by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 23, 2016 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
The Swamp Cedars in Spring Valley, Nevada have grown long memories. They stand on the valley floor under the bright Great Basin stars where the skies are still unspoiled by the encroaching glow of electricity. Beneath the trees’ branches, the blue petals of wild irises flutter in the breeze. All of them – the trees, the flowers, the stars – sway to the soft melodies played by the valley’s bubbling springs.
Most of the Swamp Cedars’ memories are pleasant. Carried by glaciers to the valley floor sometime in the last two and a half million years, the Swamp Cedars remember when wooly mammoths plodded through the Great Basin. The wind through their leaves whispers of a time when the Swamp Cedars trembled under the shadow of great teraton birds who rode the skies with their 25-foot wingspans. When wild horses stop at the springs to share a drink with the Swamp Cedars, the trees tell stories of the fleet native horses and camels that once ran the open spaces of North America.
Dawn in Spring Valley still carries the hint of curiosity the Swamp Cedars felt on that morning so many thousands of years ago when they watched the first humans walk from the foothills to rest in the welcome shade the trees offered. They learned to expect the humans regularly as they gathered under the trees for sacred ceremonies. They listened as the humans called themselves “Newe” and the trees learned that the word meant, “people.”
The Newe returned often to the Swamp Cedars for their ceremonies and the trees took delight with the Newe as old friends embraced after several seasons apart, as young people became lovers, and as information was shared about the year’s pinyon pine nut harvest.
A few of the memories are extremely painful. The Swamp Cedars recall when a different kind of human first arrived in Spring Valley. These humans were pale of skin and rode what the trees recognized as horses though they were a different species of horse than the native horses that had long since been lost. At first, there were just a few of the pale humans, but the trickle turned into a flood. The Swamp Cedars wince as they relive their first experience of steel – the excruciating pain that came when the first ax drove deep into living Swamp Cedar wood.
Worst of all, the Swamp Cedars witnessed the Newe screaming as the blue-clad humans on horses rode them down, the puffs of white smoke that turned into a haze, and the sharp cracks of rifle fire. The Swamp Cedars still recoil from the taste of blood in the soil when the bubbling springs turned red.
***
Dr. Ronald Lanner, one of the foremost experts on Great Basin trees explains the Swamp Cedars’ uniqueness: “…within the borders of Nevada, Rocky Mountain juniper is found in 39 mountain ranges but in only one valley – Spring Valley.” The Swamp Cedars carry an aura of magic. In fact, they are not cedars at all. They are actually Rocky Mountain junipers (juniperus scopulorum) and Rocky Mountain junipers always grow on dry, rocky mountain slopes or in somewhat shaded canyons. Always – except for the Swamp Cedars. Mysteriously, the Swamp Cedars grow in valley bottom woodlands that are flooded part of the year.
The Swamp Cedars of Spring Valley are likely on their way to evolving into a distinct species. Lanner describes, “…it is very likely the swamp cedars comprise a distinct ecotype of Rocky Mountain juniper. An ecotype is a genetically differentiated population that has evolved in adaptation to a distinctively different environment than characterizes that of the main population of its species.”
The Swamp Cedars are sacred to the Shoshone (Newe in their own language) peoples. According to Shoshone elder Delaine Spilsbury, Nevada’s Native peoples were hunter-gatherers who roamed the region in small familial groups while they searched for food. The Swamp Cedars were centrally located in the Shoshone’s traditional territories and offered ample shade during the hot Great Basin summers. Beneath the trees are a series of springs. Water from the springs encouraged plants and animals to proliferate. The Shoshone found many game birds and animals, medicinal plants, and fish in the nearby streams and ponds. Not far away from the Swamp Cedars, pinyon pine forests grew bounties of pine nuts. With these conditions, the Swamp Cedars became the favorite gathering place for the Shoshone and a sacred ceremonial site.
The Swamp Cedars are a massacre site. Three times over. Spilsbury explains that two of the massacres are of official military record while the last massacre happened at the hands of vigilantes with no military record.
The first two massacres happened in the 1860s. In the first massacre, most of the Shoshone escaped when American cavalry horses became mired in the mud created by the valley’s springs. The second massacre was much worse and Spilsbury says the written reports “state that men’s penises were cut off and shoved into their mouths and tree branches were shoved into women’s vaginas.”
The third massacre happened in 1897. This massacre is only remembered because two little girls hid in a ditch and were not discovered by the white vigilantes who murdered everyone else. The two little girls walked south to the Swallow Ranch. One of the two survivors was named Mamie by the Swallow family. Later, she married one of the Swallows’ hired hands – a Paiute man from Shivits, Utah named Joe Joseph. Spilsbury is the granddaughter of Mamie and Joe Joseph and, therefore, a direct descendant of a survivor of the last Swamp Cedar massacre.
The massacres cursed the Swamp Cedars with a bloody historical significance, but the massacres also endowed the trees with a deep, spiritual significance. According to Spilsbury, “Newe believe that because of their violent deaths, the spirits of the victims remain in the Sacred Trees.”
***
The Swamp Cedars are under attack. Close to 300 miles south of Spring Valley, the City of Las Vegas sprang up in the desert. Las Vegas’ population continues to grow in an arid landscape and the city is running out of water. Instead of restricting development, Sin City encourages residents and businesses to move to the city promising them access to the water they’ll need.
In 1991, the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) was created through a cooperative agreement among seven water and wastewater agencies in Southern Nevada including Big Bend Water District, City of Boulder City, City of Henderson, City of Las Vegas, City of North Las Vegas, Clark County Water Reclamation District, and the Las Vegas Valley Water District.
From the SNWA website: “SNWA officials are charged with managing the region’s water resources and providing for Las Vegas Valley residents’ and businesses’ present and future water needs.” To do this, SNWA has proposed a “Groundwater Development Project.”
The bulk of this plan hinges on a large pipeline from Las Vegas to rural eastern Nevada. The main pipeline is estimated to include 263 miles of buried water pipelines while an estimated 96 to 254 miles of collector pipelines will feed water to the main pipeline. The entire pipeline will pump 27 billion gallons of water from the desert annually. Between 71 and 88 wells will have to be dug in fragile ecosystems while somewhere between 96 and 254 miles of overhead distribution power lines will be built in a region famous for wildfires. The water will be taken primarily from 4 desert valleys – Spring, Cave, Dry Lake, and Delamar Valleys.
In other words, SNWA’s Groundwater Development Plan would destroy much of the Great Basin, would destroy Spring Valley and would destroy the Swamp Cedars.
