by DGR Colorado Plateau | Dec 13, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling
My thoughts race with yesterday. My friend Max Wilbert and I left Park City, Utah in the pre-dawn bitter cold crossing the Wasatch Mountains that form the eastern edge of the Great Basin. The drive west from Salt Lake City on I-80 is disorienting. We began the journey with the radio on. We both became too frustrated by news of another politician refusing to accept refugees, so we turned the radio off to watch the land as we traveled.
Interstate 80 took us past the sites of some of the West’s most destructive extraction industries including Kennecott Copper’s Bingham Canyon Mine. The Oquirrh Mountains stand tall on the Salt Lake Valley’s west side, each peak a majestic testament to the forces of beauty who formed the Great Basin.
Each peak, save one.
With the destruction of the mountain peak and subsequent release of heavy metals, the Bingham Canyon mine is responsible for the deaths of countless migratory birds and their homes
The Bingham Canyon Mine – the continent’s largest open-pit copper mine impacting close to 80 square miles in the Salt Lake Valley – ripped one of the peaks off to disembowel copper from the land. Not far past the pit, stretches the mine’s smelting and tailings pond. The pond, which seems big enough to be called a lake, runs parallel to the Great Salt Lake, one of the Western Hemisphere’s most significant migratory bird habitats. At some places, tailings water sits merely yards from the Great Salt Lake. Mining activities and the tailings pond release selenium, copper, arsenic, lead, zinc, and cadmium into the Lake. With the destruction of the mountain peak and subsequent release of heavy metals, the Bingham Canyon mine is responsible for the deaths of countless migratory birds and their homes including wetlands, marshes, other freshwater wildlife habitats, and freshwater ponds.
After we drove by the casinos in Wendover and the brothels in Ely, we spent the day on the southern slopes of Spruce Mountain walking through a pinyon-juniper forest clear-cut. We met up with biologist and Great Basin expert, Katie Fite, who narrated the history of environmental degradation in the region.
Today, after the travel, seeing the clear-cut, and hearing about the tragic history of the Great Basin, my head is reeling. I crave time and space. I crave simply to locate myself.
The trunk I lean against is the trunk of a tree lost in another clear-cut. I do not want to see clear-cuts anymore, so I face away from the carnage. Behind me are the scattered corpses of pinyon-pine and juniper. Many of these trees were two or three hundred years old and had watched countless of the Great Basin’s arid summers and bitter winters. The pinyon-pines had offered up their delicious nuts to birds like turkeys, Clark’s nutcrackers, Steller’s jays, scrub jays, and pinyon jays as well as wood rats, bears, deer and humans for centuries.
Cave Valley.
With my back turned to the clear-cut, the wide, clear sky, the drama tracing the sharp mountainsides, and the seemingly eternal evenness of the Cave Valley floor creates a vastness that overpowers any inclination I possess towards my own importance.
I am so small here.
I want to pray, but I hesitate because I wonder what relationship I have earned with life here to engage in sincere prayer. I wonder how I must appear to the trees. With my white skin, European genealogy, dark beard, and heavy boots, I must look like so many of the settlers who have damaged this valley before. Have these forests suffered too much trauma to welcome people who look like me? Surely, their most effective survival strategy must be to shut me out.
I want to ask this valley what I can do for life here. I remember that prayer need not involve asking for anything. I sink into the twigs and frost on the ground where I sit. I try to seep into the valley letting myself spill across the landscape.
I remember a strange sensation I experienced not long ago driving through Price, Utah – coal country. Driving parallel to a long stretch of train tracks, through dynamited rock formations, I thought of the Irish – my kin – who must have been involved in building the railroads that lacerate open lands across the West. I asked aloud about what it must have been like for a young Irishman, no older than me, who was asked by his family to leave home and seek work in America because they could no longer feed him. I asked how strange it must have been for him to stand on the docks at Cork wondering if he’d ever embrace his mother again. Then, to pause in the oppressive Utah sun considering the same embrace while digging graves for his friends after a dynamite accident – all in the course of a year.
I feel a sense of ancestral guilt here in Cave Valley knowing that those same railroads opened up Nevada’s remote places to the cattle and sheep grazing destroying the land. Even so, I want to ask this valley what I can do for life here. I remember that prayer need not involve asking for anything. I sink into the twigs and frost on the ground where I sit. I try to seep into the valley letting myself spill across the landscape. I wish the wind would carry me through the sage brush and up the slopes into the living pinyon-juniper forests. The wind stirs. Wind is an invisible being only coming close to being seen when it dries my eyes out, or dances with the trees.
The contrast of the wind’s chill and the sun’s warmth is a sensuous experience of the purest kind. I grow bold. I ask the valley what it wants me to know.
I ask the valley what it wants me to know. As the question forms in my consciousness, the blue wings of a pinyon jay catch my attention.
As the question forms in my consciousness, the blue wings of a pinyon jay catch my attention. The jay is flying swiftly through the clear-cut. She seems aware of her vulnerability with no cover in the void. She lands on a stump, searches around, and pulls up a pinyon pine cone. She shakes it and pecks at it with her beak, but finds no nuts. She pulls another cone up, and again finds no nuts. I watch her fly from stump to stump, felled trunk to felled trunk, and still she finds no nuts. Finally, the voices of my companions returning from their hike carry over the ridge line. The pinyon jay darts quickly across the open and back into the living forest finding refuge in standing pinyon pines and junipers.
