As a kid, I pictured Nevada as a wasteland of sand and cacti. Today, I know better.
For the past five years, I’ve been packing up my truck every spring and taking a long day to drive to eastern Nevada to bask in the glory of one of the least densely-populated areas of the United States.
The broad valleys never fail to stun me, but most amazing are the mountains, limestone peaks arcing into the sky. Springs and creeks flowing from the hills support rich riparian zones and bring in birds and other wildlife from miles around. Antelope, deer, elk, and wild horses cross the valleys or stick to forested patches. This region is lush, biodiverse, and beautiful.
It’s also under threat. Across eastern Nevada, the Southern Nevada Water Authority seeks to build dozens of massive groundwater wells and pump almost every drop of water south to feed Las Vegas developments. The project has been a battle between locals and developers from Vegas for decades, and still drags on.
Another major threat is felling pinyon pine and juniper forests across not just this region, but the entire intermountain west. Ranchers have been doing this for decades to remove pesky trees getting in the way of their grass—and more importantly, their profit. As overgrazing continues to desertify Nevada—it’ll look like Iraq in another 100 years—removing trees allows ranchers to maintain the illusion that overstocking can continue indefinitely.
Countless people, including myself, are mobilizing to fight like hell for this land, this water, and these forests. We aim to stop these destructive projects by exposing their true nature and—if necessary—standing in their way.
There is a lot more to these stories, but I don’t have time to share it all here. Instead, I’d like to invite you to join myself and other community members, indigenous people, activists, ecologists, photographers, and families for the fifth annual Sacred Water, Sacred Forests Camp.
The camp takes place over Memorial Day weekend, May 27 to 29, near the town of Ely and Great Basin National Park. If you’re interested in attending, you can RSVP on the Facebook event page or by emailing greatbasin@deepgreenresistance.org.
I hope to be able to introduce you to this important, imperiled area in a few weeks.
— Max Wilbert is a community organizer based in western Oregon who considers Nevada a second home.
On Tuesday night, the American people decided to elect Donald J. Trump, a billionaire business mogul and reality TV star who has been accused of raping or otherwise sexually assaulting twenty-three women, who has called for banning immigration to the United States, and who has built a campaign on virulent racism.
He received more than 60 million votes.
There is a lot to process. Those conversations, about the growing tide of white supremacy, about Trump’s pending sexual assault cases, about the fact that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, about the left’s failure to engage with the white community on issues of race, and about the gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement that characterizes the American system, are already taking place.
I want to focus here on one specific issue: global warming. As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the sun outside my home. It’s November, and temperatures are more than 20 degrees above the typical average here. This year, 2016, is predicted to be the hottest year on record, beating out last year, which beat out the previous year, which beat out the previous year, each of the last five setting a new mark.
Records are being smashed aside like bowling pins. We are in the midst of a global catastrophe, and it is even worse than previously thought. On the day after the election, news broke that the climate is more sensitive to global warming than most calculations had suspected.
The study in question predicted nearly double the warming that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had previously expected. The new data predicts between 9 and 14 °F warming by 2100, enough to potentially lead to the extinction of the human species and flip the Earth into a completely new regime more similar to Venus than Earth. Michael Mann, one of the most well-known climate scientists in the world, says these findings and the changing political situation may mean “game over for the climate.”
Into this mess strides Donald Trump, who has said that if elected, he would “immediately approve” the Keystone XL pipeline, roll back environmental regulations, further subsidize the fossil fuel industry, and back out of the Paris climate agreement. Coal and oil stocks, as well as shares of equipment companies and railroads, jumped in price after news of his victory hit.
Right now, thousands of native people and allies are gathering on the cold plains of North Dakota in an attempt to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. Under President Obama, such popular movements had a chance—a small chance, but a chance—of success. Under Trump, there won’t be so much leniency, and the road to victory will be much harder.
History is clear; social movements have generally flourished under slightly more progressive administrations, and waned under right wing leadership. What does this mean for our strategy?
I would like to have a peaceful transition to a sane and sustainable world, but it seems increasingly impossible. The American people have shown themselves to be a reactionary force, clinging to their privilege as if it can shield them against the arrows that originate in American foreign policy. Immigrants come here because their lands have been destroyed for American capitalism, and groups like ISIS have emerged from a slurry of war, oil, racism, and fundamentalism.
Perhaps, then, we need a different type of change. When it comes to protecting the planet, stopping pipelines needs to be one of our first priorities. And like other Earth-destroying machinery, pipelines are very vulnerable. They stretch on for miles with no guards, no fences, and no protection.