According to Dr. David Charlet, in his study “Effects of Interbasin Water Transport on Ecosystems of Spring Valley, White Pine County, Nevada,” “Ecosystems of Spring Valley, like most valleys in Nevada, are stressed. Overgrazing, particularly during the late 1800s, water diversion, and groundwater pumping have weakened the plant communities.”
This means human activities are already undermining life in the area.
Charlet makes horrifying predictions for the Swamp Cedars, writing, “The groundwater development proposed by the SNWA for the Spring Valley will doom the populations of swamp cedars. It is unlikely that they will live long past the first 20 yr [sic] of drawdown…” In fact, Charlet believes the Swamp Cedars will act as the canaries in the coal mine as he describes what he thinks will happen, “The swamp cedars will be the first plant species in the valley to become locally extinct, and I imagine that they would not be able to hang on for more than 50 yr. The next species to follow the swamp cedars will be the greasewood, followed shortly by big Great Basin sagebrush, and finally by rabbitbrush.”
Dr. Lanner agrees with Dr. Charlet in Lanner’s study “The Effect of Groundwater Pumping Proposed by the Southern Nevada Water Authority on the ‘Swamp Cedar’ of Spring Valley, Nevada.” He writes, “Despite the fact that the swamp cedars are not currently considered at risk of extinction by state or federal authorities, they are vulnerable to groundwater pumping leading to lowering of the water table and loss of surface flooding. The granting of pumping permits would make it logical, however, for such listing to be initiated.”
Even more terrifying than Charlet’s 20-year prediction, Lanner gives the Swamp Cedars 2 years. He explains, “Since the swamp cedars’ root systems are concentrated in the upper one foot of soil, and almost entirely in the upper two feet, drawdown of water from this part of the soil profile can be expected to be devastating to the trees. I would expect trees to die within no more than two years following the pumping of water from their root zone, even if there is ample rainfall to keep surface roots alive.”
***
What will the world lose if SNWA has its way?
Wild irises and Swamp Cedars, Spring Valley
There are the obvious answers. The world will lose the Swamp Cedars, Spring Valley’s ability to support life, and a place of cultural significance for a historically oppressed people. Las Vegas will swell and, as it gets bigger, will require ever more water to support itself. Eventually, the city will reach farther and farther to steal water destroying community after community until it cannot find enough. Then, it will collapse. Many of those who have been forced to rely on the city’s infrastructure for the necessities of life will perish. These will be grievous wounds, of course. And they give us all the reason we need to know that SNWA must be stopped.
There are wounds that strike even deeper than these, though. They are wounds that scrape our spirits. They are aimed at our souls. They erase our collective memory and chill our courage to resist. Understanding the Swamp Cedars, listening to their stories, and sharing their memories helps us to regain our own memories. Regaining our memories will enable us to see more clearly.
What will we see when we see clearly?
We will see that this culture’s pattern of abuse is not inevitable. Las Vegas’ water shortage is the result of a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts that both leads to and springs from the growth of cities. Cities are groups of people living in place in populations high enough to require the importation of the necessities of life like water. This is a way of life built on drawdown and can never be sustainable.
Contrast this to the hunter/gatherer culture practiced by the Shoshone – the people who will suffer the most from SNWA’s water grab. The Shoshone lived sustainably in places like Spring Valley for thousands of years without destroying the land. The dominant culture, on the other hand, has been in the area since the 1850s. And, already in this comparatively short time, the Great Basin is on the verge of collapse.
Central to Shoshone culture is the idea that the Swamp Cedars are sacred. As the Shoshone teach that the victims of the Swamp Cedars massacres remain in the trees, they ensure that the lessons of these massacres will never be forgotten so long as both the Shoshone and the Swamp Cedars survive.
It is in the Swamp Cedars’ sacredness that we find one of the prime motivations for the dominant culture’s destruction of the Swamp Cedars, for the destruction of indigenous peoples’ sacred places around the world, and ultimately for the annihilation of every last indigenous culture. In destroying the Swamp Cedars, in destroying sacred places, and in destroying indigenous cultures, the dominant culture destroys examples of true sustainability. The dominant culture wants to erase all memory that there are other, more beautiful ways to live.
For the vast majority of human history and in lands around the world, humans built cultures based on the notion that all living beings are sacred. Fish, birds, and animals were our kin. Mountains housed gods, rivers spoke the mysteries of existence, and spirits lived in the trees. When every living being is sacred, it is sacrilegious to destroy wantonly and the kind of total annihilation we face today is simply unthinkable.
When a small minority of human cultures banished the sacred to abstract sky gods or denied the possibility of the sacred in any form, they turned a living, speaking world into so much material to use. Surrounded, as this small minority was, by humans who still remembered the sacredness of all life, this small minority was incredibly insecure. To maintain the lies, they had to destroy the reminders. Natural community after natural community, species after species have fallen victim to this culture. The dominant culture operates as a serial killer. And, just like a serial killer, the dominant culture will destroy every last scrap of the evidence of its crimes if we let it.
The Swamp Cedars, by their sacredness to the Shoshone, by the memories they carry, by their very existence, betray the unspeakable evils committed by this culture. The dominant culture cannot afford for the Swamp Cedars to continue teaching the world about life. The Swamp Cedars must survive. We must stop the SNWA water grab and biocidal projects everywhere.
For more information about stopping the SNWA water grab, please see the Great Basin Water Network and Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition.
by DGR News Service | Jun 11, 2016 | Human Supremacy
When the will of the people spells demise for the planet
By Derrick Jensen / Deep Green Resistance
The United States is not a democracy. It is more accurate to say we live in a plutocracy — a government of, by, and for the wealthy — or more accurate still, a kleptocracy — a government that has as its primary organizing principle theft, from the poor, from the land, from the future. Yet somehow we still often publicly speak and act as though we do live in a democracy.
But there exists a deeper problem than us not living in a democracy, an even deeper problem than our inability to acknowledge that we don’t live in a democracy, which is that there’s a very real way in which we do live in a democracy. And the implications of this are very bad news for the planet. The reason has to do not so much with how we are governed as with what we want, and what we do. If it’s true that, as someone said long ago, by their fruits ye shall know them, it quickly becomes clear that, to use my mother’s phrase, the majority of people in this country don’t give two hoots in a rain barrel about the health of the planet. Some examples should make this clear.
Let’s start with tigers. Not real tigers, not flesh-and-blood tigers, not tigers who are being driven extinct in the wild. But rather the Louisiana State University Tigers football team, currently ranked number one in the country. Last January, when LSU played Alabama for the college football championship, more than 78,000 people attended. The median ticket price was $1,565, and some seats were reported to have gone for as much as $10,000. The region was so excited about this football game that a number of schools closed in celebration. And of course the television audience was well over 24 million people. It was the second most watched program in cable television history.