Pinyon Jay. Image by Robert Harrington.
I was asked by my friends to write about pinyon-juniper forests because they are being clear-cut by the Bureau of Land Management, but before I wrote about them, I knew I needed to visit the forests in an effort to understand what needs to be said. Of course, my prayer was answered. Life speaks in patterns. When a story-teller sits down to communicate her experiences in a manner that will make sense to her listeners, she may recognize those patterns and hear life speaking there.
My trip to pinyon-juniper forests in Nevada began with news of the refugee crisis. The journey continued past places where mining destroys the homes of migratory birds, fish, and so many others who depend on the precious-little freshwater near the Great Salt Lake. From there, I witnessed the ruins of pinyon-juniper forests. Not only are these forests populated with ancient, hardy trees who generously offer their pine nuts and juniper berries, but the forests are home to an estimated 450 species of vascular plants and over 150 vertebrate species. Birds live there. Wood rats live there. Deer live there. Elk live there. The Shoshones, the Goshutes, the Paiutes, all live there. All these non-humans and humans are made into refugees by the clear-cutting of pinyon-juniper forests just like the lone pinyon jay I was shown when I asked what I needed to know.
When we peer into the past with Earth’s memories, we see thousands of years of refugees. … Countless species call the world’s forests home, so when we witness deforestation, we are witnessing a refugee crisis.
The recent news on the refugee crisis encourages us to think only of boats filled with human refugees sinking on the way to Europe. These events are most tragic and the refugee crisis is by no means new nor is it limited to humans.
When we peer into the past with Earth’s memories, we see thousands of years of refugees. We see 80% of the world’s forest cover lost to deforestation. We see countless animals fleeing the thunk of axes as blades sink into the living flesh of trees. We see birds circling their young in nests built in quivering branches as we hear the hungry buzz of saws and the sickening crack and snap as trunks break. Countless species call the world’s forests home, so when we witness deforestation, we are witnessing a refugee crisis.
We see more than 75% of the topsoil that existed worldwide when Europeans first colonized North America is now gone. We watch as the plows rip through the skin of the land and the world’s forests to make way for the cultivation of annual crops. Subsistence farming is responsible for 46% of world deforestation, while commercial agriculture is responsible for 32%. Another way to say this is countless species have their homes destroyed so that one species – typically a grain – have a place to thrive.
Ripping metals from the earth creates refugees out of those who call the ground and dark subterranean regions home.
We see 60% of the world’s major rivers fragmented by dams and diversions (PDF). Some of the world’s greatest rivers such as the Nile, the Indus, and the Colorado no longer flow to the sea. For aquatic life, a dam is often an impenetrable wall. We see salmon wanting to return to their spawning beds, wanting to return home, so badly they batter their heads against concrete walls. They struggle so fiercely against the dams river water turns crimson with salmon blood. Dams isolate communities and keep non-humans from coming home as surely as the Berlin Wall of the Cold War separated Germans or the border fences in California, Arizona, and Texas alienate Americans, Mexicans, and indigenous peoples from each other.
While Earth remembers a refugee crisis thousands of years old, the Great Basin’s memories are full of relative peace characterized by humans like the Shoshone, Goshutes, and Paiutes among others living sustainably taking only as much as the land freely gave. It was the discovery of a great silver lode in Comstock, Nevada in the 1850s that brought European settlers en masse and started the refugee crisis in the Great Basin.
Ripping metals from the earth creates refugees out of those who call the ground and dark, subterranean regions home. Additionally, silver is extremely difficult to smelt requiring huge amounts of charcoal produced from burning huge amounts of local pinyon pines and junipers at high enough temperatures to separate silver from the stones it clings to so desperately.
Pinyon-juniper deforestation sends 150 vertebrate species fleeing from their cut homes while 450 plant species have no legs to run with.
I used Ronald Lanner’s statistic in my first essay on pinyon-juniper forests, “An Ancient Vision Disturbed,” but the quantity of trees destroyed for silver mining in Nevada is so staggering the statistic needs repeating. Lanner explains in his brilliant work, The Pinon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History: “A typical yield of pinyon pine was ten cords per acre, and a cord made about 30 bushels of charcoal. So, the furnaces of Eureka, working at capacity, could in a single day devour over 530 cords of pinyon, the produce of over 50 acres. An additional 20 acres a day were being cut to provide cordwood for the mills. After one year of major activity, the hills around Eureka were bare of trees for ten miles in every direction. By 1874, the wasteland extended twenty miles from town, and by 1878 the woodland was nowhere closer than fifty miles from Eureka.”
With the Great Basin experiencing over 50 acres of pinyon pine devoured by silver mining furnaces in Eureka per day, thousands of non-humans were made homeless by silver mining in Nevada each day, too.
Pinyon-juniper deforestation sends 150 vertebrate species fleeing from their cut homes while 450 plant species have no legs to run with. Ancient pinyon pine and juniper trees continue to grow their roots deeper and deeper into endangered ground. They’ve felt their kin cut and cut again. They’ve felt the jays fly away, the rabbits scamper into the brush, and the deer sprint from the axemen.
In the Great Basin, refugees beget refugees. European settlers who physically performed the most destructive job were in many cases refugees from war and economic crisis in their homelands.
