In a January 2010 press conference in Montpelier, we Independents announced our candidacy. The worldwide press has since been covering an historically unprecedented independent challenge to the two-party corporate stranglehold on Vermont’s common wealth. Ten openly secessionist candidates, plus several more who are friendly to the idea of a free and independent Vermont. Never been done before!

We’ve been featured in Time and the Huffington Post and in many countries in many languages… yet local papers still pretend that we don’t exist! Their editors echo platitudes such as Vermont doesn’t have the same hysterical backlash against our two-party system as other states.

Anybody see what’s wrong with the above statement? First of all, it tries to engineer a phoney reality for Vermont. It pretends that we don’t have any problems, as if trillions in unsustainable debt, a crumbling infrastructure and Peak Oil can simply be swept under the carpet. It pretends that oil will be forever cheap, and that no actions or investments are necessary to move to a decentralised pattern of conservation, local agriculture and local energy production. It pretends that it’s OK to fork over $7,700 per Vermont family of four, in corporate welfare, to the likes of Nestle, TransCanda and AIG.

It pretends that the bailouts have suceeded, and that all’s well.

It pretends that the Vermont Legislature are providing good management. It ignores the demographics. Most Vermonters have given up voting, and many feel that we have no voice. Less than 30% voted in the Primary. Young people are leaving because college is unaffordable in VT. Young professionals are leaving because high rent & taxes strangle business, keep wages low, and leave few opportunities after college.

Most Vermonters have been denied the opportunity to hear about any alternatives to the Democrat/Republican status quo. The Two Party System has brought us a failing economy, a failing dollar, ecological devastation, climate change and perpetual wars. But somehow, if you say this, the Vermont media will call you a ‘fringe’ candidate.

Finally, a break! The Vermont media can’t ignore the Independent candidates any longer.

(Though I would like to correct the interviewer, there’s not just one but THREE independent candidates running for Governor: there’s also Emily Peyton and Dan Feliciano. All three have great ideas, they’re on the ballot and I recommend that you check them out and vote with your heart.)

Here’s Dennis speaking about local control of schools for Vermonters and our communities. Vermont’s parents are the real experts on schools, not bureaucrats in Montpelier or politicians in Washington, DC:

Learn more at GovernorSteele.com

Mixed Nuts is a screw-ball musical comedy with music from the 20s and 30s, and a cast of independence-minded eccentrics from the Vermont State Hospital who have prepared a vaudeville review directed by Dr. Elizabeth Darcy. The bizarre crew of entertainers is lead by a re-incarnated, unpredictable, and loveable Ethan Allen.

My family and I will be at the Unadilla Theatre in East Calais next week. I’ve read the script… it’s awesome. Such serious times, we need some comic relief. This is comedy that makes us think, challenge our assumptions about what is sane and what is insane.

Mixed Nuts will run in central Vermont at the Unadilla Theatre in East Calais, August 24-31, 2010. Showtime is 7:30 PM. Reservations and Information: (802) 456-8968

The Unadilla is the theatre that brought King Lear, The Gondoliers, Uncle Vanya and When We Are Married to Vermont audiences.  Their website is at Unadilla.org.

Reservations and Information: 802-456-8968 or at : unadilla@pshift.com

Jim Hogue portrayed Ethan Allen at my son’s school, and in many public venues in Vermont and worldwide.

Directions from Middlebury: Click the link to the left… then follow the directions from Montpelier

Directions From Montpelier: take Rt 2 East to East Montpelier, then Rt 14 North to North Montpelier. One mile North of North Montpelier turn right on Max L. Gray Road and follow it for 5 miles to the theatre.

From St Johnsbury: Go to Marshfield Villege on Rt 2 West. In Marshfield Village turn right on Creamery St (sign East Calais) Go up hill bearing left onto the Calais Road. At third 4 corners turn right on East Hill Road. Follow to Blachly Road and the theatre.