All of which leads me to conclude that more people in this country care about the Tigers football team than living, breathing tigers. Obviously, you could make the same argument about the Detroit Tigers, Miami Marlins, Carolina Panthers, Jacksonville Jaguars, and on and on.
Siberian tigers
Now don’t get me wrong: I like sports. But ultimately what we’re talking about here is a game. Do you think we could have gotten schools to close or 70,000 people to gather to help clean up Louisiana’s beaches from the Gulf oil spill (and do it week after week, as they do for LSU football games, for New Orleans Saints football games — as they do almost daily in every city across the country for football, baseball, basketball, and on and on)? Or hell, do you think we could get schools to close or more than 70,000 people to gather week after week to try to do something about that same region’s Cancer Alley?
Another example: For one brief night a couple of years ago the northern California county where I live — Del Norte — became a vibrant and shining example of participatory democracy in action. But it wasn’t saving the redwoods or the die-off of amphibians or dam removal that got people to turn out en masse. It was a particularly controversial domesticated plant. You probably know that through popular vote the state of California legalized cannabis for medicinal use, and now the number of allowable plants is determined county by county. So when the Del Norte County supervisors were considering dropping that number from ninety-nine to six, people flooded the public input meeting and prevented it from happening. This is how participatory democracy is supposed to work: public “representatives” are supposed to carry out the will of The People, and those who try to do otherwise get voted out of office.
The point here is not whether marijuana should be legal, any more than it is whether Alabama beats LSU. The point is that I wish people cared as much about salmon as they do about marijuana, or football. But they don’t. If people collectively had to make a choice between living rivers and electricity from dams (and recreation on reservoirs, and the value of some people’s vacation homes), we can guess what they’d choose. In fact, we know what they already chose. The answer is evident in the 2 million dams in this country; in the 60,000 dams over thirteen feet tall; in the 70,000 dams over six and a half feet tall; and in collapsing mollusk populations, collapsing fish populations, and dying rivers and flood plains. If people collectively had to choose between iPods and mountain gorillas, we know which they would (and do) choose. If they collectively had to choose between laptops in their laps and human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we know that answer too.
You could say I’m comparing apples and oranges, but I’m really just talking about people’s priorities in action. By their fruits ye shall know them.
But it gets worse, because most people won’t acknowledge even to themselves that they’re making these choices. Any choices made long enough over time (on personal and especially social scales) stop feeling like choices and start feeling like economic imperatives or political inevitabilities or just the way things are. Too many people argue — or rather don’t argue but just blithely assume — that we don’t have to choose between living rivers and dams, that we don’t have to choose between a living planet and the industrial economy. But I’m not talking about wishful thinking here. I’m talking about reality, where, as Bill McKibben so frequently and eloquently points out, you can’t argue with physics. Millions of dams and hundreds of thousands of ruined rivers and streams later, we should all know this. Just as we should know that burning carbon-based substances releases carbon into the air; and just as we should know that items that require mined materials — iPods, laptops, windmills, solar photovoltaic cells, electrical grids, and on and on — require mines, which means they destroy landbases.
The notion that we needn’t choose, that we can have the “comforts or elegancies,” as one antebellum proslavery philosopher put it, of this way of life without the consequences of it, that we can have the goodies of empire (for us) without the horrors of empire (for the victims), that we can have an industrial economy without killing the planet is completely counterfactual. This notion can only be put forward by those who are either beneficiaries of, or identify with the beneficiaries of, these choices, which is to say those who do not primarily care for or identify with victims of these choices. This notion can only be put forward by those who have made themselves — consciously or not — oblivious to the suffering and indeed the actual existence of these victims. Which brings us back to how we really do live in a democracy. This failure of imagination — this failure to care — is one of the things that keep our incredibly destructive brand of democracy functioning. Without question, most people in this culture prefer their “comforts or elegancies” to a living planet, and so theft and rape and pillage are allowed to rule the day.
Upton Sinclair famously said that it’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it. I’d say here that it’s hard to make people care about something they receive tangible benefits from not caring about. This destructive democracy we share is a democracy where most people vote — through their actions and inactions, through their enacted passions, through what they care and don’t care about — with and for entitlements. Which is why, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we should go ahead and call it a kleptocracy. It is a democracy of, by, and for those who benefit from the wholescale destruction of the planet.
Derrick Jensen is the author of more than twenty books on the dominant culture and the environmental crisis. His latest book is The Myth of Human Supremacy.
Originally published in the May/June 2012 issue of Orion. Published online for the first time here.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 10, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
If fear is the mind killer, guilt is the heart killer. Experiencing guilt creates a wound. The wound is healed when the behavior producing the guilt is rectified. The scar that forms over the wound serves as a reminder to guide future behavior.
Living in a state of perpetual guilt, however, prevents the wound from ever healing. The wound festers. The guilt swells until it becomes an infection of empathy. The infected person devotes all her energy to coping with the constant pain of guilt. She spends all her time hunched over the wound, seeking to alleviate the pain. Focused on the wound like this, she cannot look beyond herself. A cycle develops. The guilt grows and becomes ever more painful. The pain strangles the infected’s capacity for empathy. Eventually, the infected loses her ability to act from a genuine concern for others and only acts to avoid the pain of more guilt.
The dominant culture produces this state of perpetual guilt for its members. One of the truly demonic characteristics of the dominant culture is that to survive we are forced to participate in the system that is destroying the planet. As long as this culture endures, our hands are soaked in blood.
It started long ago when some humans traded the long-term stability of true sustainability for myopic comfort. Agriculture developed. Grasslands and forests were destroyed for domesticated crops. Rivers were bled to death for the requisite water. And, climate change began.
With a more reliable food source than hunter-gatherers, agricultural humans’ population exploded. Cities developed and civilization began. Eventually, cities stripped their land bases of the necessities of life and they were forced to denude ever larger regions of natural life to support their populations. This process is thousands of years old and countless communities have fallen prey to the destruction.
Civilization rages on and most of us live on lands where the human population long ago overshot the land’s ability to produce the requisite calories and nutrition to sustain us. Wildlife populations are collapsing. More water is being poisoned every day. We are losing topsoil at an insane pace.
To make things even worse, the dominant culture enforces a system of land ownership that transformed the natural world into mere resources that could be bought and sold. Those with the most power (read: money) may exclude the rest of us from accessing what we need to live. Even in places where there is still enough animal life, clean water, and topsoil to support humans in a sustainable manner, chances are someone “owns” that land. In other words, if we took to hunting “their” animals, drinking “their” water, foraging on “their” property, they will appeal to a governmental system to provide armed men to remove us.