European settlement brought populations of humans that the land simply could not support naturally. All those people had to eat. So, cattle grazing was introduced to the semi-arid lands of the Great Basin. It wasn’t long before cattle ate away native grasses and destructive, invasive grasses were imported to support cattle populations. The ranchers became jealous of pinyon-juniper forests and a new motivation for deforestation led to more of the forests being cleared.
In the Great Basin, refugees beget refugees. European settlers who physically performed the most destructive job were in many cases refugees from war and economic crisis in their homelands. My ancestors, the Irish, endured centuries of British domination and a wave of Irish fled starvation when the Great Famine struck Ireland a few years before the Great Basin was settled. Many Irish were involved in building railroads and in mining in Nevada. Richer European settlers – the mining bosses and ranch owners – possessed too much capital to be thought of as refugees in the traditional sense, but they demonstrated a certain spiritual disease produced by the belief that humans can safely take more from the land than the land freely gives.
Exploitation of the land initiates a cycle of violence that is pushing the world to near total collapse.
These European refugees forced the Great Basin’s indigenous peoples into becoming refugees in their own homelands. Lanner describes the violence visited up the Shoshone near Austin, Nevada. The mining and urban activities in the area quickly consumed huge tracts of pinyon-juniper forests which served as the Shoshones’ primary winter food source. With their food depleted, the Shoshones were forced to work for wages in the only two industries operating in Nevada: mining and ranching. “The more these food sources were destroyed, the more dependent the Indians became on wages; and the more they engaged in lumbering and ranching for white men, the more they destroyed their food sources. By the time the bubble burst in the 1880s and 1890s when the mining industry collapsed, the pinyon groves were gone, the valley grasslands were fenced for cattle, and much of the old culture was forsaken.”
As these memories should demonstrate, the exploitation of the land is the source of the oldest refugee crisis. Exploitation of the land initiates a cycle of violence that is pushing the world to near total collapse. Some human cultures have literally eaten themselves out of house and home and continue to require new lands to fuel their way of life. As wider and wider swaths of land are destroyed, communities are encountered that refuse to vacate their homes. But, those who exploit the land gain short term advantages over those who refuse to exploit. Those who refuse to exploit are forced from their homes or killed by weapons made possible by the exploitation of the land and their homes are devastated by technologies similarly made by possible by exploitation.
When the exploiters destroy the possibility of relationship in their minds, they destroy their possibility of belonging, spiritually, to the land. They become refugees.
Spiritual refugees flow from and are created by the land’s exploitation. Before the land, human, and non-human others can be exploited, the exploiters must convince themselves they are somehow superior to these others. The possibility of relationship between exploiter and exploited is forsaken.
The exploiters no longer view mountains as powerful beings patiently watching time pass over the land; mountains are viewed as simple piles of dirt. Animals are no longer treated like relatives capable of teaching humans great lessons; animals are treated like unthinking, unfeeling bags of meat. Rivers are no longer recognized as great dancers, twisting, turning, and writhing in their long beds; rivers are viewed as puddles of water to be drained for farming. When the exploiters destroy the possibility of relationship in their minds, they destroy their possibility of belonging, spiritually, to the land. They become refugees.
In living, and in dying, pinyon-juniper forests offer more to life than they took away. They do not exploit, they do not force others to be refugees. They stand, hardy and still, completely confident in their own belonging.
Pinyon pine and juniper trees are intimately familiar with the refugee crisis. Yet, they cannot flee for refuge themselves. They also offer a lesson for solving the refugee crisis. Pinyon-juniper forests, in simply existing, are inherently beneficent. By simply growing, they sequester carbon and aid in slowing climate change. By simply seeking to reproduce, they create food for countless others. When they die, naturally, their wood become homes for birds, rats, and other animals. In living, and in dying, pinyon-juniper forests offer more to life than they took away. They do not exploit, they do not force others to be refugees. They stand, hardy and still, completely confident in their own belonging.
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Dec 1, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Standing in a pinyon-juniper forest on a high slope above Cave Valley not far from Ely, Nevada, I am lost in an ancient vision. It is a vision born under sublime skies stretching above wide, flat valleys bounded by the dramatic mountains of the Great Basin. The vision grows with the rising flames of morning in the east. The night was cold, but clear, and the sun brings a welcome warmth. When the sun crests the mountains, red and orange clouds stream across the sky while shadows pull back from the valley floor to reveal pronghorn antelope dancing through the sage brush. A few ridge lines away, the clatter of talus accompanies the movement of bighorn sheep. The slap and crack of bighorn rams clashing their heads together echoes through the valley.
As the morning passes, the sun shines through pine needles and juniper branches to dapple the forest floor in silvers and golds. The trees offer shade where patches of snow glimmer and whisper with the smallest sounds of melting. Pinyon pine cones are scattered across the ground. As they open, their seeds – delicious, nourishing pine nuts – become visible. Beautiful, blue-feathered pinyon jays gather the nuts in their beak before flying off to cache them for the deepening winter.
Humans have long participated in this vision though the vision is far older than them. From a place deeper than my mind’s memory, in the memories of the borrowed materials forming my body, I feel a kinship to this land’s original peoples. For thousands of years, in this part of the Great Basin, Shoshones and Goshutes have stood looking out at valleys like this one as they gathered the pine nuts that provided the most important winter food source making it possible for humans to live in the Great Basin’s harsh climate.
