The fourth meeting of the DGR Santa Barbara book club was held on Saturday, August 19th at the Santa Barbara Eastside Library. We discussed chapters 5 & 6 of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet. The following questions were posed before the meeting to inspire discussion:
- Do you agree with the 4 points preceding the sections entitled “Tilters, Descenders, Lifers”? Why or why not?
- In your opinion, what are the important takeaways from the “Tilters, Descenders, Lifers” section?
- How did the “Taxonomy of Action” chart affect how you think about political action and strategy, if at all?
- What was your favorite part of the reading?
Everyone at the meeting agreed with the four points at the beginning of Chapter 5: in order to avoid ecological catastrophe, the burning of fossil fuels has to stop, all activities that destroy living communities must forever cease, human consumption must be scaled back, and the human population must be reduced. The discussion reflected on how the last two points might be hard to digest for many people given the dominant paradigm, especially considering how efforts to thwart overpopulation are so closely associated with violent totalitarian regimes.
The discussion continued with people sharing their conclusions about Tilters, Descenders, and Lifers. All three groups focus on preserving privilege rather than human rights and a liveable planet, and any solution produced by the three groups actually only makes things worse mostly through propagating extraction, hoarding resources, and obstructing efforts to directly confront systems of power. We shouldn’t protect systems of power that destroy the planet; we should dismantle them.
The Taxonomy of Action chart displays a list of actions according to the inverse relationship between how risky an action is and how many people are required to complete it. It is completely factual and absent of assigned values. For this reason, the chart acts as a great preliminary guide to planning political actions. The discussion at this point focused on the participants’ perspectives of violent and nonviolent actions, and how these are defined. Acts of sabotage against pipelines sparked discussion on the effectiveness of one action versus a series of actions, and what an effective reaction by authority figures might look like.
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