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“Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Sierra Club v. Morton (1972) Denver, Colorado–In a first-in-the-nation lawsuit filed in federal court, the Colorado River is asking for judicial recognition of itself as a “person,” with rights of its own to exist and flourish. The lawsuit, filed against the Governor of Colorado, seeks a recognition that the State of Colorado can be held liable for violating those rights held by the River. ...

We’re improving some technical things on our end for blog subscriptions. To subscribe to news & events for this chapter and/or for our international lists, use the form in the sidebar, or browse all DGR lists. If you received this post by email, it means you’re subscribed via wordpress.com. You’ll keep getting emails for regular posts, but not for calendar event postings or for exclusive alerts. To get them all, subscribe to the list as described above. Then login at wordpress.com to unfollow from the old method. ...

Few topics generate more commentary on Deep Green Resistance social media than critiques of alternative energy. For many, solar, wind, and other non-fossil energy sources and technologies represent a pragmatic hope for saving the biosphere. Our position on these technologies is that they represent a false hope for a couple reasons. One, their manufacturing processes are fossil-fuel intensive and involve other nonrenewable resources like metals and plastics. Once built, solar panels and wind turbines have a limited life-span, after which they must be replaced. Two: even if they’re recycled, that process is itself toxic and energy-intensive, and must take place at specialized facilities, which means transportation, which means more fuels and infrastructure. Three: while in operation, both solar and wind facilities kill wildlife by displacement, collisions with turbines, burning in solar mirrors, and so on. ...

Naomi Klein’s latest book, This Changes Everything, is based on the premise that capitalism is the cause of the climate crisis, and to avert catastrophe, capitalism must go. The proposed solution is a mass movement that will win with arguments that undermine the capitalist system by making it morally unacceptable. This premise has many flaws. It fails to acknowledge the roots of capitalism and climate change, seeing them as independent issues that can be transformed without taking action to address the underlying causes. Climate change cannot be avoided by building more infrastructure and reforming the economy, as is suggested in the book. The climate crisis is merely a symptom of a deeper crisis, and superficial solutions that act on the symptoms will only make the situation worse. Human-induced climate change started thousands of years ago with the advent of land clearing and agriculture, long before capitalism came into being. The root cause—a culture that values domination of people and land, and the social and physical structures created by this culture—needs to be addressed for any action on capitalism or climate to be effective. ...

Here are some sketchnotes I took during the early part of Lierre Keith’s Public Interest Environmental Law Conference talk on the current state of environmental activism: Watch her full talk here (start at 2:02:00), and be sure to check out sketchnotes from the other PIELC keynote addresses. Originally published by Doug Neill, The Graphic Reporter ...

Susan Hyatt and Michael Carter, DGR Southwest Coalition In 2004 the World Health Organization ranked Major Depressive Disorder as the leading cause of disability in the US among people aged fifteen to forty-four. MDD afflicts about 14.8 million adults, 6.7 percent of the U.S. population aged eighteen and older in a given year. [1] The US National Institute for Mental Health estimates that one in four US adults “suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder.” [2] Many see only one way out: nine in ten suicides—33,000 total in one year in the US alone—had one of these disorders. [3] How can we explain this? If the life of privilege and material wealth in the US and other consumer nations is so desirable that every living thing must pay the price for it, why kill yourself to escape it? What if statistics like these were taken seriously, as a sign of preventable social malaise, not human frailty? Suppose someone cared enough about all this misery to uncover a cause, and take steps to alleviate some of this pain. Might that look like the same effort to end poverty, global warming, and the extinction crisis? ...

Screenshot of Amanda Todd’s YouTube video, My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm posted before her suicide in October 2012. by Susan Hyatt and Michael Carter, DGR Southwest Coalition The environmental crisis consists of the deterioration and outright destruction of micro and macro ecosystems worldwide, entailing the elimination of countless numbers of wild creatures from the air, land, and sea, with many species being pushed to the brink of extinction, and into extinction. People who passively allow this to happen, not to mention those who actively promote it for economic or other reasons, are already a good distance down the road to insanity. Most people do not see, understand, or care very much about this catastrophe of the planet because they are overwhelmingly preoccupied with grave psychological problems. The environmental crisis is rooted in the psychological crisis of the modern individual. This makes the search for an eco-psychology crucial; we must understand better what terrible thing is happening to the modern human mind, why it is happening, and what can be done about it. ...

Join the growing Deep Green Resistance movement and help actualize a strategy to save the planet. There are two ways to get involved with the efforts of the Sonoran chapter of DGR: 1. Join the Chapter 2. Volunteer Chapter Membership involves participating in activities and organizing work of DGR Sonoran, as well as meeting its unique expectations, including frequency of participation and attendance of group meetings. Volunteer Membership involves taking on projects suited to your gifts and capacity. Individuals need not meet unique expectations of the local group, including frequency of participation and attendance of group meetings, but must abide by the policies of the broader DGR movement. ...