Topic: Grassroots Alternatives to Bipartisan Extractivism and Ecocide: Strategy and Prospects
Speaker: Max Wilbert
Time: July 16, 2025, at 13:30 Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Summary: While much is made of the political divide between conservative and liberal parties in the west, when it comes to environmental policies, the ruling classes prioritize resource extraction and energy production. This is true in both democracies and dictatorships, resulting in a situation of bipartisan ecocide where the ebb and flow of politics matters little when it comes to core environmental issues like climate change, overshoot, technological escalation, and growth. This talk will advocate for the individual embrace of a biocentric orientation and the communal orientation towards a biodiverse movement of movements characterized by mutually supporting elements of deep ecology, degrowth, radical permaculture, social democracy, and revolutionary vanguardism. We’ll explore strategies that appear to show promise, as well as significant barriers this movement faces.
Profile: Max Wilbert is a writer and biocentric community organizer. He has been part of grassroots political work for 20 years and is the founder of Protect Thacker Pass. Max is the author of two books, most recently “Bright Green Lies: How The Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It” (Monkfish 2021). His work has been featured on CNN, The New York Times, NPR, Le Monde, BBC, and elsewhere.
A few days after Max presented to us he posted on his Substack channel a wonderfully insightful monologue: https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/im-giving-away-copies-of-my-first?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#media-8c923bde-0cd7-4b5a-8482-a7cd0f917bee