Recently, a number of activists, including some who I know, were able to approach and shut down all five pipelines that carry tar sands oil into the United States in a coordinated act of non-violent civil disobedience. Their action was brave, but its long-term efficacy depends on whether courts will agree with them that their action was necessary and create a precedent to normalize actions of this type. With another Antonin Scalia on the way to the Supreme Court, a positive outcome is in doubt.
Coordinated action of another type could be more effective in protecting the planet. In plain language, I speak of sabotage. Individuals or networks of people conducting coordinated, small-scale sabotage over a widespread area could cripple the fossil fuel system with a minimum of expense, technical expertise, personnel, and risk. It is simple to disappear into the night, and with proper security culture the possibility of capture is remote. We’ve seen how vulnerable this network is; anyone could do this.
It isn’t idle speculation that such attacks would have a substantial impact. Its actually been done before, most notably in Nigeria, where indigenous people in the Niger River Delta have risen against polluting oil companies many times over the past several decades. Most recently, attacks on oil pipelines earlier this year shut down some 40 percent of Nigeria’s oil processing. Months later, the oil industry still hasn’t recovered.
To many people, this plan will sound insane. Modern life is dependent upon oil in so many ways. But when oil is killing the planet and those in power will not respond to rational argumentation or peaceful protest, and when sixty million people are willing to vote a climate-denying sexual abuser into office, what options are we left with? It is time for serious escalation.
Max Wilbert is a writer, activist, and organizer with the group Deep Green Resistance. He lives on occupied Kalapuya Territory in Oregon.
Modern society — industrial civilization — is built on violence.
This violence goes largely unnoticed. When it is noticed, it’s often seen a series of isolated incidents, rather than a fundamental part of the dominant culture.
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Here is an average morning inside of this culture.
First, you wake up on top of a foam mattress offgassing toxic VOCs that will not biodegrade in 10,000 years. You sit up and put on your clothes — all with tags reading “Bangladesh” and “Puerto Rico” and “Dominican Republic.” These clothes were made by virtual slaves.
You walk downstairs and fill a glass with water from the tap. The water comes from a local river that was dammed 127 years ago. Ever since, native species in the watershed have been in decline. You drink the water.
You pour yourself a bowl of cereal. The cereal is made of wheat and corn grown in what was once the tallgrass prairie of the eastern Great Plains. Ninety nine percent of that habitat – millions of acres – was plowed and utterly destroyed to grow those crops. The soil is gone now; your meal is only possible through fossil fuel fertilizers.
You add milk; it comes from a factory farm nearby, where cattle are packed in next to each other in squalor and pumped full of antibiotics and rBGH (genetically modified growth hormone) to increase production. The cows are in pain; their imprisonment is fouling the land around them. The cereal tastes good.
It’s almost time for work, so you walk down to your car. You’re somewhat environmentally conscious, so you’ve bought an electric car. It makes you feel a lot better. The car has 1000 pounds of lithium-ion batteries under the hood. The lithium for those batteries was strip-mined in the Peruvian desert; the pollution and land destroyed by the mine has devastated local people’s traditional livelihoods. You get inside the car and start the engine. It’s a push-button startup system; there is a fancy LCD screen inside. It’s modern and sleek; you pull away from the curb.
You drive on paved streets to your destination. Under those streets are indigenous burial grounds. There used to be thick old-growth forest here; now it’s a trendy, up-and-coming neighborhood. There are a few run-down houses here and there; the poor people who used to live in this neighborhood and are being forced to move, many after generations here; it’s just the latest set of refugees that have walked through this place.
You pass a police officer. The precursor of the modern police force was the slave patrol in the antebellum South. Many people live in constant fear of them.
It’s cold outside, but inside the car you’re warm and happy. You’re listening to the radio; the transmission towers are responsible for a few hundred thousand bird deaths a year. The radio is on a news station. The news person is talking about the latest bombing campaign your government is conducting. It’s taking place far away; you don’t think about it too much.
You’ve arrived at work. You work at a hospital. The hospital is on a hill. Before the concrete and buildings, there was a meadow here. It was full of flowers in the spring. Insects came from a long way away to eat from the flowers. It made the flowers happy. Many people walked through the meadow in those days. There was a good view from there. Sometimes lovers would walk there to be alone. That all changed when the settlers came with their earth-movers and road-builders.
You park your car, then walk inside. The sun is shining. It’s a nice day. You pass the gardeners working outside, spraying herbicide on the weeds. It wouldn’t do to have weeds. The gardeners have brown skin. They came from Mexico. They used to grow their own food and sell the rest in the village down the road, but after the free trade agreements opened them up to competing with Cargill, they couldn’t stay anymore. They became refugees and crossed the border. Technically, they’re in the country illegally. The land they’re on was part of Mexico before the war.