As I let my memory flow into the past, I see hundreds of generations of Shoshones and Goshutes living well off the gifts the land freely gives. Living in this way, I know their relationship with the land could have lasted forever. Pinyon pines could have gone on offering their pine nuts to jays, rats, and humans. Junipers could have gone on twisting in wooden gymnastics and growing their bundles of blue berries.
A herd of cattle catches my attention and I remember that this is just a vision, after all. The presence of cattle, here, forces me to confront the reality of the Great Basin’s ongoing destruction. An anxiety accompanies the cattle. It is the anxiety that flows from the knowledge of ecological collapse. I envy the hundreds of generations of Shoshones and Goshutes who had no reason to question the eternity of their culture.
Following the slow steps of brown and black cows, I see a metallic glint on the valley floor where streamers are tied onto fences built by ranchers so that sage grouse will not fly into the fences and kill themselves. I have seen the bundles of feathers and blood mangled and stuck in the wire fences. The cattle march to a shallow pond. A thin, but growing ring of algae floats on the pond’s surface while piles of cow shit litter sandy soil stripped of any vegetation. From the pond comes a strangled, gurgling sound. Despite the drought, water is being pumped from already strained wells to support the cattle.
The valley floor is striped in green and yellow patches. The green patches represent healthy, native sage brush and the yellow patches represent invasive crested wheat grass. I have learned how in the 1950s and 60s, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) initiated a series of projects designed to strip away sage brush to replace it with imported Asian crested wheat grass. Not long after white settlement cattle herds wiped out most of the native grasses in the Great Basin, so now the land must be forced to support them. Destroying the sage brush has had disastrous consequences including contributing to the collapse of sage grouse populations who, as their name suggests, require healthy sage brush for habitat.
Above the valley floors, where the pinyon-juniper forests drape across the mountains’ shoulders, are brown swaths cut into the land where the forests have fallen victim to the BLM’s so-called “vegetation treatment projects.” These vegetation treatment projects are really just clear-cuts justified by the BLM as “providing woodland products to the public,” “maintaining sage brush habitat,” and “protection of property and infrastructure.”
As my experience of this ancient vision disintegrates with the reminders of the processes threatening life in the Great Basin, I remember why I came here. I came, specifically, because I had heard of the BLM’s practice of clear-cutting pinyon-juniper forests. Friends of mine asked me to write about threats to pinyon-juniper forests. I had never seen a clear-cut pinyon-juniper forest before, I knew very little about the Great Basin at all, and I’ve always thought the best way to write about the land is to seek a true relationship with it.
So, my friend, the great activist, writer, and photographer Max Wilbert flew to Salt Lake from Eugene, Oregon and we made plans to drive from my home in Park City, Utah to Nevada to see both living pinyon-juniper forests and clear-cuts. We met up with Katie Fite, a biologist and the Board Secretary for the environmental protection group, WildLands Defense. Katie brings over 30 years of on-the-ground experience to environmental advocacy possessing expertise in the Great Basin’s ecology.
***
I walk through the shades and shadows of a healthy pinyon-juniper forest. Songbirds create their music celebrating the beauty of their home. Social ravens gossip back and forth diving down to ask who I am. From time to time, I catch a grey glimpse of a rabbit bounding out of my path. The gentle hooting of an owl falls from the treetops. Though I am several hundred yards from any of my companions separated by ridge lines and hundreds of trees, I do not feel alone. A sense of deep familiarity, the feeling shared when friends gather, settles over me.
It is the 19th of November. The full cycle of seasons in the Great Basin carries the range of temperature extremes. The summers are dry and hot and the winters are frigid with plenty of snow. Even a single day in the Great Basin reflects these extremes. Last night dropped below freezing and I woke with a crisp layer of frost on my sleeping bag at dawn.
In the cold times like these, the slopes of the mountains are the warmest places to be because as the sun comes up and heats the air on the valley floor, the warm air rises. The slopes of the mountains are also where the pinyon-juniper forests are. By mid-morning, the sun is strong and hot. Even though the temperatures fell into the teens Fahrenheit last night, the temperature gains the 60s by noon. The forests, then, are the most comfortable places to be in both the cold night and the hot day. The forests are warmer at night and in the morning than the valley floors, and when the sun beats down during the day the trees offer soothing shade.
It feels, to me, that these ancient pinyon-juniper forests enjoy caring for humans.
I feel I could walk through the forest like this for miles. Then, the trees abruptly stop. The shade ceases and the sun strikes my eyes with a physical force. A cold wind, driven wild over unbroken space, slaps my face. The sudden openness is a shock. I almost trip. Behind me is a living forest, before me is a void.
I have stepped into a clear-cut.
To my left for a mile, to my right for a mile, and a quarter mile across, the land is brown. The long limbs of pinyon pines slump across the gnarled trunks of junipers. I have only seen pictures of human massacre sites. Bodies, frozen and stiff, heaped in piles. And these clear-cuts are truly tree massacre sites.
Old -growth Juniper and Piñon-Pine lie in a twisted heap in a chained area south of Spruce Mountain, Nevada. (Photo: © Max Wilbert 2015)
I can tell this particular clear-cut was “chained.” Chaining is a practice employed by the BLM and is done by stretching a U.S. Navy battle-ship anchor chain between two crawler tractors. The tractors are driven parallel to each other, dragging the chain across the forest floor, and uprooting everything in the chain’s path.
