Question Earthority!

This week’s editorial is a “guest column” of sorts: I’m reproducing (with the permission of author Zek Kolyma) part of a manifesto distributed at Earth Day events a few years ago. Interestingly, this site is named for the flier (”Question Earthority! Volume I, Issue I, Earth Day 2001″) in which that manifesto appeared.

In its entirety, the manifesto (”A Real Third Way”) covers the existence and operations of something called the Direct Action Group for Guerilla Extropian Revolution. That group no longer seems to exist (if it does, I can’t find it, and Zek just smiles cryptically when I ask about it), so I’ll leave that part for another time when it might be relevant. Instead, I’ll stick with the first part and an excerpt from the remainder, which address my issue of interest this week: The relationship between environmentalism and anarchism.

A Real Third Way
by Zek Kolyma

Not everything you’ve been told about the environment is a lie … but pretty damn close.

On the one hand are the corporations and their whores in government, insisting that your standard of living — maybe even your life itself — depends upon your consent to their rape of the land, sea and sky, at your expense. Corpoate welfare is called the “free market” instead of what it actually is: State socialism.

On the other hand, Ralph Nader and his corporate whores tell you that only their brand of state socialism can save us from impending environmental disaster.

Aristotle had a name for the fallacy that sets up two bad alternatives and then attempts to hide the possibility of others by forcing a choice. But I forget what that name was. Let’s just use a more modern, but equally applicable, term: bullshit.

The false alternatives are: your freedom or the environment. The Right tells you that you have to give up a livable Earth to have your freedom. The Left tells you you have to sacrifice your freedom if you value Gaia.

The third way — the only real way — to get anywhere is to acknowledge that both freedom and environment are values worth preserving, and that they aren’t incompatible.

The third way is the libertarian way — maybe even the anarchist way.

The answer is not more government

The answer is less government. A lot less government. Maybe even no government at all.

No more of the corporate welfare that hands the land over to timber and mining interests — to to fill the treasury’s coffers but at a net expense to taxpayers.

No more of the “regulatory” nonsense that sets an “acceptable” limit of pollution, and that is quickly turning the United States into an environmental hellhole, just like it did with the old Soviet Bloc.

No more handing your future over to the boards of directors who care only for a dollar, or to “environmentalist” organizations that seem to care a lot more about running your life than about the quality of that life.

It’s time to take your life into your own hands

It’s time for change

It’s time for direct action

[N.B. This is where we skip part of the manifesto dealing exclusively with “DAGGER”]

Uncle Sam wants you, but do you want him?

The time has come to make a choice. The choices that Left and Right offer are the choices of muggers and slavers:

Your money or your life

The Earth or your freedom

Master with a whip or master with a cane

False alternatives. Heads we win, tails you lose. In other words, bullshit designed to make you a slave and keep you a slave.

The alternative we offer you is: Your money and your life. The Earth and your freedom. Neither slave nor master be.

[N.B. Another break]

State socialism — whether it comes wrapped in green or in red, white and blue — is nothing but the residue of a failed past, clinging desperately to the edge of the dustbin of history. But we …

We are the vanguard of the revolution

… and it’s time to get started.

[N.B. The rest of the manifesto is exclusive to “DAGGER”]

Food for thought.