From the Vermont Commons website:

Is Mixed Nuts about secession? It is, in the same way that Pygmalion is about linguistics. But this is what Mixed Nuts is really about: the courage and camaraderie of a few people, and how music and dance can move us. And Pygmalion is about the courage of Liza Doolittle going up against the brilliant, cold, and uncompromising Henry Higgins. Whether Higgins succeeds in pulling off his experiment of teaching Liza “to talk proper,” or whether the inmates of Mixed Nuts succeed in their secession are both beside the point. Both these plays (and any play worth going to, for that matter) are about something more than their basic themes and plots.

I tell people who ask that Mixed Nuts is a screwball musical comedy about six inmates who escape from the custody of the Vermont State Hospital in order to make Vermont an independent republic. That is the kind of answer that one must give because people need to know the genre, the plot, and the motivation of the main characters before anything else.

The answer I want to give to that question is that Mixed Nuts is about dancing. But that is nothing to hang your hat on, and it would be doing the play a disservice because such an answer is so open to interpretation as to be meaningless. My elevator speech would end in failure, as you will see. But we, you and I, are not in an elevator. And I am now writing this so as to seduce you into believing that this play is worth doing because it is the stuff of dreams.

And what is dancing that it is worth your time? Is it learning a few steps and moving around a dance floor? Sure. Is it “a language to whisper private and sacred things . . . the expression of a search for a passion that might be spiritual or romantic or uncategorizable, but that, in any case, is an antidote to the harsh facts of an earthbound existence?” Sure.

The play opens with “Let Yourself Go,” a dance and a song about dancing. The next song is also about dancing: “In me you see a sinner, and dancing is my crime . . .”  The Green Mountain Boys get “Happy Feet” in their exhilaration. The play ends with a dance. So the play is about dancing.

It’s also about camaraderie, courage, independence, conviction, reason, control, power, love, and the old horses: sanity versus insanity, reality versus superstition, and the blending of life and art.

But every character in the play is dancing. It is a dance from start to finish.

As you listen to the band don’t you get a bubble?
As you listen to them play don’t you get a glow?
If you step out on the floor you’ll forget your trouble.
If you go into your dance you’ll forget your woe.
So . . . – Irving Berlin

MORE on the Vermont Commons website!

Playing 2:00 PM at the historic Gathering Inn, Hancock, Vermont !

The doors of sound have been ripped off the hinges by Electric Sorcery who routinely electrify Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Towns are regularly woken out of their slumber by the by the wicked sound of this power trio.

Electric Sorcery takes psychedelic music firmly rooted in the 70s and adds their own special twist. Funky rhythms and psychedelic guitar riffs come together to create an intriguing sound that is sometimes very heavy…. This is a fun listen and anyone who gravitates towards the psychedelic sounds of the 70s needs to hear this… – SeaOfTranquility.org

Meet & Eat    Greet & Drink

Saturday, September 25, from 2 – 4 PM

1295 Route 100

Diagonally opposite the Hancock Hotel

Please bring your concerns, your hard questions, and your ideas.  The Independent vision for Vermont is all about you, your families and communities !

Thank you kindly to our Sponsors. Please give them your business, they earn it daily:

For directions from where you’re at, click ‘Directions’ on the map below:

View Larger Map

As of today the gloves are off.  The Democrats are playing hardball and so will I:  with real facts. With the facts that they don’t want you to know, because then you’d realise that the Democrats don’t give a fig for local energy development or replacing Vermont Yankee.  If they did give a fig, they wouldn’t make it so hard to be an energy producer in Vermont.  They wouldn’t pile up regulation & red tape against local energy production, faster than Vermont business can cope.

This is a fact that has to change with this coming election!

Democrats make nice promises, but once in office they rip off working families in Vermont for the benefit of corporations such as Nestle, Entergy, AIG, Trans-Canada, Coca-cola & Omya.  They drive away local business and kill small family farms, and maintain unreachable in-state tuition for UVM (highest in the US).   We can’t afford it.