The area chosen for chaining has no logic, no reason behind it. The clear-cut follows no straight lines. The path the crawler tractors took follows no pre-conceived geometric plan. No one mapped out where trees would be cut and where they wouldn’t. The cut looks more like the devastating consequence of a petulant child’s temper tantrum than the cold-calculations of forestry professionals.
Moving through the middle of the clear-cut, now, the worst part is the silence. The silence is more than the absence of sound. This is a spiritual silence. The void seeps from the empty space where a forest once stood and flows into my consciousness. Where moments before I was surrounded in the sense of the presence of life, now there is nothing. Nothing, except the rotting corpses of a once thriving forest community.
I want to know how this is possible. I want to know what justifications cleared the way for this destruction. I want to know who is behind this. I want to know why.
***
The history of pinyon-juniper deforestation in the Great Basin as well as a list of justifications and motivations for deforestation is too long, perhaps, for one essay. The truth is, I am still learning. I have spent the last three weeks reading everything I can about pinyon-juniper forests and I wish to sketch a broad storyline. This storyline includes dominance of ranching and mining interests in Nevada, a governmental bureaucracy that consistently drinks the kool-aid prepared by ranchers and miners, the historical amnesia that characterizes settler colonialism, insidious racism, blatant genocide, and what pinyon-juniper expert Ronald Lanner calls “dendrophobia for which there seems to be no treatment.” Because one essay cannot possibly provide the whole story – a story pinyon-juniper forests desperately need to be told – I will broadly describe the major themes in this essay and I plan on writing a series on pinyon-juniper forests exploring specific themes in more detail.
The history of pinyon-juniper deforestation in the Great Basin is a glimpse into the dominant culture’s insanity. There was a truly sustainable way to live in the Great Basin, but the arrival of European settlers doomed that way of life. The Shoshones and Goshutes lived for thousands of years hunting game in the spring and summer and gathering pine-nuts in the fall. This sustainability involved understanding how to manage their populations so the land’s ability to support humans would not be drawn down. Ronald Lanner in his foundational work “The Pinyon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History,” credits pinyon pine-nuts as the essential food source that made it possible for humans to live in the Great Basin. Of course, the Great Basin’s original peoples have always known this, and know that destroying the forests is suicidal.
European settlers arrived in droves looking for precious metals and bringing their “white man’s buffalo” (domesticated cattle). Mines were established and the only reliable source of wood in most of Nevada was pinyon-juniper forests. Lanner explains, “The production of mineral riches would not have been possible in nineteenth century Nevada without the pinyon woodlands and their vast supplies of wood. The opening of a mine was only the first of many operations necessary to convert hard rock into treasure. Huge labor forces had to be brought in to work the mines and to build and operate stamp mills, smelters, amalgamators, and concentrators. Lumber in enormous quantities was needed for these operations: timbers for shoring the mine shafts, charcoal for smelting ore, cordwood for heating and cooking. The great Nevada silver boom ran on wood.”
Lanner goes on to quantify the destruction and the numbers are absolutely devastating. He explains the destruction around Eureka, Nevada in the 1870s: “A typical yield of pinyon pine was ten cords per acre, and a cord made about 30 bushels of charcoal. So the furnaces of Eureka, working at capacity, could in a single day devour over 530 cords of pinyon, the produce of over 50 acres. An additional 20 acres a day were being cut to provide cordwood for the mills. After one year of major activity, the hills around Eureka were bare for ten miles in every direction. By 1874, the wasteland extended twenty miles from town, and by 1878 the woodland was nowhere closer than fifty miles from Eureka.”
As is so often true, the destruction of the land is the destruction of the land’s original peoples. Lanner describes the situation in Nevada for the Shoshone as a “vicious circle” and writes, “The mining and urban activities there required huge amounts of wood and the burgeoning population consumed prodigious amounts of food. Local Indians helped provide both of these commodities by working for wages as lumberjacks and ranch hands. Those who cut down trees were destroying the source of their traditional winter food, pine nuts. Those who punched cattle aided and abetted the eradication of the native grasses that provided their traditional summer fare of grass seed. The more these food sources were destroyed, the more dependent the Indians became on wages; and the more they engaged in lumbering and ranching for white men, the more they destroyed their food sources. By the time the bubble burst in the 1880s and 1890s when the mining industry collapsed, the pinyon groves were gone, the valley grasslands were fenced for cattle, and much of the old culture was forsaken.”
The 1950s ushered in the next era of pinyon-juniper deforestation as ranchers became jealous of the presence of trees on potential grazing lands. Lanner notes that since the earliest white settlements in the Great Basin, accessible tracts of woodland had always been grazed. Lanner sums it up writing that overgrazing and timber trespass “combined to make the woodland one of the worst abused vegetation types in the West: even now the acre of woodland where one can find refuge from the ubiquitous cow pat is a rarity. But, as the post-World War II hunger for red meat mounted, the Forest Service started carving up National Forest woodlands with bulldozers and chains, hoping to create greener pastures.”
The ranchers’ jealousy of trees persists to today though new justifications for deforestation have been developed to thinly disguise the ranchers’ war on forests. A recent public scoping notice published on September 29, 2015 by the BLM, Carson City District, Sierra Front Field Office is illustrative.
