Banned Book Club Selection: 'Ecodefense'

From Ecodefense: The Field Guide to Monkeywrenching :

If a stranger batters your door down with an axe, threatens your family and yourself with deadly weapons, and proceeds to loot your home of whatever he wants, he is committing what is universally recognized-by law and morality ­as a crime. In such a situation the householder has both the right and the obli­gation to defend himself, his family, and his property by whatever means are necessary. This right and this obligation is universally recognized, justified and even praised by all civilized human communities. Self-defense against at­tack is one of the basic laws not only of human society but of life itself, not only of human life but of all life.

The American wilderness, what little remains, is now undergoing exactly such an assault. Dave Foreman has summarized the character and scale of the assault in the first chapter of this excellent and essential book. With bull­dozer, earth mover, chainsaw and dynamite the international timber, mining and beef industries are invading our public lands-property of all Americans ­bashing their way into our forests, mountains and rangelands and looting them for everything they can get away with. This for the sake of short-term profits in the corporate sector and multi-million dollar annual salaries for the three-piece ­suited gangsters (M.B.A., Harvard, Yale, University of Tokyo, et alia) who control and manage these bandit enterprises. Cheered on, naturally, by Time, Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal, actively encouraged by those jellyfish Government agencies which are supposed to protect the public lands, and as always aided and abetted in every way possible by the quisling politicians of our Western states (such as Babbitt, DeConcini, Goldwater, Hatch, Garn, Symms, Hansen, Wallop, Domenici-to name but a few) who would sell the graves of their own mothers if there's a quick buck in the deal, over or under the table, what do they care.

Representative democracy in the United States has broken down. Our legis­lators do not represent those who elected them but rather the minority who fi­nance their political campaigns and who control the organs of communica­tion-the Tee Vee, the newspapers, the billboards, the radio-that have made politics a game for the rich only. Representative government in the USA rep­resents money not people and therefore has forfeited our allegiance and moral support. We owe it nothing but the taxation it extorts from us under threats of seizure of property, or prison, or in some cases already, when resisted, a sud­den and violent death by gunfire.

Such is the nature and structure of the industrial megamachine (in Lewis Mumford's term) which is now attacking the American wilderness. That wilder­ness is our ancestral home, the primordial homeland of all living creatures in­cluding the human, and the present final dwelling place of such noble beings as the grizzly bear, the mountain lion, the eagle and the condor, the moose and the elk and the pronghorn antelope, the redwood tree, the yellowpine, the bristlecone pine, even the aspen, and yes, why not say it?, the streams, wa­terfalls, rivers, the very bedrock itself of our hills, canyons, deserts, moun­tains.

 

[ via The Revolution Script ]