(Printable zine format below)
The ritualization of Corporate Earth Day and more consistently, current trends of unadulterated corporate greenwashing, all fail to meaningfully address and challenge environmental destruction and the imminent climate catastrophe that we currently face.
The same corporations that are ravaging Mother Earth and exploiting her children, are selling us greenwashed “sustainability” and change-your-light-bulb-solutions.
Every choice that brings us towards healthy relations with Mother Earth is necessary, but we must be critical when “solutions” are sold to us by the same corporations who profit from the destruction of our Mother.
We must also be critical of non-profit corporations who perpetuate and ultimately defend this destructive, capitalistic system in attempts to build a “green” economy.
We do not wish the corporate, racist, hetero-patriarchal, colonial, police State to be “green”, it is our intention to abolish its very existence.
Green fashion is still fucking fashion. T-shirts, bumper stickers, and Facebook groups are not solutions but instead further play into global consumerism, distract us from actual social and environmental crisis, and personally isolate us from our own potential.
We will not rest for a “greener” form of exploitation.
We will not accept carbon “offsets” or other false “solutions” that are consumerist substitutions for action.
To build healthy/sustainable communities we must directly confront our spiraling personal consumption and desires, support local alternatives (and we don’t mean businesses), and abolish corporations and the abusive State who have created green markets and platforms to mask the innumerable atrocities they continue to commit against humans and non-humans.
Today’s Environmental Justice movement, through its professional career activists and non-profit corporations, focus more on organizational development and narrowly focused campaign goals rather than building community/social power that challenges the very forces that are perpetuating and benefiting from eco-cide: corporations and the racist police State.
In many cases non-profit corporations are either funded by or partnered with the very corporations and/or State whose practices they appear to be opposed to.
It is not our intention to shift power from the State to a non-profit corporation of paid “experts.â€â€¨We seek total liberation through building power in our own communities.
The U.$. government has no interest in respecting the environment when its colonial existence is dependent upon exploitation of the Earth. This is evidenced with the extraction of natural resources such as oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium from Indigenous People’s lands, the choking of rivers and killing of Salmon by hydro-electric dams, depleted uranium spread throughout the Middle East, subsidies to large agricultural corporations which destroy biodiversity and small farm livelihood, and so many more crimes against the Earth, humans, and non-human beings.
Corporations and the State are eco-terrorists.
The lines cannot be any more clear when corporations such as BP poison the oceans, or Peabody, Dennison, Newmont, Barrick and so many more rip out the organs of our Mother. Or when ski resorts such as AZ Snowbowl threaten to desecrate sacred mountains, when rain forests are wiped from existence, when oil is extracted from sands and entire ecosystems are devastated.
Each day as many as 200 living species become extinct and 150,000 acres of tropical rainforest are destroyed. Each day, 2 million tons of toxic waste is dumped into our rivers and seas, 22 million tons of oil is extracted and 100 million tons of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere.
In the trajectory of unsustainable madness, we see our only option being total liberation of Mother Earth, human and non-human beings from industrial capitalism.
Our tactics will become more desperate with the less clean air we have to breathe, the less clean water to drink, the less clean soil to plant… our lives depend on the health and wellbeing of Mother Earth and all her children.
Indigenous Peoples must inform all of our strategies or liberation still means colonization.
As the 400-year-old tree falls to the logger’s hands, to the lumber mill, to the shelves, all the while pockets are lined, we witness; capitalism is the enemy of Mother Earth. We understand; capitalism will never be sustainable.
No matter how “green” our jobs are and how “green” the economy becomes; we can never sustain unsustainable lifestyles.
Corporate Earth Day has become a means of appeasing and distracting us from the acts of violence perpetuated against Mother Earth and our human and non-human communities every day.
Will we wake up to the spectacle before it is too late?
CAPITALISM IS NOT SUSTAINABLE
LIBERATE MOTHER EARTH.
