"OWS began at Zuccotti Park, once called Liberty Plaza. It was at this same
Liberty Plaza twenty years earlier that an organization called the Youth
Greens met in the chilly, predawn hours the day after the twentieth Earth
Day anniversary to challenge what it saw as the primary cause of the
ecological crisis: capitalism, as symbolized by the institution of Wall
Street. In solidarity with the Wall Street Action, which was endorsed by
over fifty social and political groups, and turned out two thousand people
organized into affinity groups, with close to three hundred arrested,
actions were held in San Francisco, Eugene (Oregon), Minneapolis, and Saint
Louis. In San Francisco, six hundred people marched on the Pacific Stock
Exchange at 6:00 a.m., with fifty of those later arrested.
"The Youth Greens was largely an ecological anarchist organization, working
with the Green movement of the 1980s and 1990s. It had active chapters in
five U.S. cities, with annual decision-making conferences, and infused
antiauthoritarian ideas and practices into the emerging Green movement,
arguing against reformists. The Youth Greens asserted that the ecological
crisis was a result of social forms of domination, and that humans
dominating and exploiting other humans extended into the natural world in
the attempt to dominate nature. Thus, for the Youth Greens and its allies
in the Left Green Network, resolving the social crisis, by addressing and
overturning all forms of social hierarchy and domination, was the only way
to solve the ecological crisis.
"We can learn from the ideas and practices of the Youth Greens. At the
Earth Day Wall Street Action, Youth Greens assembled the first black bloc
in the United States—inspired by the German autonomen, or 'those who are
autonomous.' Dozens of young people dressed in all black and covered their
faces with black bandanas as a way to avoid being identified and surveilled
by police. Nine years later, this tactic would gain worldwide visibility at
the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. The Youth Greens also
developed political principles covering almost every aspect of contemporary
life, from gay and lesbian liberation to antiracism to the practice of
direct democracy, viewing all this as interrelated and part of a larger
global movement."
https://groups.google.com/group/socialwar-energy-climatewar/msg/1f59d8612bb91d7f?hl=en-GB&;
More on this organization and mileau:
http://books.google.com/books?id=MnD1D37szowC&pg=PA117
--
"Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen
lytlað."
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