So, we must follow their rules to get what we need. We must participate in this murderous system just to survive. In order to eat, we must have money to purchase the food from someone who owns the land where the food was produced or from someone who owns the store who imported the food from far away. In order to sleep, we must have money to pay someone rent for the privilege of using their shelter. In order to make this money, we must offer our labor to those who control the money.
When we sacrifice our time and our money to those in power their power becomes stronger. Their stranglehold on life gets tighter. The destruction of the world intensifies.
Many people, recognizing this, experience overwhelming guilt. They live with that open, festering wound. The wound destroys their empathy and they stop looking beyond themselves. All they want is to be free of the pain. All they want is peace of mind. And, in this quest for peace of mind, they work only for personal purity. They engage in merely personal solutions to global problems.
As they spend their time recycling, signing internet petitions, and carpooling to work, they huddle over their inflamed conscience, whispering to themselves, “At least, I am not destroying the planet.”
I understand their pain. I know what it feels like to want nothing more than to soothe the wound. I have experienced the willingness to do absolutely anything to silence the constant chatter of guilt. I internalized the guilt this culture forces on us so completely I sought to destroy the guilt by destroying myself. Twice.
***
The dominant culture has a vested interest in neutralizing people through guilt. If it can convince enough people that the evil is their fault and paralyze those people in a lifetime of emotional sorrow, then far less physical force is needed to subdue the masses.
Spirituality has proven a very effective means of instilling this guilt.
When I search through my earliest memories to the roots of my consciousness, I find the life-sized crucifix hanging behind the altar at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church in Newburgh, Indiana where I was baptized and attended Mass every Sunday in the beginning years of my life. Even the softening effect time has on memory cannot cloud the vivid clarity of the horror I see displayed there.
An emaciated man hangs by nails driven through his hands and feet into rough-hewn boards. A crown of thorns has been placed around his head, piercing his taut skin. Blood and sweat drip down his face. His eyes roll upwards as he looks for help from the sky. None comes.
The weight of his body on the nails in his hands tears the skin and bones in his palms. The same weight on the nails in his feet have curled his toes grotesquely against the wood. The man is suffocating. With each breath, he is forced to pull himself up against the nails in his hands and push against the nails in his feet. This makes the tearing worse. He pauses between each breath, each push and pull, caught between the desire to live, to take one more breath, and the reality of the pain accompanying each effort for each breath.
As if this struggle was not excruciating enough, I can see the black and blue swelling in the man’s thighs where his femurs have been broken to make it even more difficult to push up for oxygen. Then, I see a puncture wound in the man’s abdomen, under his ribcage. Someone has stuck a lance through his lungs and into his heart to ensure the man has finally died.
I feel deeply sorry for this man. My grandmother holds me in her lap beneath this scene as I ponder the intensity of the pain this poor man has felt. My grandmother looks from my eyes to the crucifix and a strange mix of sorrow and fear is reflected in her gaze.
“Who is that, Granny?” I ask.
“That’s Jesus Christ, our Savior,” she says.
The name and these words mean nothing to me. I am still only concerned with his pain. I cannot imagine why something this terrible would ever happen to someone. My only experience with the kinds of wounds I see on this Jesus are from needles in the syringes in shots doctors have given me.
I hate shots. I hate the way the needle first breaks through skin with a violent prick. I hate the sensation produced by the needle cutting through the grains of my muscle tissue. I shudder as I imagine the feeling of a whole lance pushing through my abdominal wall, grating against the bones forming my ribcage, and finally bursting into my heart.
“Why did they do that to him?” I ask in a whisper.
“He died for our sins,” my grandmother says. ‘Sins’ is another word I’ve never heard before.
“Oh. What are ‘sins’?”
“Sins are when you do something bad,” she explains. “Every time you do something bad, they drive another nail into him.”
This idea drives through me as surely as the nails. My mind recoils. “I don’t want them to hurt him anymore.”
“I know you don’t,” my grandmother comforts me. “Be a good boy, and they won’t have any reason to hurt him.” With this, the first poisons of overwhelming guilt trickled through my heart.
***
I attended Catholic elementary schools and a Catholic college. Whenever I forgot that life in this world is a life of suffering, I was referred back to a crucifix. I was taught that emotional pain is the cross humans must bear: the heavier the better. The completeness of my guilt was cemented when I was taught that all humans enter the world stained by original sin. Our mere existence was accompanied by guilt.
Guilt was an indication that I had harmed my relationship with God and I must never harm my relationship with God. Whenever I felt guilt, I was told I must repair my relationship with God or risk an eternity of suffering in Hell when I died. I was told I must never offend God. I must never do anything wrong and the only way I would know I was on the right path was to keep my conscience clean.
I left my Catholic faith in my early twenties, but the damage had been done. I had been convinced that I was fundamentally flawed. I killed the Catholic God of my youth, but countless other gods filled the void haunting me as they pointed out my failures. The wound was permanently opened and every action has the potential to scratch it.
Though I deserted the original source of my guilt – Catholicism – I still witnessed trauma daily. Trauma is another effective means to cause guilt. More than 40% of people diagnosed with PTSD, for example, report guilt associated with the traumatic events they’ve experienced. When survivors of trauma blame themselves for the trauma, they often paralyze their ability to act.
Even if the trauma is not happening directly to some of us, we are all surrounded by scenes of the destruction of the natural world. This indirect trauma has been named complex post-traumatic stress disorder by Harvard doctor, Judith Herman. Her research reveals that the guilt accompanying PTSD often accompanies complex PTSD, too.
The dominant culture has created a vicious, genius cycle. Trauma leads to guilt and guilts freezes the traumatized in inaction clearing the way for those in power to create more trauma.
***
My guilt has gotten so bad it solidifies as a recurring image in my mind. Guilt drags me into a bare, unfinished room. The floor is raw particle board. Splinters pierce any skin that touches the floor. No walls have been built to cover the studs holding the room’s roof up. Pink, fiberglass insulation – the kind that produces a scratching sensation just from seeing it – pokes out from the gaps between the studs.
There are two versions of me in the room. The first me is crumpled in the far corner of the room, shaking and weeping. Standing over this version of me is an angry me with a baseball bat. The me-with-the-bat is screaming accusations and questions. He knows my deepest shames.
“How could you ask your parents for money, again?” the question echoes off the walls.
The me-on-the-floor dares not answer, knows that no words will suffice. No rational explanation will alleviate the guilt. The me-on-the-floor rubs himself into the floors and scratches into the insulation. “If I can just show him how much I am suffering,” I tell myself, “the me-with-the bat will be satisfied.”
But, it doesn’t work. I’ve seen the image so many times, I can read the Louisville Slugger logo on the meat of the bat as it slams across my ribs.
“You don’t make any money,” the me-with-the-bat says with derision as he swings the bat over his head.
