We Are Those Who Are on the Side of the Living, and We Are Going to Win

Who are we? We are the people who are ready to fight back. The people who no longer live in hope that the Earth will be saved, but in the certainty that we will save her. We are activists, survivors, lovers and fighters. And we say: the destruction will stop.

By Derrick Jensen / theecologist.org

We are people who do not resign ourselves to the fate we are so often told is inevitable.

We are people who refuse to continue as slaves. We are people who are remembering how to be human beings. We are people who are ready to take back our own lives, and to defend our lives and the lives of those we love, including the land.

We are people who are at long last ready and willing to fight back. We are people who know in our bones the truth of Robert E. Lee’s statement, “We must decide between the risk of action versus the positive loss of inaction.” We are people who are ready to take the offensive, or support those people who do.

We are survivors. We have survived domestic violence. We have survived racism, and we have survived sexism. We have survived industrial schooling, and we have survived the industrial economy. We have survived television. We have survived the toxification of our total environment.

And we are ready to fight back

We are lovers, lovers of the land, lovers of each other, lovers of our own bodies, including our emotions. We love. We hate. We feel joy, despair, sorrow, outrage, happiness, anger. And we are ready to fight back.

We are the oppressed. We are prisoners, family farmers, animal liberators, women, children, American Indians, blacks, Mexicans, poor whites, Asians, people of the Third World, the indigenous. We are parents, and we are childless. We are those who hate our jobs, we are the unemployed, and we are those who want no jobs. And we are ready to fight back.

We are those who have listened long with love and sorrow, and who now with their permission speak for salmon, redwoods, rivers, voles, spotted owls. We speak for the bison, the sturgeon, the manatee, the shark.

We speak for the soil, for the wind, for the snow, for the ice caps. We speak for the phytoplankton, and we speak for the insects. We speak with voices that are no more and no less than the wind moving in and out of our bodies, over our vocal cords. We speak for our homes, and for our neighbors, and we will be heard. They will be heard. And we are ready to fight back.

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