our hearts and minds-to always put the Earth first.