The me-on-the-floor is resigned to wait out the beating. His only move is to roll feebly from the blow as it clacks across his spine this time.
The me-with-the-bat only continues with my litany of shame.
“The world is burning, and what are you doing?” The bat strikes.
“Do you know how you hurt everyone when you tried to kill yourself?” Wood to bone.
“Depression? Why do you keep using that as an excuse?” Thud.
I hope that soon the bat will find my skull and grant me unconsciousness.
When my mind is consumed with this image, how can I practice empathy? When I am dodging the questions and fleeing the blows of that Louisville Slugger baseball bat, how do I find energy to love? Obviously, I cannot. The bat I hit myself with in my mind pacifies my resistance as surely as any police baton in the real world could. This is, of course, the point.
***
It has become clear to me that the me-with-the-bat must be destroyed. The baseball bat must be knocked from his hands forever. I must rise from the floor of that unfinished room and burn it to the ground.
The dominant culture that is murdering the planet and neutralizing those with hearts still alive enough to feel the guilt associated with participating in planetary murder must similarly be destroyed. The longer we wait, the deeper the guilt will cycle, the more pain we will feel, and the longer we will be divorced from love.
In my personal life, I am taking action to destroy the control guilt has over my life. I am seeing a therapist who is helping me practice resistance when guilt seeks to drag me into the unfinished room where it will beat me with my shame. I am taking medication that helps me cut cycles of guilt short before they consume me.
On the cultural level, I’ve been presented an opportunity to stand alongside those serious about stopping the destruction. I will attend Extraction Resistance: A 3-Day Training in Direct Action to learn how to apply more than personal solutions to global problems.
***
The modern environmental movement is said to have started close to 60 years ago. In that time, the situation has only gotten worse. A primary reason the movement is failing is too many environmentalists are relying on personal solutions to stop global problems. We are not going to save the planet by using more efficient light bulbs. We are not going to save the planet by carpooling to work. We are not going to save the planet by eating a strictly vegan diet. Hell, we are not going to save the planet by eating strictly anything.
We’ve tried to reduce, reuse, and recycle our way to a sustainable future for 6 decades and the destruction of that future has only intensified. We need more than personal lifestyle changes. We need more than personally responsible consumption habits. We need organized, militant, direct action.
One of the reasons the environmental movement is failing is the dominant culture holds many of us in cycles of guilt. Blinded by guilt, many of us have become consumed by our own pain. Our world shrinks to the realm of our individual actions. We desire the false peace of mind that we’ve convinced ourselves comes when we can claim we are not personally involved in the destruction. We act only to feel better.
When we are stuck in our own minds, we tend to think that the problem is solved when we can put our minds at ease. But, the problem is not simply mental. The dominant culture is physically destroying the planet. When we rise above our guilt and look beyond ourselves, we will recognize that those countless others who give us life do not need our guilt, they do not need us to maintain our personal purity, they do not need our peace of mind. They need us to stop the destruction of the planet.
When we stop the destruction of the planet, we will recover our empathy. We will act from love instead of the fear of pain. And, the wound of guilt will be free to heal.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 16, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Another episode with anxiety knocks me to my bedroom floor. Rational thought forsakes me. My body shakes with the strangled sobs of a man ashamed of his tears. Alicia bends over me. Her dark brown eyes – normally calm with the consistent rationality characterizing her personality – are wide with concern and weariness. We’re only several nights removed from the last episode. She must think, “Oh god, not again.”
Alicia seeks to hold me. I find a deep comfort in her touch – and a deep revulsion. It’s not her. The contradiction is born from the lies fear instills in me. Somewhere in the darkness, a voice reminds me that I am unlovable. I crave love but the voice whispers my lack of reasons to be loved. The closer Alicia gets to me, the closer she’ll get, I fear, to hearing those whispers, too. The closer she’ll get to realizing a man who cannot love himself should not be loved by anyone.
I crawl towards the space between the ground and the bed seeking to hide in the shadows offered there. A burn forms on my face where I grind it into the carpet. The pain provides a strange relief in its reality. The rash, the swollen skin, the heat pulsating on my forehead are sensations I can understand. The mental anguish exists nowhere that can be touched and yet hurts everywhere. This is a pain I cannot understand. I cannot locate the pain’s source to alleviate it. My only meagre power is the power of transformation. I force the emotional pain to materialize as physical pain on my face.
Memories, threatening to cross the boundary into hallucinations, condensate in my senses. I see my mother’s face, streaming tears, when she visited me in the psyche ward at a hospital in Milwaukee, WI after I tried to kill myself. I see her face again, this time in a psyche ward in San Diego after I tried to kill myself a second time. I see my father’s shoulders slumped as he sinks into the plastic of a hospital chair as I attempt to explain what I’ve done. I wonder if he’s given up on me.
I see the troubled glimpses my loved ones give me when they think I am not looking. It’s a look of bewilderment and exasperation. It’s a look that asks, “When will he try to kill himself again?” I see the twitches in my loved ones’ faces when they think I am going to explode into a mess of fear, worry, and despair.
How long can anyone love a human they perceive as a ticking bomb? Everyone would be better off without me, I imagine. If I could just disappear, they could get on with their lives. If the ground would swallow me up or an ocean wash me away, everyone would be relieved.
Eventually, I exhaust myself sobbing. The anxiety subsides. My mind quiets down. The tears slow and stop. I am still alive. The fear has not killed me.
The next morning, I rise from bed to brush my teeth. I cannot avoid my own gaze in the mirror. My loved ones tell me my blue eyes always betray the truth of my emotions. Some days the blues of my eyes are soft and accepting like warm waters to swim in. Today, the blues I see in the mirror are frozen and sharp. They are steely in their resolve.
I do not want to live like this. I am sick of being afraid. I am sick of anxiety. I am sick of cycles of worry stealing my life from me. Personal civil war makes a battlefield of my mind. I’ve been getting my ass kicked. But, that stops now.
***
My friends recently invited me to an event, Extraction Resistance: A 3-Day Direct Action Training in Eugene, OR over the Fourth of July weekend. The event will focus on developing skills related to all aspects of a direct action and will teach land defenders how to engage in the effective confrontation of those in power.
I almost said no. The whispers reminded me that it would be expensive to travel all the way to Eugene. They asked me if I wouldn’t prefer to stay home and relax on the Fourth of July. They recalled the depressed exhaustion I sometimes experience and they pointed out how fighting the anxiety takes much of my energy.
I could have used these whispers as excuses. My friends are deeply compassionate, and I’m sure they would not have pressured me. The whispers are lies, though, and I refuse to let them rule my life.