Vermont’s Hydro-Power: Not for Vermonters. We don’t get the power and don’t get paid for it. Corporations just take it, tax-free.

The Burlington Free Press reported that the (mostly) Democrat Legislature scuttled Vermont’s purchase of 8 hydroelectric dams in 2005-6.  The market value then was $385 million, and today it is over a billion!  There’s 478 MW coming from those dams, enough to cover 25% of Vermont’s electricity needs.  It could do better than replace Vermont Yankee; in fact, Sen. Vincent Illuzi, R-Essex/Orleans said that the dams ‘would have reduced the cost of doing business in Vermont’.

Today Vermont’s dams export power to Massachusetts and don’t even have wires connecting them to Vermont (except for two small wires north of St. Johnsbury).  Vermont’s locally grown power is export-only, according to the incumbent Vermont Legislature.  They’re not serious about replacing Vermont Yankee.  Never were.

The Vermont legislative Democrats listen to their corporate lobbyists and the Democrat Party in Washington, NOT to you and me.  That’s why I’m running for Senate, along with a growing number of Independents.  I’m out there every day, listening to you, and learning about the real Vermont.

Let’s work together to make a clean green sovereign Vermont, with local energy, local food, and local opportunities to make it, especially for our young people!

At the Vermont Secretary of State in Montpelier

Folks,

As of Friday morning, I am officially on the ballot for Vermont Senator for Addison County!  Thanks to you all for your hard work and great ideas.  Your contributions have served to get the Independent word out there, encourage people to register to vote, even built a parade float.

But I’m not gonna do an NPR on you and beg for even more funds.  Funds’ll come, somehow.  What’s really needed is organisational help.  I’d like to set up a community forum in Addison County every month until the election.  A forum in which people from all walks of life can address the candidates directly with concerns, questions, and even vent steam together with neighbours on how broken the system is.  If you know something about community organising and publicity, please contact me directly, robert@senatorwagner.com.

Friday morning I also discovered that a bear had raided our beehives, in spite of extreme measures to prevent this.  And that another animal had breached the temporary gate to the vegetable garden, and chewed up the beet tops and the blueberry seedlings.  We put together the remaining bees in one hive that still had a queen (fortunately), and in the evening when they quieted down, started putting in an electric fence.  That’s when the bear came back.

Made a lot of noise, as it poised itself to eat the remaining honey, combs and young bees. It turned toward us. I shot it.

I’m not much of a hunter.  Got it in the butt.  But that was enough… it ran away.  Scarpered.  Spent the night in the orchard with the gun across my legs, but it didn’t come back.

Morning came, put on a fresh clean shirt and headed to the Community Forum in Burlington at City Hall organised by Todd for VT House, where I thoroughly enjoyed myself on the panel, talking Vermont issues with real people.

Back home later… reflected on the fact that the Legislature must keep Vermont’s firearms laws the way they are: liberal & progressive!  Resist any attempt of the politically correct Democrats to take guns away from Vermonters or control them.  And nullify any foolishness coming out of DC that would interfere with this basic right.  After the Fugitive Slave Act, the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act, anything is possible.  This is why I am asking you to send me to Montpelier. Vermont’s unique identity must remain intact.

http://collapsenet.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1042&Itemid=28

We are not ineffective, we are not few in number. You are not alone.

TWEET: #CollapseNet #Vermont #VTGov #Montp #TransitionTown

Folks,

This will be a way for individuals, families and communities who are building lifeboats in Vermont, to connect, share information and expertise, teach, learn and reskill.

Please pass this on.  If you are on Twitter, please tweet the following links with the hashtag #CollapseNet.

Here’s the press release:

http://www.collapsenet.com
http://www.collapsenetwork.com
http://www.collapsenet.net

May 21, 2010 – CollapseNet ™, a long-anticipated new effort from internationally-recognized author, lecturer and activist Michael C. Ruppert, will officially launch on Tuesday June 8, 2010. The site will be a first-of-its-kind effort to promote the rapid and focused sharing of information between millions around the world who are preparing for the collapse of human industrial civilization – The Lifeboat Movement.

CollapseNet will also feature regular video and written updates, commentary and analysis from Michael C. Ruppert, the sole subject of the critically- acclaimed feature documentary Collapse. DVD sales of Collapse begin on June 15th, 2010. The film, directed by two-time Sundance Winner Chris Smith, has been mentioned as a strong candidate for Best Documentary at the 2011 Oscars.

Michael, the author of two books, is a former LAPD detective and recognized investigative journalist, is known for having thoroughly predicted the 2008 economic crash starting in 2000, as well as many other geopolitical and economic events over the last decade. More than half of the predictions he made during the filming of Collapse (March-June, 2009) have come true since its theatrical release at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of that year.

“There are millions of us around the world who see and understand what is happening,” says Ruppert. “Worldwide reaction to the film has proved that. CollapseNet will – as fast as our maps can populate – demonstrate that the Lifeboat Movement is global, vocal and rapidly standing up to meet this supreme challenge. We apologize or justify ourselves to no one. All we ask is that governments and those who disagree leave us alone. We will be here to help your children build lifeboats when they are ready.”

Ruppert’s newest book, “Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post-Peak Oil World ” – on which the movie was based — lays out in stark, clear and simple detail the challenges we face as the realities of Peak Oil and diminishing energy supplies collide with a hopelessly corrupt and collapsing economic paradigm based upon infinite growth.

“The essence of survival as human industrial civilization disintegrates,” says Ruppert, “will stem from one thing only; the relocalization of all things necessary to sustain life, civilization and culture. Most important will be relocalization of food production so that as much food as possible comes from within the shortest possible distance. As collapse progresses, all other essential life-sustaining needs will have to be met close to home because there will not be enough energy to either grow crops using current methods, or to produce other critical goods and transport them across great distances.” – Currently, ten calories of hydrocarbon energy are required to grow every calorie of food consumed in the industrialized world. “The only way to prevent a massive die-off is through permaculture and petro-chemical-free agriculture and the skill sets needed to support local communities after the social contract has withered. This must be undertaken by neighborhoods and communities rather than increasingly ineffective and dysfunctional national and regional governments.”

The collapse of human industrial civilization will bring with it a host of unforgiving challenges including the breakdown of governments, economic collapse, the end of fiat currency, massive civil unrest, displaced populations, permanent blackouts, infrastructure failures, fresh water shortages, famine, war, widespread disease and suffering. The tragedy of Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico has drastically reduced what time there is to prepare and forever changed the global playing field. It has unleashed an immediate host of unforeseen and unforgiving new challenges.

CollapseNet launches with the premise that a large reduction in human population is inevitable. CollapseNet’s greatest mission is to limit and mitigate the losses and suffering from this while helping people to prepare to maintain a recognizable quality of life. CollapseNet has no political affiliation and is not aligned with any religion, political ideology or nationality. Although based in the United States, CollapseNet’s proprietary software is, at launch, scalable and operational on a global basis. “I’m fairly confident we will have a presence in at least 40 countries before the end of 2010,” says Ruppert.

“There are a lot of things we hope to do with CollapseNet,” Ruppert adds. “We’re going to expand our video capabilities and move into special web-based programming as we grow. We’re going to find ways to help those with needed skills, information and on-site reporting get vital information into the right places quickly, securely and efficiently. CollapseNet will become what lifeboat builders around the world need it to become, as circumstances dictate. And we’ll do it without the vacuous wasteland that is mainstream, publicly-traded media throughout the world. CollapseNet will never trade its shares, or its integrity, in the marketplace.”

As your candidate I pledge to work without stopping toward the survival of our people and our communities.

