Category: Uncategorized

Sheffield Spring Moot 2026

SAVE THE DATE: On 6-8th March 2026, we’re having an Earth First! spring moot in Sheffield!

Sign up here to come along! (or email sharc0114@proton.me)

Got a workshop you’d like to run? Fill in this form to apply for a space 🙂

What is a spring moot? Come along if you want a weekend full of:
🎉 workshops, games, socials and more
💬 Ecological resistance, anarchism, anti-imperialism, local organising, anti-fascism and more.
😋 delicious vegan food
🫂 old friends! new ones! fun 😀

🔥 Down with Empire up with Spring 🌱

invite your friends! and maybe your enemies too!

📍location tbc
🌐 earthfirst.uk/sheff26 for more info
✉️ sharc0114@proton.me for any questions

We’ll update this page with more information as it becomes available. In the meantime, keep the date free and let your friends know 🙂

P.S. it’s being organised by a local crew, not the summer gathering collective. Email sharc0114@proton.me if you have any questions

Rebel, rebel!

In recent years there has been an explosion of activity in the climate movement in the UK. It’s inspiring to see so many determined to take action on climate change and committing themselves to fiercely defending nature. Extinction Rebellion (XR) in particular has brought in thousands of new people, shifted public opinion, and reignited a movement. There has also been exciting movement within XR, increasingly targeting those in the corporate media and fossil industries causing the problem rather than just creating public disruption.
But it seems that some important lessons from the past have been forgotten. We know some of you are thinking and talking about these things already and we hope what we’ve written is received as it is intended, as some considered reflections from critical friends:

We are not pawns for a personality cult

Climate Change is urgent, and we need to take action now, but we also need to be in it for the long haul. Treating people as disposable – getting arrested for the sake of getting arrested – and ignoring the threats of burnout means people will drop out and feel discarded. This is already happening. We want to build an inclusive, diverse, caring movement that treats everyone as valuable, not forgotten once they have served their purpose in a strategy they have little say in. Non-hierachical organising means meaningful participation for all, not unaccountable leaders and unaddressed invisible hierarchies.   

FTP!

Cops are not your friends. The police defend the individuals and institutions that are destroying the planet’s life support systems. Prisons and police are part of the problem, not the solution. They enforce a system that is ecocidal and violent in nature; they defend the right to degrade, pollute, control, and exploit humans and nature. They are inherently racist and sexist. They need to be abolished. These aren’t impossible dreams. Black feminists have long led the fight for abolition, and when the Black Lives Matter movement erupted around the world, suddenly people were openly discussing police and prison abolition in the mainstream media.

It’s ALL about politics

Politics isn’t about politicians and parliament, it’s about people trying to create the society they believe in. Climate change is not ‘beyond politics’, taking action on climate change is fundamentally political. Issues such as race and class aren’t annoying obstacles to a bigger movement, they are essential to building effective, enduring change. The domination of humans and the domination of nature are intrinsically linked, and we can’t end one while the other continues. De-politicisng climate change not only ignores capitalism and other root causes, it also means XR will continue to be dominated by white middle class ‘environmentalists’.

Diversity of tactics

Civil disobedience is just one of many tactics, and not the only way to take action. You don’t have to put yourselves in the hands of the state. Ecological direct action is about doing it yourself, attacking those destroying nature and inspiring others to follow suit, not lobbying government to act on your behalf. Political violence should never be resorted to lightly, but dogmatic pacificism protects the state, the rich and the powerful. Historical struggles against slavery, feudalism, colonialism, patriarchy and fascism all involved violence. Riots, revolts and rebellion against oppression have their place and should be celebrated not reviled. Preaching non-violence also ignores how the very idea of ‘violence’ is used to repress and pacify resistance, and leads to self-policing and authoritarianism within our movements. A diversity of tactics means different approaches to working together and reinforcing each other. In this way we can build towards revolutionary change.

Love and rage

Self-reflection and critical discussion isn’t infighting and factionalism, it’s how to build strong, powerful movements that can bring about the unprecedented changes climate change requires. We’re not writing these words to show ourselves as ‘more radical than thou’ and we know that everyone goes through their own political journey in life. But if any of what we’ve written speaks to you, come and talk to us, lets work out where we go next.
We’re ready. Instead of grieving for a dying planet, it’s time to step up and fight, for people and nature, with love and rage.
Your friends from the EarthFirst! gathering collective

PDFs: Online version of Return Fire vol.4

Here’s the PDFs for the most recent version of Return Fire, vol.4, of autumn 2016 – additionally with the supplement that accompanies it. Once again, 100 pages of passion, commentary, proposals and interview material.