***
We are running out of time. Polar bears, coral reefs, and North Atlantic cod are all running out of time. Kiribati ran out of time. So did Golden toads. So did Monteverde harlequin frogs.
Climate change set the clock. It is ticking. If we do not stop climate change right now, we’re all finished. The good news is we know how climate change is caused, so we know how it can be stopped. Humans burning fossil fuels cause climate change. To stop climate change, to ensure the planet’s survival, we must act quickly and decisively to stop the burning of fossil fuels.
So far, most of the tactics used to stop the burning of fossil fuels have proven inadequate. We sold our cars, started biking to work, and bought city bus passes. We voted. When we learned the lesser of two evils was still evil, we signed countless petitions begging governmental leaders to take action. We sent checks to non-profits and then wondered what happened to our money. We boycotted Shell, Chevron, and British Petroleum. We bought into the idea that so-called green technology would allow us to continue our current lifestyles free of the guilt accompanying environmental destruction.
But, it hasn’t worked. Achieving personal net zero, reducing our individual carbon footprint, has done little to slow the worldwide consumption of fossil fuels. Focusing too much of our energy on personal consumption habits has reduced each one of us to single consumers. Playing by the government’s rules leaves each one of us only the meagre power of a single vote.
Too many of our tactics rely on someone else to stop climate change for us. Voting and petition signing relies on politicians to do the right thing. Boycotts rely on corporations to voluntarily halt fossil fuel development. Even if every individual American achieved carbon neutrality, the US military would still be the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world, burning over 100 million barrels of oil a year. This means that changing our personal habits is only a tiny piece of the solution.
We have learned that we cannot trust others to stop the madness for us. If we’re going to stop climate change, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. We can remove others’ ability to burn fossil fuels if we prevent oil, gas, coal, etc. from ever leaving the ground. Once fossil fuels have been extracted we can preserve them in unburned states by blocking their transportation to worldwide markets.
We must re-evaluate our tactics and recognize that escalation is needed. We must physically intervene to stop the destruction of the planet. We must place our bodies between the destroyers and those we love. We must cut the destroyers off from the fuels they require.
So, what’s stopping us?
Fear is stopping us. The processes destroying the planet are destroying our strength of heart. While ice sheets melt so quickly that rising sea levels sink entire nations, while intensifying storms destroy coastal communities, and while salt water poisons freshwater sources, climate change floods the world with fear.
The island nation of Kiribati, which may be inundated by rising sea levels
The murder of species is coupled with the murder of hope. Whole species are being murdered at a rate the planet has not seen since an asteroid crashed into Earth 65 million years ago. Over the last 40 years, half of all animals have been killed including 75% of all freshwater species. Scientists predict that if present trends continue 41% of all amphibian species and 26% of all mammals will disappear into the eternal night of total extinction. If drastic changes are not made quickly, humans might be one of those lost mammalian species. In fact, some scientists already doubt that humanity will survive the end of the century.
We have seen what happens to those who effectively resist. Effective resistance often brings confrontation with police and soldiers. This confrontation can be understandably terrifying especially when you know 4,800 Americans suffered arrest-related deaths from 2003-2009. We know, too, that at least 116 environmental activists were murdered in 2014. We’ve heard the clack of batons on bones, watched crowds scatter before the thud of rubber bullets, and seen faces swollen with terror and pepper spray.
There is so much to fear that too many of us have become paralyzed. Too many of us are stuck in the knowledge of the atrocities too terrified to act. We must overcome this fear. The continuation of life on Earth depends upon it.
***
As you might have guessed, I experience the debilitating kind of fear diagnosed by psychologists as general anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder. For most of my adult life, I have felt too much fear, for too long that it developed into an illness. This summer, I plan on keeping this Direct Action Journal chronicling my experiences struggling to overcome fear while striving to participate in effective actions. I hope the narration of my experiences will help others.
I was diagnosed with mental health disorders while I practiced as a public defender in Kenosha, WI. I was under constant stress. I worked under the fear that my mistakes would send my clients to prison. The State of Wisconsin mandated that we accept close to 3 new cases a day. I often worked 12-hour days and brought my case files home. When I woke up at 3 AM horrified that I missed a detail in a case scheduled for the next morning, I jumped out of bed, put on some coffee, and worked some more.
At the same time, I lived three blocks from Lake Michigan’s shore and I watched in horror as climate change drove the Lake’s water levels to ever deeper lows. Walking the beach trails, I saw countless bass and perch carcasses – their homes destroyed by the Lake’s recession. I followed global environmental news and knew the scene was similar everywhere.
Eventually, a constant sense of dread dominated my consciousness, even when rationality recognized no threats existed. I became exhausted and tried to kill myself twice. I have not tried to kill myself in 3 years, but I still experience extended cycles of anxiety.
***
Psychiatry teaches the best antidote for despair is action. Doctors now understand that the brain is flexible and malleable. Experiences literally form the brain’s structure. Experiencing intense fear or stress for a long time or at frequent-enough intervals can cause malfunctions in the parts of the brain responsible for responding to threats by releasing hormones to support defensive, physical actions like fighting for our lives or running away.
With too much fear, too much trauma, the brain can develop a hypersensitivity to anything that might be a threat causing the brain to more-or-less constantly release the fight-or-flight hormones. The greater this hypersensitivity becomes, the more likely a person is to exist perpetually in the fight-or-flight mode. This can be paralyzing. People suffering from general anxiety disorder often hesitate at the verge of action because they see potential threats in every course they could take.
Climate change and the possible destruction of the planet is a constant, serious threat. In fact, it is the most serious threat confronting us today. It follows that living with this ever-present nightmare is producing the symptoms of general anxiety disorder across the human species.
To live in this fight-or-flight mode constantly, to live perpetually in fear, becomes exhausting. A person can forget that there was ever a time she existed outside of the exhaustion. She could develop the belief that her life will forever be exhaustion. Despair sets in. Where there was once only fear, there is now an absence of hope and a belief that bravery in the face of fear is impossible. This is major depressive disorder.
Depression is the inability to envision a future worth living in. While water is being poisoned, air polluted, and species eliminated, the building blocks of life are being pulled from under us. While our future is being stolen by environmental destruction, is it any wonder more and more people are being neutralized by despair?
The good news is the brain’s malleability allows new habits to form. If, instead of reacting to fear with hesitancy and paralysis, a person chooses to act and creates a habit of action, the brain will reform itself to support that habit. Anxiety and depression, then, can be reversed. Fear’s domination can be undermined.
***
The invitation to participate in the Direct Action Training event coincides with my commitment to release the grip mental illnesses sometimes take over me. I believe there is significance in this. I have prayed for help and Life is answering.