It is not within the scope of this essay to address the problems with each of the BLM’s justifications. Many of the justifications require their own, full essay to thoroughly undermine them and I plan on writing those essays. Several of the reasons may be addressed, here, though. The BLM’s notice makes no attempt to hide ranching interests as a primary purpose for the treatments. This is clear as the BLM explains that one purpose of the vegetation treatment project is “to maintain and enhance rangeland health.” The problem with this is the Great Basin is not rangeland. The valley floors are naturally covered in sage brush and the highlands are pinyon-juniper forests. Converting the region into rangeland is only possible through great violence.
The BLM gives another justification for the deforestation with, “A large focus of this project would be to improve and protect greater sage-grouse habitat, and treatments would be designed to address threats to greater sage-grouse from invasive annual grasses, wildfires, and conifer expansion.” Of course, it was the BLM’s own disastrous policy of sage brush clearing that led to the sage grouse collapse in the first place. The BLM goes on to blame invasive annual grasses (most of which were brought to the Great Basin by settler activities), wildfires (exacerbated by human-created climate change, drought, and the planting of imported grasses that burn more quickly than native grasses), and finally to conifer expansion. By conifer expansion, the BLM is referring to pinyon-juniper forests who are simply regrowing in regions where they had been cut down by the mining operations of the 1870s.
***
I hope this essay serves as an introduction to the beauty of the Great Basin’s pinyon-juniper forests, the gifts they have long provided, and the dangers confronting them. It is time the BLM’s pinyon-juniper deforestation projects be stopped. The good news is a coalition of allied activists with Deep Green Resistance and WildLands Defense is in the early stages of planning a campaign to save these beautiful, essential, ancient forests. The first step is recognizing their inherent value as living beings. Stay-tuned for more updates including ways to get involved. Join us and stand on the side of pinyon-juniper forests.
Editor’s Note: The second installment of this multi-part series on pinyon-juniper deforestation can be found here.
Will Falk moved to the West Coast from Milwaukee, WI where he was a public defender. His first passion is poetry and his work is an effort to record the way the land is speaking. He feels the largest and most pressing issue confronting us today is the destruction of natural communities. He is currently living in Utah.
More information on this campaign can be found at Protect Piñon-Juniper Forests.
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Aug 21, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest, Strategy & Analysis, White Supremacy
Editor’s Note: For further analysis of effective resistance movements, please visit the Deep Green Resistance Book, and read about our strategy: Decisive Ecological Warfare.
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
When I am in Hawai’i, I ask everyone I meet if the United States will ever voluntarily de-occupy the Islands. No one ever says yes. Usually, before I can say anything else, people hurriedly start talking about the lack of a valid treaty or that the American occupation is illegal by their own laws or that the United States will pay for its human rights violations.
I am a haole in Hawai’i, a white settler in the United States. I acknowledge that every square inch of the United States of America exists on stolen native land. Leadership in land based struggles in the United States rests most properly in the hands of indigenous peoples. I will not undermine indigenous leadership, so I direct my thoughts to other settlers.
If no one believes that the United Sates will ever voluntarily de-occupy Hawai’i, why are so many of the movement’s settler supporters so focused on achieving this impossible voluntary withdrawal? Why, for example, do so many settlers spend so much energy supporting a parade in Oahu – a parade that is billed as a march for Hawaiian sovereignty while quietly being a voting drive to encourage participation in the occupying American government? Why do so many settlers hold up expensive court cases relying on American judges who are paid by the American government to make decisions leading to this mythical voluntary de-occupation as the only viable means for de-occupation?
The first answer is privilege. Settlers benefit from the current arrangement of power in Hawai’i. These Islands represent the tourist fantasy to many settlers despite the fact that Hawai’i’s life support systems are inches away from total collapse. The inability of settler support to recognize that Hawaiian de-occupation is our responsibility leads me to conclude that most settlers are not as concerned with Hawaiian liberation as they are concerned with maintaining a feel-good environment that balances settler crises of conscience while never threatening settler access to Hawai’i. Hawai’i does not have time to coax these settlers from their positions of privilege. So, I direct my thoughts to settlers of strong heart who simply suffer from a lack of analysis.
Apart from privilege, the second reason settlers have proven unable to mount a serious solidarity effort with the Hawaiian de-occupation movement is they see no alternative to a liberal mindset. “Wait a minute,” I hear a lot of confused readers saying, “Aren’t liberals good?” No, actually. It’s too late to rely exclusively on liberalism. Hawai’i has been cursed for 122 years of occupation with too much liberalism. Liberalism is the haoles’ game. Liberalism serves the United States of America. Liberalism renders resistance ineffective and must be forsaken if de-occupation is to be achieved.
The alternative is radicalism. An examination of the differences between the liberal and radical world views will demonstrate how radicalism arms settlers seeking to demonstrate true solidarity with a better analysis for forming an effective de-occupation strategy. This is not to say that a mixture of tactics cannot be effective. The Hawaiian de-occupation movement should not remove any tool from the table, but the longer Hawai’i remains occupied the clearer it becomes that decisive action is needed.
***
Before I begin, I would like to absolve the term “radical” of the bad reputation it has received in popular circles. Too many people confuse the word “radical” with the word “extreme.” But, as the great African-American activist Angela Davis has explained and as every major dictionary will tell you, the word radical simply means “getting to the root” and is most properly applied to political analyses that seek the origins of oppression.
