farmdoc's blog post number 201

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) (pictured), one of my heroes, was an American philosopher and writer. His writings, especially those on non-violent resistance to government injustice, inspired Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. In the 1830s and 1840s, to protest the slavery that the government condoned, Thoreau refused to pay the government’s annual poll tax. In 1841 he was jailed for his refusal. In his essay Civil Disobedience, published in 1849,Thoreau contended that each person owes a greater duty to his own conscience and beliefs than to the government. Thus he encouraged people to non-violently disobey laws they believed unjust. Non-violent civil disobedience is a legitimate form of protest in civil society – aiming at least to bear witness to the abuse of government power, and at best to reduce that power by changing its enabling legislation. We used it effectively in Save Albert Park’s campaign. This week Still Wild Still Threatened signalled a willingness to abandon its protest if all logging in the Upper Florentine Valley ended. The Tasmanian Government sanctimoniously replied that it doesn’t deal with people who break the law. The relevant law – which excludes the public from public forests that are being trashed – is a diabolical law. So if the government won’t change that law then, in the spirit of Thoreau, the People must resist the law and then change the government.