Day of Solidarity with Marie Mason, Eric McDavid, and all Eco-Prisoners
It’s time to begin planning, sharing and supporting events, fundraisers and solidarity actions for June 11 this year!
June 11 began as an international day of solidarity with long-term eco-prisoner Jeff “Free” Luers in 2004. At the time Jeff was serving 22+ years.
After years of struggle, Jeff and his legal team won a reduction in his sentence and he was released from prison in December 2009. But in the years between Jeff’s arrest and release, the FBI had carried out a series of indictments and arrests in an attempt to devastate the radical environmental and anarchist communities.
Two of the people caught up in this maelstrom of repression were Eric McDavid and Marie Mason. Marie Mason and Eric McDavid share the unfortunate distinction of having the longest standing sentences of any environmental prisoners in the United States.
Please join us in an International Day of Solidarity with Marie Mason, Eric McDavid, and all Eco-prisoners on every June 11. As we support Marie and Eric, we also work to build networks of support for our movement to resist state repression and recognize that the state’s tactics against our movement can affect all of us. This is a time to remember our friends who are in prison – who are continuing their struggles on the inside. This is a time to continue and strengthen the very work for which Eric and Marie are now serving so much time – to struggle against capitalism, ecological devastation, and the ever more diffuse forms of control in this prison society. June 11 is also a reminder to those of us on the outside that there are things worth fighting for and consequences worth facing because the future will be decided by the actions we take.
This year on June 11 – the International Day of Solidarity with Marie Mason, Eric McDavid & all Eco-prisoners – we will be running the 2nd >> annual Never Alone online exhibition. It will serve as an avenue not only for fundraising for these political prisoners, but as a way to reach out >> informatively to a broad audience on issues of earth & animal liberation and state captivity. We would love to invite you to contribute artwork to this exhibition.
“This call is not proscriptive in any way; read what you want in these words and put them into action as you and your crew see fit. But remember, what we’re calling for is not a ritualistic expression of solidarity, a once a year party in which we, for only an instant, call to mind those captured by the State. Rather, ours is a call to live the history of our imprisoned comrades, to take their names, their actions, and their struggles and to turn them back on the world that locks them up. Ours is a call to action. In solidarity with Marie and Eric; with all long-term anarchist prisoners; >> in defence of the earth; until all cages are empty!”