Gunslingers and Deep-Green activism

Christine is on vacation
As you read this, I will be doing some serious, hardcore lollygagging in the warm Arizona sun with family and friends. Of particular note, I will be hanging out on some corner about 350 miles southeast of Winslow, Ariz., in Tombstone, Ariz.—famous home of Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral—whooping it up at Helldorado Days, an annual festival that runs this year from Oct. 21-23.

“Saturday [Oct. 22] will be a very action-packed day, starting at 10 a.m. and running to 5 p.m., with over 30 different entertainment groups from belly dancers, gunfighters, line dancers, cowboy stories, music and just plain good old fun,” according to www.tombstonevigilantes.com. Saturday afternoon is also when the Helldorado Days beard and mustache contest will be held (I believe my honey, David, and his chest-length beard have a good chance of doing well in this event).

Good to know
I’ll leave you with some eco-information that Mark Stemen, professor of environmental studies over at Chico State, shared with me:

The new environmental film, END:CIV—“the movie too scary for Halloween,” as Stemen put it—will be shown at 7 p.m. on Nov. 11, in Ayres Hall, room 106, on the Chico State campus. Entry is free. Directed by Franklin López, END:CIV is partly based on the two-volume book Endgame, by outspoken eco-activist Derrick Jensen. Deep Green Resistance movement activist Dillon Thomson will speak after the film.

Deep Green Resistance, for the uninitiated, is a growing movement that, for one, believes that industrial civilization is unsustainable. In addition to Jensen, other big names in the movement are writer and food/environmental activist Lierre Keith and writer Aric McBay, co-author with Jensen of the very interesting book What We Leave Behind.

(END:CIV can also be viewed for free at http://submedia.tv/endciv.)

Stemen also told me about http://fertileground1.ning.com, the website of Bellingham, Wash., nonprofit organization Fertile Ground, of which Thomson is a board member. Fertile Ground’s mission, according to its website, is to promote “a worldwide oppositional culture to challenge the power structures that perpetuate systems of oppression and domination over human populations and the natural world. We do this by developing Deep Green leadership that builds support for localized resistance against the destructive manifestations of industrial civilization.”

The Fertile Ground site lists 10 fundamental beliefs. Here are several of those:

• Human survival is dependent on healthy, diverse ecosystems.

• Industrial civilization is undermining every living system on the planet.

• The rights of life trump the perceived rights of commerce.

• The scale of planetary degradation is massive and should be met with solutions that match the scale of the problems.

• The modern environmental movement will need to undergo a fundamental transformation for it to be successful.

• Technological innovation will not prevent the systematic degradation of our planet.

• Our current civilization needs to be replaced by thousands of cultures that are fully integrated into their local ecosystems.

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt