We haven’t posted in a while, so our solidarity statement is coming a bit late. But we have been acting on our solidarity, in the streets, and in our lives.
After putting up tree-sits earlier in the spring to protect redwood forest in California’s far north coast, upon discovering active logging in April, forest defenders have ascended to the trees again to defend a redwood grove a few miles north of Trinidad in northern Humboldt County. Green Diamond Resource Company (GD) plans to clearcut the forest under an active Timber Harvest Plan (THP). The 40.5 acres of the THP is almost entirely within the protection zone of two osprey nests (Pandion haliaetus). This bird of prey is a “Species of Special Concern” under California’s environmental laws. The southerly tree-sit remains as a “tree village.” Both locations are under ownership of Green Diamond, known for their clear-cutting, large-scale logging plans, and logging in sensitive species habitat. Despite their notorious practices, GD was awarded sustainable certification by both the Forest Stewardship Council and the Forest Stewardship Council, an aberration in itself.
The forest defenders sent an open letter to the company on June 29 that included the warning, “Before colonization,… redwoods stretched across 2 million acres of coastal California. Now, a tiny fraction of is protected …, and the vast majority has been converted into tree plantations. Green Diamond’s management scheme – clearcutting every 45 years – is creating an ecological dystopia.” In the letter, the Redwood Forest Defenders call on GD to “cancel the two Timber Harvest Plans, and to take responsibility for the generations of harm they have caused – the legacy of colonization they benefit from and their profit-driven destruction of habitat.” They also call on CalFire, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to stop approving and supporting Timber Harvest Plans that destroy habitat for the threatened species that they, as resource agencies, are tasked with protecting.
You can access the open letter and photos from the actions at https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1-0Wf3rQmzpOfpd_KRhci6KLDKvRL3Ikn
and photos from May: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16fI_2ELuYb7BiuC2CXz7Hblh_2zm-fJq?usp=sharing
Things are also gearing up in the Mattole River watershed on Rainbow Ridge and elsewhere, as activists monitor any corporate entry into the forests, track logging plans filed, plan for action training camps and strategize.
It is that time of year.
We Stand With Black Lives Matter
Back in March most people never expected that the top headlines exploding at the time of the global pandemic that has dramatically affected everyone’s life in one way or another, would shift in a heartbeat to racial justice, police out of control violence, and solidarity felt around the world. With the cell phone-recorded 8 minute death of George Floyd, that story, along with the reaction and the context, pushed the virus story off the top of the breaking news circuit.
As horrific as that act of deliberate murder was, we all know how often and for how long those despicable acts happen behind the scenes, covered up or ignored by a white supremacist cultural streak that runs through our society without suppression. Some of us have been talking for years about the need to diversify the environmental movement. We haven’t done that yet except in very small ways—progress, but not enough. And it is not about our movement, though we have to look at our organizing models, our action training pedagogy, and our targets through a racial justice lens as well as a biocentric lens. But in the end, it is about how our species is living on this planet–with our fellow species and with our fellow humans.
This is our statement of our solidarity:
We stand beside those in the Black Lives Matter and Black Power movements and all People of Color struggling for their rights, their freedoms, their dignity and their lives.
There is no one action, no one death of a Black person at the hands of a racist cop that should stand as an isolated incident that shocks people in the US that this level of racism still exists. Racism, white supremacy and fascist actions and injustices have been perpetrated all around us for hundreds of years, and we stand for finally calling for a time of reckoning.
It is not the responsibility of people of color to teach white people how to be anti-racist. It is our responsibility to teach ourselves and those around us how to be part of creating a different world, through revolutionary thinking, revolutionary acts and with love and respect.
It is also our responsibility to go beyond standing in solidarity with those oppressed and at risk, but also to apply anti-racist principles in our own lives, in our organizing, and in our communities to ultimately dismantle white supremacy and racism in our communities, country and world.