Here’s what Ruppert had to say in Burlington…

http://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/author-and-peak-oil-activist-michael-ruppert

May 19, 2010, 1300 PDT — This is my first real large talk since 2005. I held nothing back. In it, I say things that are certain to tick off almost everybody out there. That was intended. What I want now is for anybody to challenge me to back up anything that I said here on mainstream media. (Special thanks to George Galloway. You showed me how to do this.)

Vermont is a very special place. It is one of only two states in U.S. history that were independent republics before voting to enter the Union. The other, of course, was Texas. I just spent almost a week in Vermont on a whirlwind tour that included major speaking engagements in Burlington, Montpelier and Brattleboro; two TV appearances (including this one); two in-studio radio interviews, and many smaller appearances at a number of venues. Vermont is unique among all the states in that, by itself, it could be made into a lifeboat as a state. I met with both the Gubernatorial (Dennis Steele) and Lt. Governor candidates as well as candidates for the state senate. As I listened to them I heard that their concerns — as well as their emerging platform — are taken from the pages of the collapse of human industrial civilization.

What you will see here is explosive and controversial. I guess you could say I’m really back now. It’s time to bring this to a head because there is no more time to waste. From now on I will refer to the Peak Oil/Sustainability movement only as the Lifeboat Movemement, because that’s what it is. It belongs to all mankind.

photo courtesy of Cara Tompkins

Michael Ruppert maintains a blog at MikeRuppert.blogspot.com and will keep it up to date until CollapseNet goes live…

Today Dennis Steele, Independent from Kirby, army helicopter crew chief, fifth-generation Vermonter and Northeast Kingdom businessman is officially on the ballot for Vermont Governor. This opens a new era in Vermont politics.

Today, the old political machine that passes the governorship back & forth between Republicans and Democrats, the machine that steals everything in Vermont that isn’t nailed down, the machine that takes away teachers pensions and cuts public transport as they pour Vermont’s rich resources into the wars and into Wall Street… paused.

I care deeply about my home which is Addison County, Vermont… and ask all of you to reach out and understand that the endless wars are unsustainable, immoral, unacceptable, and are bleeding Vermont dry. There is a way to make a sustainable Vermont with local food production and distribution, local green energy and local governance… we’ve made the first steps.

But now the incumbents who are taxing the middle class into the ground, scaring away business, making deals with Monsanto to kill small family farms and cutting programs that serve the neediest… these incumbents must go.

The photo shows Katie Lane-Karnas accepting Dennis Steele's petition signatures at the Secretary of State Office

From Pete Garritano, who is running for Lieutenant Governor, also as an Independent:

My name is Peter Garritano. I am running for Lt Governor as an independent candidate. I am married and have two kids and I live in Shelburne. I love Vermont because of its natural beauty, and the friendly nature of the people who live here. People here want to live and let live and I think this is a lesson that would serve us well in dealing with some of today’s important issues.

My passion in running for office came as a result of the wars and the incredible human and economic toll they have taken on both the people of the Middle East and the citizens of Vermont. I don’t care why we invaded, we have been given an endless supply of dubious excuses, I do not want my tax money being used for war and killing.

It’s time to start a direct democracy, bottom up not top down, by the people and for the people, where important issues like war, and health care, and how our taxes are spent , are voted on by the people of Vermont. Our elected officials have consistently failed us in all these areas.

Peter Garritano

VTGarritano.com

About Dennis

• About Dennis
• Military Service

What can you do?

• Befriend Dennis on Facebook
• Join our facebook group!
• Join your county on Facebook!

This is a blow to Vermont liberals, lefties and democrats who have buried their heads in the sand to keep pretending that their Obama walks on water, folks who have buried any and all opposition to the ongoing wars, torture and domestic loss of liberties… in exchange for a smile and promises of ‘change’. The Left can’t ignore the only recently announced White House approval for a controversial expansion of offshore oil exploration. And now, in a global ecological catastrophe of global proportions, the feds are even slower to respond, than the Bush Administration responded to Katrina.

The Black Swan was popularised by Nassim Taleb in his recent book by that name. Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as ‘black swans’—undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events.