Here’s the PDFs for the most recent version of Return Fire, vol.4, of autumn 2016 – additionally with the supplement that accompanies it. Once again, 100 pages of passion, commentary, proposals and interview material. The supplement, Caught in the Net, is a survey of critical perspectives on what information age technology is doing to our cognitive abilities, our health more generally, and our capacity to rebel. It comes as a separate document, of another 28 pages. Both colour and greyscale cover options are available, for further reproduction and distribution.

http://actforfree.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/return-fire-vol4-covers-COLOUR.pdf

http://actforfree.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/return-fire-vol4-covers-BW.pdf

http://actforfree.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/return-fire-vol4-contents.compressed.pdf

http://actforfree.nostate.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Caught-in-the-Net-Return-Fire-4-supplement.pdf

To give you an idea, a few of the featured pieces are the Institute for the Study of Insurgent Warfare’s essay Panopticons Then & Now, arguing for a more sophisticated understanding of the surveillance State; On the Catastrophe of the Salmon Farms and Martime Devastation in the Patagonian Sea as recounted by members of Colectivo Critica y Accion following the events of 2016; words on avoiding needlessly repetitious deeds and indeed aiming to ‘hit where it hurts’ as highlighted in Dissonanz #34 by Taking Apart Authority; and Sold Out to the Industry tells of U.K. unionism cosying up to the fracking prospectors, from The Acorn.

Other articles we have condensed or synthesised are those such as the ‘Antagonistic Margins’ of seduction, contagion and queering the ‘terrortory’, by The Experimentation Committee; the presentation of “Another Figure of the Migrant” as theorised by Thomas Nail in conversation with the Hostis journal; or Ed Lord’s discussion of modernity and questions of psychological ‘disorders’, ‘A Profound Dis-ease’.

Plenty of direct attacks on structures of our enemies found their way into our Global Flash-Points listing, as usual, as did the lowdown on various trials and kidnappings of those we feel an affinity to in Rebels Behind Bars. Our review for the issue is a reappraisal of the John Zerzan essay, Animal Dreams, by Bellamy Fitzpatrick, as To Love the Inhuman, mindful of the recurrent pitfalls of certain aspects of anti-civilisation analysis. Verses of Hunter Hall, Gabriel Pombo da Silva, Robert Hass and more made it into this round of Poems for Love, Loss & War.

Delving back to grasp Memory as a Weapon, in this section we’ve got stuff from “An Outragous Spirit of Tumult & Riot” during the Luddite rebellions against assimilation into the factory system of booming British industrialism (resurrected from the archives of Do or Die magazine) to A Shorter History of a Northwest E.L.F. Cell (sometimes exhilarating, sometimes dismaying) which was serialised in Tides of Flame, charting the rise and fall of one particular environmental guerrilla faction leading into the ‘Green Scare’ of a decade gone by; and that’s just a part of it…

As for the rest, grab a copy and see what moves you.

Comments, suggestions and submissions: returnfire@riseup.net

More soon.

R.F.

Afterword: The timestamp on this volume means that some developments are not up to date in the online release. We’d encourage readers to research cases that interest them for updates, but for now we wanted to at least publicise the prison address for one anarchist who has since been sentenced to 7 years and 6 months for the Aachen case outlined in vol.4 (the second defendant, also arrested in Barcelona, was acquitted). She welcomes correspondence in English, Spanish, Italian or German; let’s not leave her alone. Inform yourself, arm yourself, reach out, make a fist.
Post to:
Lisa
Buchnummer: 2893/16/7
Justizvollzuganstanlt (JVA) Köln
Rochusstrasse 350
50827 Köln – Germany

Return Fire vol 1: http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=14689
Return Fire vol.2: http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=18655
Return Fire vol.3: http://actforfree.nostate.net/?p=23837

Whirlwind, new Earth First! zine

Whirlwind, Voices of Resistance and Ecological Direct Action from Earth First! A5 zine. The first issue!

Whirlwind, Voices of Resistance and Ecological Direct Action from Earth First! A5 zine. The first issue!
A new Earth First publication includes reports, analysis and reviews from the ecological struggle to save this doomed planet. With colour illustrations this is a rather nicely put together bit of propaganda!

 

Avaialble from your local radical bookshop, ecological direct action group or http://www.activedistributionshop.org/shop/zines/4209-whirlwind-earth-first-zine-winter-201617.html

Earth First! zine – we want your writing

We want your writing!

We want your writing!
For a semi-regular zine of activist reflections and actions.
This is an invitation for articles offering a critical analysis and reflections on Earth First! and related environmental and social justice direct action movements, how we organise and the actions we take. Contributions can be about actions in the UK or international. We also welcome book reviews, activist resources, short rants, illustrations, cartoons, poems and photographs. We suggest 500 – 2000 words for articles, but contact us if you want to do something longer.
We aim to have a zine in print and online by the Earth First! winter moot 2017. All articles will be copyleft and you can choose whether to write anonymously. Deadline November 30 2016.
Also contact us if you want to join our editorial collective or offer us funding.
zine@earthfirst.org.uk or contact us if you want to send an article by snail mail.