The brilliant writer and activist Lierre Keith has pointed out two fundamental differences between liberals and radicals. The first difference revolves around individualism. Liberals believe that the basic social unit is the individual, while radicals believe the basic social unit is group or class. This reliance on individualism allows liberals to claim that every individual is entitled to their personal identity free from the realities accompanying social class. In fact, for many liberals, it is an insult to be identified with a certain group regardless of political reality.
For radicals, on the other hand, each individual is socially constructed by political reality. Radicals embrace their social group recognizing it as a source of strength. The first step to affecting change is making common cause with those who share your condition.
The other big difference between liberals and radicals is a disagreement on the nature of social reality. Liberals subscribe to a certain idealism while radicals root their analysis in materialism. For liberals, thoughts, mental states, and attitudes are the only sources and, therefore, solutions for oppression. Liberals locate reality in the human mind and tend to think that education is always the key to social change. For liberals, evil is a misunderstanding and if oppressors can just be shown the error of their ways, they will change.
How does this play out in Hawai’i? Take the role of white supremacism in the domination of Hawai’i, for example. Liberals, long ago, succumbed to the lie that racism and white supremacism are merely emotional states held in the hearts of individuals. They confine the definition of racism to hatred based on the color of one’s skin and confine the definition of white supremacism to hatred for everyone who is not white.
It is astronomers relying on a liberal definition of racism who can claim they are not racist because they hold no hatred in their hearts for the Hawaiian people while still insisting on destroying Mauna Kea’s summit to build telescopes. It is mining executives relying on a liberal definition of white supremacism who can claim no hatred in their hearts for native peoples while insisting that the guts be ripped from native land and poisons pumped into native waters to provide iron ore for the telescopes that destroy native peoples’ sacred sites.
Radicals see tangible systems of power maintained through force and working in the real, physical world as the sources and solutions of oppression. Education is an important first step to building radical consciousness, but they see organized political resistance and force as the means by which real change is achieved. Evil is not a misunderstanding. It is intentional and gives material benefits to oppressors. Oppression is always linked to resource extraction.
An emotional state – like hatred – might contribute to white supremacism, but radicals are less concerned with changing the hearts and minds of those murdering people of color and murdering the world, and more concerned with stopping the destruction. Hawaiian radicals, like Haunani-Kay Trask, for example, see racism as, “A historically created system of power in which one racial/ethnic group dominates another racial/ethnic group for the benefit of the dominating group.” White supremacism is the latest version of this system of power with white people dominating everyone else.
Racism and white supremacism establish, “Economic and cultural domination as well as political power…in the systemic dominance of the exploiting group.” Finally, radicals recognize, as Trask pointed out, that the dominating group holds a monopoly on the means on violence. It is this violence that must be confronted and dismantled if racism and white supremacism are ever truly going to be undermined.
To take this even further, consider what would happen if the liberal analysis was carried out to it’s logical conclusion. Imagine that liberals were actually successful at convincing those in power to treat every one in the world with love and kindness. Without a corresponding change in material reality, there would still be a huge problem. The dominant culture is built on the exploitation of natural resources. Resources are becoming scarcer and scarcer. Humans need to eat, for example, but topsoil is so depleted that major crops are all supported by oil. What will happen, despite the liberal conversion to loving kindness, when the dominant culture needs oil and indigenous peoples and others refuse to give up their lands to give them that oil?
***
A primary strength of the radical analysis is its ability to articulate the role power plays in oppression. Gene Sharp, the world’s foremost authority on civil disobedience and direct action tactics, has identified two manifestations of power – social and political. Social power, for Sharp, is “the totality of all influences and pressures which can be used and applied to groups of people, either to attempt to control the behavior of others directly or indirectly.” Political power is “the total authority, influence, pressure, and coercion which may be applied to achieve or prevent the implementation of the wishes of the power-holder.”
The powerful do everything they can to convince the oppressed that the current arrangement of power is inevitable. To believe power is inevitable is a mistake. Sharp says, “Power, in reality, is fragile, always dependent for its strength and existence upon a replenishment of its sources by the cooperation of a multitude of institutions and people – cooperation which may or may not continue.” The key to Hawaiian de-occupation, then, is dismantling American power. Power is dismantled most effectively by cutting it off at its sources.
Sharp lists six sources of power: authority, human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions. Jacques Maritain defines authority as “the right to command and direct, to be heard or obeyed by others” and Sharp notes that it is enough that those in power be perceived and accepted as superior. Human resources are simply defined as the number of people who obey those in power and will do their bidding. Those in power derive power from the skills, knowledge, and abilities of those who will do their bidding. Closely tied to skills and knowledge, intangible psychological and ideological factors like cultural history and spirituality can be leveraged by those in power to dominate others. Those in power need material resources like property, money, and sources of energy to maintain their power. Finally, those in power must have means to enforce obedience – punishment, in other words, for those who dissent.
The goal of any resistance movement aspiring to true success must engage in shrewd target selection to undermine these sources of power. Taking Sharp a step further, it is possible to prioritize which sources of power are more essential to the functioning of power than others. The most important sources of power are the material resources power depends upon and the brutality of the sanctions they can enact through their commitment to the exploitation of resources. All the other sources of power ultimately depend on the ability of those in power to enforce their power physically. This is a radical conclusion and can be easily demonstrated.