What is Life suggesting? My personal fear threatens to destroy me just like our cultural fear threatens to destroy the planet. My struggle to overcome fear is bound up with the struggle to return the planet to true peace. Winning my struggle and bringing all my power to bear will benefit Life.
Engaging in direct action terrifies me. The old whispers stir. I hate their lies. I refuse to let the lies terrify me. The more often I resist their lies, the closer I come to silencing the whispers, forever.
Climate change terrifies me. Despair rises as I confront the global situation. I hate despair. I refuse to let it’s exhaustion overcome me. The more often I resist despair, the closer I come to ridding myself of it, forever.
I know that anxiety and depression are emotions. I know from my experiences that emotions by themselves cannot kill me. Physical action can kill me. I can swallow a whole bottle of pills, jump from a bridge, or put the gun to my temple. But, in each case, it would be the physical action – and not the emotion – that would actually kill me.
If it is true that only action can kill me, then it is true that only action can save me. It is not enough to hope the anxiety will go away. It is not enough to pray for the depression to disappear. If I want to get better, I have to act. It is armed with this knowledge that I’ve started seeing a therapist again for the first time in 2 and a half years. I’m being treated by a psychiatrist and have started a medication regimen that is helping. I will pair personal therapy with the therapy of direct action.
Climate change causes a cultural anxiety disorder and widespread despair, but these emotional states by themselves are not what is destroying the planet. Real, physical processes – like fossil fuel combustion – are destroying the planet. To survive, we must act in the real, physical world. To survive, we must make fossil fuel combustion impossible. This will be scary, but we must overcome our fear. When we overcome our fear and end this nightmare of climate change, we will overcome the greatest fear of all: planetary destruction.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 7, 2016 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
This article originally appeared on Counterpunch
By Katie Fite / Wildlands Defense
BLM is escalating herbicide use on public lands in the wake of the September 2015 Sage-grouse Plan Amendments and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Not Warranted Finding for ESA listing. A primary agency excuse for forsaking sage-grouse ESA protection is the pipe dream that new habitat will be created through radical deforestation, and that fuelbreaks will stop fires. The Finding lays it out:
Cumulatively, the FIAT assessments of the five priority areas identify more than 16,000 km (10,000 mi) of potential linear fuel treatments, approximately 2.99 million ha (7.4 million ac) of potential conifer treatments, more than 2 million ha (5 million ac) of potential invasive plant treatments, and more than 7.7 million ha (19 million ac) of post-fire rehabilitation (i.e., should a fire occur, the post-fire rehabilitation identifies which areas BLM would prioritize for management) within the Great Basin region…
The deforestation acreage is larger than Vermont. Native pinyon and juniper trees are treated as weeds, rather than a forest community vital for biodiversity and buffering climate change effects. Real weeds will have a field day in the wake of the bulldozers, bull hogs, masticators, chain saws, mowers, roller-choppers, brush beaters and “prescribed” fire unleashed for subduing woody vegetation. Lands will be doused with herbicides to try to keep cheatgrass, rapidly advancing medusahead, and others from thriving in the wasted, bared soils and hotter, drier, grazed sites. The fuelbreaks will raze sage and trees across a distance greater than that between Patagonia and the North Pole. These cleared zones will parallel many roads on public lands, further fragmenting wildlife habitats and providing fertile grounds for flammable annual grass in the chronically grazed arid landscape, and for human-caused catalytic converter, target shooting and other fire ignitions.
BLM is further reverting to a 1960s worldview of farming-style manipulation of wild lands, mainlining chemicals in support of its treatment habit. This distracts attention from the fact that the new BLM Sage-grouse Plan Amendments allow livestock grazing and many other threats to the bird to continue with little real change, despite a torrent of litigation claiming otherwise. In support of the folly, NRCS and BLM have concocted elaborate models deeming native forest and sage expanses unhealthy or “at risk.” After clearing, the land may be seeded, often with a mix of exotic forage grass and “cultivars,” not the local native plant ecotypes, but plants bred to be big and tough and a livestock forage boon. Places purged of woody plants will be embedded in a landscape “compartmentalized” (BLM’s term) by fuelbreaks.
Livestock grazing is a primary cause of weed infestation and dominance across public lands. But BLM refuses to deal with livestock as a cause of weeds. PEER very recently filed a complaint with CEQ and rancher sycophant Interior Secretary “what’s good for the bird is good for the herd” Sally Jewell over BLM’s denial of the climate effects of cattle and sheep grazing.
That’s only part of it. BLM is a weed denier of the worst sort, and willfully blind to the adverse climate effects of its land clearing. Instead of addressing cattle causes of weeds, BLM’s time honored method is to spray and walk away, leaving livestock free to graze and trample sprayed land in short order, churning soils and copiously defecating, ensuring a fresh batch of weeds takes hold.
2007 Weed EIS and PER Set the Stage
In 2007, BLM completed a Westwide 17 State Weed EIS and risk assessments for expanded herbicide use tripling sprayed acres, along with a Programmatic Environmental Report PER bedfellow laying out burning, chaining, mastication, bull hogging, mowing, brush beating, harrowing, “biological thinning” (dustbowl style grazing) and other severe weed-causing disturbance assaults on native vegetation communities. Environmentalists implored the BLM to address weed causes, employ passive restoration and minimize spraying. BLM ignored this, saying weed causes were dealt with in “allocations” of Land Use Plans. The many Plans issued since then do not address causes of weeds in divvying up “forage” and other allocations, like this and this. Risk assessments based on minimal info, predictably found the chemicals were safe for public land. The PER’s ecological impacts were never analyzed. The fore-shadowed radical treatment disturbance, now funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of sage-grouse and fuels funds, is laying waste to the West. BLM’s project rationales are a constantly moving target.
The Oust Debacle
As BLM was preparing the Weed EIS, it became embroiled in litigation with southern Idaho farmers over a crop catastrophe. BLM had ballyhooed DuPont’s Oust herbicide as a panacea for cheatgrass. Prominent range staff that had long pushed exotic forage plants as desirable on “rangelands” worked closely with DuPont to fine-tune the chemical.
“Oust is the best tool we’ve ever had, yes sir,” says Scott Anderson, a supervisor in the BLM’s Shoshone, Idaho, office. “There’s nothing like it.”… “In the mid-1990s, BLM officials began using it experimentally against cheatgrass, which the agency had been fighting a losing battle to control. They discovered that when sprayed immediately after a fire, Oust was nearly 100% effective in suppressing the growth of cheatgrass for at least a year. “That gave us an opportunity to come in and reseed the sagebrush and other desirable vegetation,” explains Mike Pellant, a BLM rangeland ecologist in Boise.
Oust kills plants by preventing roots from taking in water and nutrients from the soil.