The Black Swan has its origins in a centuries-old scientific assumption that ‘All swans are white’. Just because nobody but Australian aborigines saw them until recently.

To me, the Black Swan Event is a catastrophe that causes a chain reaction, in a world of global energy and food dependencies. It relieves the tension of that which is ready and waiting to happen, but hasn’t happened. Academic snobs don’t see it, but are experts at covering their tracks, afterward. Party politicians can’t see it and even if they could, it’s not within their daily protocol of memorised answers to pre-arranged questions by the mainstream media.

The ‘tension’ is Peak Oil, if you haven’t heard of it here’s what it’s about. Once that tension is released, centrally planned economies such as the fiat currency and debt-based US Empire simply break down. The centralised nanny-state with drones checking for protesters productive workers born in Mexico & pot plants (as despair, domestic violence & rape multiplies) simply doesn’t work. The USSR disintegrated overnight. All empires go… once whatever dependency it was that fuelled its overstretch… goes. The tension… releases.

What remains are localised economies based on minimal energy usage, the way the human race lived for most of its existence. Vermont is one hopeful example of a small, governable entity. Vermont was a independent republic until 1791. We can be free again! Imagine Free Vermont, and vote for Dennis Steele for Governor. Engage in, and promote, local food production.

So what’s the Black Swan? It’s all over the newspapers, predictable in hindsight, but strikes to the heart of the Empires energy plans. The bastards will have to invade Venezuela now (at the very least, maybe Bolivia for good measure), just to continue fuelling the military overstretch, hundreds of bases worldwide, and the never-ending wars. All of which consume approximately half the oil said to be consumed by the US. Think of it, half the oil! This is the Empire’s next move:

US builds up its bases in oil-rich South America
From the Caribbean to Brazil, political opposition to US plans for ‘full-spectrum operations’ is escalating rapidly

The rest of this post I dedicate to Michael Ruppert, whom I just interviewed for Montpelier’s local paper, The Bridge. Ruppert will be touring Vermont in May, screening his film Collapse and dealing with questions and concerns from audiences. This tour is sponsored by Chelsea Green Publishing, the Vermont Independent Candidates, Radio Free Vermont, Vermont Transition Towns, and others:

• May 13 – Burlington
  Contois Auditorium, City Hall 7:30 p.m.

• May 14 – Montpelier
  Unitarian Church, 7:30 p.m.

• May 15 – Brattleboro
  Brattleboro Union High School, 7:30 p.m.

• May 16 – Woodstock
  Woodstock Town Hall Theater, 7:00 p.m.
  Features screening of film and Q&A with Michael Ruppert afterward

Click here for more information on the tour!

‘The oil slick is now the size of Delaware. It will be Ohio-sized within days. Florida has declared a state of emergency. All commercial fishing in the Gulf is threatened. All widlife is threatened. And when and if the slick gets to NOLA it will have a disatarous impact on energy production and the brave, battered, courageous people who live there. Coastal refineries may have to close… What might happen if the oil ignited? Oil should be at $100 before the end of next week. I suspect between $150 and $200 (maybe higher) this summer.

‘Worse: Napolitano and Salazar are already talking about huge claim funds. Massive class-actions against BP are starting. Insurance claims may well dwarf Katrina. The economy of the entire Gulf Coast is in jeopardy. From what I heard there is no real plan to stop the leak and no estimation as to when that will happen. (I might have missed that.) What happens when the slick hits Cuba? The rest of the Caribbean?

‘The current fradulent Wall Street bubble will pop in shorter order than anticipated.

‘Within about a week, man’s greed and reach for energy have found natural and unyielding limits. Two coal mine disasters and an oil slick that will cause as yet unknown catastrophic damage, loss of life and property. And yet there are still those in this movement who think we need to argue with people who believe there’s plenty of easy oil about anything.