Inside the hospital, there are people waiting to be seen for appointments. They’re reading magazines. Most the magazines have pictures of women in them. The women aren’t wearing many clothes. They’re being used to sell products. A girl is reading one of the magazines. She looks about 10 years old. The leading cause of death for girls a few years older than her is eating disorders.
Another woman is hoping to have an abortion. She is only 19 years old. The hospital has Catholic roots; she won’t be allowed that level of control over her body and her future.
You walk past them, past examination rooms and surgical rooms and recovery rooms. There are receptacles everywhere for gloves, needles, and other medical waste. All the garbage from this hospital is shipped to an incinerator; it’s illegal to send it to a landfill. The incinerator is located in the middle of a poor neighborhood two states away. The smoke that comes out of its smokestack contains some of the most toxic substances known to science. There is a school a block away from the incinerator. They keep their windows closed and keep the kids inside when the smoke is rising from the facility. It doesn’t help much.
You get to your office. You touch the door as you walk in. It’s made of dense chipboard. The wood in the chipboard used to be an old-growth boreal forest. Formaldehyde and other chemical glues hold it together. Like the light switch, the computer, the examination table, the chairs, the desk, the floor tiles, and the light fixtures, the paint on the door is made from oil. The oil used in these specific light fixtures and floor tiles came from Saudi Arabia and Nigeria and Texas and Canada.
You sit down and get to work.
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This was a very partial description of the violence in modern society. Make no mistake: this is a war.
When we are honest about the level of violence in this culture, not resisting becomes a sickening thought.
But false solutions abound; almost all of the solutions put forth to solve these problems of violence continue it in another form, or simply displace it to another area of the world or a new type of impact.
True solutions undermine the ability of industrial civilization to continue its destruction. A longtime military maxim has been that victory requires removing the ability or will of the enemy to continue their fight. This is a situation of planetary self-defense. All options are on the table, from revolutionary law-making to strategic non-violence to coordinated sabotage of industrial infrastructure.
If you’re contemplating entering the fight, remember what Andrea Dworkin famously wrote: “Resist, do not comply.”
Three members of the radical environmental organization Deep Green Resistance and two other individuals were detained for more than seven hours at the Peace Arch border crossing between Washington State and British Columbia on their way to Vancouver to attend a talk by author and activist Chris Hedges last Friday, September 25. They were questioned about the organizations they were involved in, their political affiliations, and their contacts in Canada before being turned away by Canadian border agents. Upon re-entering the United States they were then subjected to another round of questioning by US border agents. The car they were traveling in as well as their personal computers were searched.
The interrogation comes on the heels of an FBI inquiry into Deep Green Resistance last fall in which more than a dozen members of the group were contacted and questioned by FBI agents. Several months later the group’s lawyer, Larry Hildes, was stopped at the same border crossing and asked specifically about one of his clients, Deanna Meyer, also a Deep Green Resistance member. During the 2014 visits, FBI and Department of Homeland Security agents showed up at members’ places of work, their homes, and contacted family members to find out more about the group. Meyer, who lives in Colorado, was asked by a DHS agent if she’d be interested in “forming a liaison.” The agent told her he wanted to, “head off any injuries or killing of people that could happen by people you know.” Two of the members detained at the border on Friday were also contacted by the FBI last fall.
Since Hildes was last held up at the Peace Arch border crossing in June he filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Traveler Redress Inquiry Program. In August he received a letter from the DHS saying the agency “can neither confirm nor deny any information about you which may be within federal watchlists or reveal any law enforcement sensitive information.”
It’s not only Deep Green Resistance members who have had trouble getting across the border. Environmental activists who were part of a campaign in Texas opposing the Keystone XL pipeline were the targets of an FBI investigation in 2012 and 2013 and have also been denied entry into Canada. At least one of those activists, Bradley Stroot, has been placed on a selective screening watchlist for domestic flights.
Nearly all of the activists involved are US citizens who have not had issues traveling to Canada in the past, leading them to believe that the recent FBI investigation and interest in their activities has landed them on some kind of federal watchlist. According to Peter Edelman, an immigration attorney in Vancouver, there are three broad categories under which Canadian border agents may deny entry to a foreign national: If they suspect you are entering Canada to work or study or you clearly don’t have the financial resources needed for the duration of the visit; if you pose a security threat to Canada or are a member of a terrorist or criminal organization; or if you’ve committed certain crimes. Edelman says that US citizens tend to get targeted more easily at the Canadian border because of the various information- sharing programs between the two countries. As soon as they scan your passport, border agents have access to a whole host of state and federal databases. Still, Edelman says, “Who gets targeted and who doesn’t is definitely an exercise in profiling.”
