Recently, the Earth First! Journal ran a four page insert featuring the Black and Green collective (a biocentric anarchist group based in Harmony, Maine) and their projects. Members of the Trumbull Plex collective found their perspective insightful and inspiring. Due to a shortage of space in this issue, we were not able to reprint the fine articles contained in the EF! insert. However, we would like to entice The Rumble readers to find out more about the group by giving them a taste of Black and Green’s take on several topics.
It is essential to stress that B and G does not profess a homogenous strategy, but rather encompasses a diversity of tactics as anarchists fighting for the natural world.
They state:
“We come from different places and viewpoints. Some of us are militantly opposed to technology, while others aren’t so militant. There are biocentric anarchists who work with MOVE and others who support their struggle against the State, but do not agree with their philosophy…We believe in the principles of biocentrism. We also believe that the entire power structure needs to be dismantled and replaced by a nonhierarchical society based on the principles of biocentrism.
“We are not part of the typically left-based, eco-anarchist contingent… or the anthropocentric social ecologist movement, and although we do share the central principle of biocentrism, we are not deep ecologists. We are, simply, anarchists fighting for the natural world.”
B and G pokes fun at the EF! movement by commenting on tactics and strategy.
They state:
“I suggest that we shift our focus from defense to offense. All those hours spent dragging logs onto the road in a short lived attempt at de fending a place could be better spent attacking the buildings, vehicles, heavy machinery, and other assets of earth-destroying agencies and corporations…Learn to carefully play with matches and diesel fuel. If that is not your style, try neighborhood organizing. Leave the media out of the picture and take the offensive going door to door. Don’t go there asking for money, Organize and patiently show people how to fit into the resistance.”
They remind us that we fight a corrupt system and, at the same time, have become co-opted and corrupted by that same system.
They state:
“The technological-industrial empire, driven by the kulture of profit and “progress,” of taking more than we need and destroying or enslaving the rest has left this planet with the life systems failing and sustainable humyn communities devastated. Ecological and social crisis surround us and are met by the system with only a steady and purposeful tightening of controls. We must continue to resist the destruction of humyn-cultural and biological diversity, but we must also free our minds and our lives of the ideology of technology and progress, and we must direct and evaluate our tactics and our strategies mindful of two things: that the system will never allow us more than short-term and superficial gains, and that while we are busy fighting on their terms, in their institutions the powers-that-be are tightening the noose that they know will be necessary when enough people have had enough of lies and misery and murder. Our resistance must stay grounded within our reverence for life and refuse any compromises from the empire of death.”
For more information, please contact
Black and Green
POB 183
Harmony ME