It did this splendidly when the wind blew herbicide-infested soil onto crop fields and poisoned the earth. After the farmers finally figured out what had happened, BLM declared an Oust moratorium. Prolonged litigation ensued, with over 66 days of testimony in federal court. A jury trial and verdict found BLM bore 40% responsible, and Dupont 60%. Damages of 17 million dollars were awarded to the farmers. But the District Court ruling was appealed, and reversed by the Ninth Circuit in 2011. Courthouse News described the long ago initial filing “a day late and 17 million dollars short.”
“Idaho farmers filed their complaint a day too late to collect damages from the government after their crops were caught in the crossfire of a federal agency’s herbicidal battle against non-native grass, the 9th Circuit ruled Thursday … The farmers’ claims against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are “forever barred.”
Oust affected so much ag land that damage was detected. Most of the spraying takes place in remoter wild places where drift effects could escape detection.
Meanwhile, BLM kept on spraying, purposefully blind to weed causes. The 2007 Weed EIS blessed Plateau (Imazapic) as the new cheat panacea. Mowed and roller-chopped sage, prescribed burned forests and sage, and wildfire areas were doused with Plateau. It was applied over untold 100,000s of acres following fires. But there is still a hitch. Similar to Oust, Plateau kills “desirable” seedlings. So at the same time BLM has been spending tens of millions of dollars on seeding burned lands ostensibly for sage-grouse, it applied a potent lingering seedling killer. A scientist letter responding to BLM’s unprecedented 67 million dollar rehab boondoggle for the Soda Wildfire pointed out:
First, spraying a pre-emergent herbicide (imazapic/Plateau) may not have much effect on cheatgrass in 2015 because it germinated prior to application. Second, and much more importantly, imazapic will kill any seedling forbs that emerge from the seed bank. This will decrease abundance and diversity of forbs which are necessary for sage grouse…
Plateau also kills sage seedlings and the native seeds in the soil seedbank. Without sage, the sage-grouse, pygmy rabbits and other wildlife are doomed.
Oregon: A Special Case, and Sacrificing the Eastside
Oregon citizens and activists have often been alert, vocal and litigious in opposition to public and private lands herbicide campaigns that take place in the big dollar timber country on the west side of the Cascades. So BLM deals with ecosystems and people there a bit more lightly. In 1984, an injunction in Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides et al. v. Block prohibited herbicide use by BLM and the Forest Service in Oregon. BLM prepared a new EIS for four herbicides in 1987, and the injunction was modified, allowing 2,4-D, dicamba, glyphosate, and picloram. In 2010 a new EIS expanded herbicides. It has fewer protections for lands, waters, fish, frogs, wildlife and people on the east side of the Cascades. BLM added 10 more herbicides west of the Cascades, but did not allow aerial spraying, vs. 13 more herbicides east of the Cascades and allowed aerial spraying.
In synch with its 2007 EIS, BLM went far beyond treating “noxious” weeds in Oregon. “Management objectives” ballooned: the control of all invasive plants; the control of plants as necessary to control pests and diseases …; the control of vegetation to meet safety and maintenance objectives …; and, the treatment of vegetation to achieve specific habitat goals for Federally Listed and other Special Status species …
East of the Cascades, 2,4-D, Dicamba, Fluroidone, Imazapic, Imazapir, Picloram could be sprayed aerially (note this is fewer chemicals than inflicted on the rest of the states aerially in the 2007 EIS). There is so-called “restricted” use of Chlorsulfuron, glyphosate, hexaninone, metsulfuron metyl, tebuthiuron “only where no other means available” … “where practical, limit glyphosate and hexaninone to spot applications.” Weasel word language is pervasive, providing leeway to wiggle out of promised protections. If livestock might eat the plants, BLM is to apply “at the typical rather than the maximum rate,” but no word on what to do about native ruminants “don’t apply some chemicals where wild horses are present, or herd them out of the area.” There is minimal protection for recreation – a campground might be fleetingly signed. Protections recommended for reptiles and amphibians were not adopted, even provisions leaving bits of untreated habitat as refugia were scuttled. BLM is increasingly outsources spraying, through agreements with Counties and “cooperators.” Protections that appear to have survived could readily fall by the wayside in practice.
The Spray and Walk Away Path Forward
Now BLM has just released a Final EIS adding three more bizarrely named chemicals (rimsulfuron, fluroxypyr, aminopyralid) for use across the West in its War on cheatgrass, medusahead, prickly pear (which with along with the saguaro are a keystone desert species), pigweed and others.
BLM claims these chemicals are safer for the environment and human health than those already in use. Safe, like aminopyralid that can be spread through manure? Or safe like post-emergence burndown rimsulfuron that is touted as great for mixing with others of its ilk, and for which even BLM’s assessment admits a drift risk for non-target vegetation? Just like Oust and Plateau, rimsulfuron kills seedlings of the very plants that wildlife must have to survive. There are only a few days left to weigh in on this latest EIS (blm_wo_vegeis@blm.gov). Meanwhile, step-down EA analyses expanding aerial spraying and broadening herbicide use are proliferating at the BLM District level.
BLM insisted their were minimal downsides to the banished Oust, the fallen from favor Plateau and the rest of the toxic lot, including woody plant killers like Tebuthiuron, which caused a profusion of cheatgrass in Nevada sage purging reminiscent of the 1960s. The current chemicals and all their associated carriers, adjuvants, breakdown products and other associated toxins, including unknowns from mixes of multiple active chemical ingredients that BLM allows, had been deemed safe in the 2007 EIS. Now that BLM has had a revelation that they are less safe, it is not dropping a single chemical.
What will the 7 million acres of new treatments, 10,000 linear miles of permanent bleak fuelbreaks, and rehabbing of failed fire rehabs (often using many of the same old techniques) do to the land? And how much spraying will accompany forest clearing for porkbarrel biomass? Beyond the butchered landscape, desertification and destroyed habitat, it may often be impossible for people to avoid unwanted exposure to herbicides on visits to public lands. Access roads will be bordered by FIAT-ordained fuelbreaks for long stretches. Cleared of “brush” and seeded with exotic forage grass, they will be favored cattle loafing areas. Aerial herbicide use in wild land settings with fickle weather ensures drift onto the road and dust, onto camping sites, killing non-target vegetation, polluting water in springs and streams, and contaminating sage-grouse, antelope and pygmy rabbit foods. New irreversible native species habitat loss and expanded habitat fragmentation will take place. Public lands will bear an even greater resemblance to an intensive cattle ranch operation under this desolate paradigm. How long will agency grazing climate and weed denial go on? Or denial of the climate consequences of deforestation right here at home? But look everybody, over there, a bright shiny new million dollar treatment saving sage-grouse.