‘It would be so poetic if history recorded that this was the event that marked the cliff edge of human industrial civilization. Maybe then someone will get the point. Maybe then we will find our hundredth monkey… And maybe Mother Earth will have poisoned us with the substance we have so greedily raped her — and killed each other — for… You want oil?… I’ll give you oil.‘

Why personal change does not equal political change

by Derrick Jensen, originally published in Orion Magazine.

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

Or let’s talk energy. Kirkpatrick Sale [advisory board of SVR, the Second Vermont Republic] summarized it well: “For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption—residential, by private car, and so on—is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government [he forgot military]. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution.”

Or let’s talk waste. In 2005, per-capita municipal waste production (basically everything that’s put out at the curb) in the U.S. was about 1,660 pounds. Let’s say you’re a die-hard simple-living activist, and you reduce this to zero. You recycle everything. You bring cloth bags shopping. You fix your toaster. Your toes poke out of old tennis shoes. You’re not done yet, though. Since municipal waste includes not just residential waste, but also waste from government offices and businesses, you march to those offices, waste reduction pamphlets in hand, and convince them to cut down on their waste enough to eliminate your share of it. Uh, I’ve got some bad news. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.

Last night, Derrick Jensen addressed a packed Ira Allen Chapel at UVM on the subject, "Civilization and Resistance: What's At Stake?"

So how, then, and especially with all the world at stake, have we come to accept these utterly insufficient responses? I think part of it is that we’re in a double bind. A double bind is where you’re given multiple options, but no matter what option you choose, you lose, and withdrawal is not an option. At this point, it should be pretty easy to recognize that every action involving the industrial economy is destructive (and we shouldn’t pretend that solar photovoltaics, for example, exempt us from this: they still require mining and transportation infrastructures at every point in the production processes; the same can be said for every other so-called green technology). So if we choose option one—if we avidly participate in the industrial economy—we may in the short term think we win because we may accumulate wealth, the marker of “success” in this culture. But we lose, because in doing so we give up our empathy, our animal humanity. And we really lose because industrial civilization is killing the planet, which means everyone loses. If we choose the “alternative” option of living more simply, thus causing less harm, but still not stopping the industrial economy from killing the planet, we may in the short term think we win because we get to feel pure, and we didn’t even have to give up all of our empathy (just enough to justify not stopping the horrors), but once again we really lose because industrial civilization is still killing the planet, which means everyone still loses. The third option, acting decisively to stop the industrial economy, is very scary for a number of reasons, including but not restricted to the fact that we’d lose some of the luxuries (like electricity) to which we’ve grown accustomed, and the fact that those in power might try to kill us if we seriously impede their ability to exploit the world—none of which alters the fact that it’s a better option than a dead planet. Any option is a better option than a dead planet.

Besides being ineffective at causing the sorts of changes necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are at least four other problems with perceiving simple living as a political act (as opposed to living simply because that’s what you want to do). The first is that it’s predicated on the flawed notion that humans inevitably harm their landbase. Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it. We can rehabilitate streams, we can get rid of noxious invasives, we can remove dams, we can disrupt a political system tilted toward the rich as well as an extractive economic system, we can destroy the industrial economy that is destroying the real, physical world.

The second problem—and this is another big one—is that it incorrectly assigns blame to the individual (and most especially to individuals who are particularly powerless) instead of to those who actually wield power in this system and to the system itself. Kirkpatrick Sale again: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.”

The third problem is that it accepts capitalism’s redefinition of us from citizens to consumers. By accepting this redefinition, we reduce our potential forms of resistance to consuming and not consuming. Citizens have a much wider range of available resistance tactics, including voting, not voting, running for office, pamphleting, boycotting, organizing, lobbying, protesting, and, when a government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we have the right to alter or abolish it.

The fourth problem is that the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

The good news is that there are other options. We can follow the examples of brave activists who lived through the difficult times I mentioned—Nazi Germany, Tsarist Russia, antebellum United States—who did far more than manifest a form of moral purity; they actively opposed the injustices that surrounded them. We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.