On Friday, September 25 Deep Green Resistance members Max Wilbert, Dillon Thomson, Rachel and two other individuals not affiliated with the group drove from Eugene, Oregon to attend the talk by Hedges, which was a collaboration with the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter and the Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution. They got to the border around 1 p.m., told the border agents where they were going, and that they’d be returning to Oregon the next day. They were then asked to exit their vehicle and enter the border control facility, where they assumed they would be held briefly before continuing on their way.
Instead, they ended up spending four hours on the Canadian side, each questioned separately. At one point, an agent came into the building carrying Wilbert’s computer and notebooks. He asked the agent what they were doing with the computer and was told they were searching for “child pornography and evidence that you’re intending to work in Canada.” The agent also said they were “not going to add or remove anything.”
According to Edelman the searching of computers and cell phones at the border has become standard procedure despite the fact that there are questions about whether a border search allows for such invasive measures. Border agents take the view that they are permitted to do so, but the legal picture remains murky. “The searching of computers is an issue of contention,” Edelman says.
After four hours of questioning, all but one of the travelers were told that they would not be allowed to enter Canada. Wilbert, who grew up in Seattle and has traveled to Canada many times without incident, including as recently as January 2015, was told that they were suspicious he was entering the country to work illegally. A professional photographer, he had volunteered to take pictures of the event, which he had openly told the agents. “It was pretty obvious they were grasping for straws,” Wilbert says. “Under that level of suspicion you wouldn’t let anybody into Canada.”
The other three individuals were told they had been denied entry for previous political protest-related arrests. Rachel, a Deep Green Resistance member arrested in 2012 during a protest near the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, had traveled to Canada in December 2014 without any problems. The one individual allowed entry had no prior arrest record or explicit affiliation with any political groups. (Interestingly, several Deep Green Resistance members traveling separately, including one of the group’s founders, Lierre Keith, were allowed to pass through the border and attend the event.)
After being denied entry to Canada, the group turned around and attempted to reenter the United States, at which point they were again pulled aside and told by US border agents to exit their car. The group was then subjected to a similar round of questioning that lasted three and a half hours. This time, US agents took three computers from the vehicle into the border control facility and kept them for the duration of the interrogation.
According to Wilbert, the questions on the American side were more obviously political. Agents wanted to know the names of the groups they were involved in, what kinds of activities they engage in, what they believe in, and who they were going to see.
“It seemed very clear on the US side that they had already come to conclusions about who we are and what we were doing,” Rachel says.
Around 8:30 p.m. they were told they could leave and that it had been nothing more than a routine inspection.
Wilbert doesn’t see it that way. Two days later he got a new computer and says he plans to get rid of the one seized by border agents. Despite assurances from the border officials that nothing was “added or removed” he says, “We feel like everything we do on those computers will never be private.”
“It was pretty clear to us that it was an information gathering excursion,” says Wilbert. “They had an opportunity to harass and intimidate and gather information from activists who they find threatening.”
Adam Federman, Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Adam Federman is a contributing editor at Earth Island Journal. He is the recipient of a Polk Grant for Investigative Reporting, a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, and a Russia Fulbright Fellowship. You can find more of his work at adamfederman.com.
Republished with permission of Earth Island Journal
This film, by DGR member Max Wilbert, brings you the voices of climate scientists – in their own words.
Rising temperatures in the Arctic are contributing the melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and destabilization of a system that has been called “Earth’s Air Conditioner”. Global warming is here and is impacting weather patterns, natural systems, and human life around the world – and the Arctic is central to these impacts.
Scientists featured in the film include:
Jennifer Francis, PhD. Atmospheric Sciences
Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University.
Ron Prinn, PhD. Chemistry
TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Natalia Shakhova, PhD. Marine Geology
International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
Kevin Schaefer, PhD.
Research Scientist, National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Stephen J. Vavrus, PhD. Atmospheric Sciences
Center for Climatic Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Nikita Zimov, Northeast Science Station, Russian Academy of Sciences.
Jorien Vonk, PhD. Applied Environmental Sciences
Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University
Jeff Masters, PhD. Meteorology
Director, Weather Underground
Credit Addendums
At 16:15, the footage of methane venting from the seafloor was captured by Ocean Networks Canada / CSSF. It is venting from a place called “Bubbly Gulch” near one of their seafloor observatory nodes called Clayoquot Slope (a.k.a. ODP 889), located off the coast of Vancouver Island, not Oregon. The footage was captured in May 2010 at a depth of 1257 m. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEHFit_5l-Y
Coordinated action of another type could be more effective in protecting the planet. In plain language, I speak of sabotage. Individuals or networks of people conducting coordinated, small-scale sabotage over a widespread area could cripple the fossil fuel system with a minimum of expense, technical expertise, personnel, and risk. It is simple to disappear into the night, and with 