Consider the Overthrow. Did Queen Liliuokalani abdicate the throne because she believed in American authority or the inherent right of Americans to command Hawaiians? Did the Americans command more people to do their bidding in Hawai’i than the Queen? Was Queen Liliuokalani victim to some psychological failing that the Americans exploited?
The answer is obviously no. At the time, Kingdom of Hawai’i supporters outnumbered the Americans over 13 to 1 on the Islands and constituted 4/5 of the legally qualified voters in Hawai’i. Queen Liliuokalani abdicated the throne in order to avoid bloodshed and, according to her June 17, 1897 letter to President William McKinley, because she, “recognized the futility of a conflict with so formidable a power.”
Queen Liliuokalani abdicated the throne because there were 200 United States marines, holding rifles, standing outside her door. Again, it wasn’t the moral superiority of Americans that convinced the Queen. It was, quite clearly, the threat of violence. It is important to understand the physical processes that allowed the Americans to exert that kind of power in Hawai’i. Another way to understand this is to ask, How did a nation existing thousands of miles away on another continent succeed in pointing 200 rifles at Queen Liliuokalani? The answer is, superior material resources.
In order to occupy Hawai’i, Europeans had to get there first. The only way Europeans ever got to Hawai’i and then transported themselves in numbers great enough to gain power was through the use of large naval ships. In order to build these ships, those in power needed wood and lots of it. The U.S.S. Boston that provided the marines and firepower for the Overthrow was in fact one of the American navy’s first steel warships. In order to produce the steel needed to armor the U.S.S. Boston, iron ore must be harvested. To turn iron ore into steel, vast quantities of coal are needed. To mine sufficient quantities of coal, vast tracts of land housing this coal have to be ripped up. To gain access to these vast tracts of land to be ripped up, the indigenous peoples of that land have to be removed or destroyed.
It is true that the other sources of power support the exploitation of the natural world as we can see in the manufacturing of American naval ships. Coal mining, for example, requires human resources. Most humans will not voluntarily mine coal, so those in power have to employ a mixture of authority, psychological coercion, and pure violence to access the coal they need to exert more power. But, the whole system of violence requires material resources. No one is killed by authority alone. Mountain tops are not ripped off by simple knowledge. Belief systems, by themselves, do not colonize indigenous lands. Material action in the physical world produces power. Bullets, swords, or atomic bombs at various stages of human history kill people. Oil-powered excavators and dynamite blow the tops off mountains. Soldiers delivering blankets infected with small pox clear indigenous peoples off their land.
The good news is that the more destructive those in power become, the more complex their system of murder gets, the more opportunities they expose for dismantling their power. Each step in the manufacturing of the U.S.S Boston, for example, presents an opportunity for resisters to stop the replenishment of power at one of its sources. The method is simple. Restrict those in power access to the resources they require and their power weakens. Cut them completely off, and empire comes crashing down.
The physical processes that produce warships and put rifles and cannons in the hands of American troops in Hawai’i follow a similar pattern. These processes are ultimately what make civilization unsustainable. These processes demonstrate precisely how the civilized have come to dominate the world at the expense of the uncivilized and life on this planet. Again, this present state of the world is not inevitable. It is the result of power built through the exploitation of life on the planet. The problem for life right now is the American empire shows no signs of slowing. The bigger their weapons become the faster life is pushed to the brink of total extinction.
Radicalism, then – because it springs from material reality – gives the Hawaiian de-occupation movement an ecological imperative. European contact has resulted in half of Hawai’i’s endemic species being lost to extinction. How many more species must be lost before actions that truly reflect the seriousness of the situation are taken? The American empire is built on the use of fossil fuels and the American military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world. Burning fossil fuels must be stopped to avoid climate catastrophe. The American military presence is, perhaps, the most serious physical obstacle confronting the de-occupation movement. Blocking the military’s access to imported fossil fuels, then, could deal a decisive blow both to American power on the Islands and American environmental destruction.
***
This is the reality of the challenge confronting the Hawaiian de-occupation movement:The United States will never voluntarily leave Hawai’i and the survival of life on the Islands demands de-occupation. Too many settler liberals would have everyone believe that if Hawaiians just ask nicely enough, or cleverly enough, or with irrefutable American logic, the Americans will leave. Too many settler liberals hold up the American political and international legal systems as the only means for de-occupation. Too many settler liberals can be relied upon for sign-holding events, parades, and social media campaigns to achieve de-occupation, but when it comes down to being accomplices to Hawaiian liberation, we are failing.
Appealing to the American political system hasn’t worked in 122 years. Appealing to the international legal system misunderstands the material reality of power. These liberal tactics can be employed to erode American authority, to persuade humans not to support American power, but there are more decisive routes to undermining American power. It’s not that liberal tactics do not have their place. But, by themselves, they do not undermine power in any serious way.
Time is short in Hawai’i. Settlers wishing to demonstrate true solidarity need to embrace a radical analysis. It is time to get to work seriously dismantling the sources of American power.
Will Falk has been working and living with protesters on Mauna Kea who are attempting to block construction of an 18-story astronomical observatory.
Find an index of Will Falk’s “Protecting Mauna Kea” essays, plus other resources, at:
Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i: Protect Mauna Kea from the Thirty Meter Telescope
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Jul 30, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest, Mining & Drilling
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Many view the debate surrounding the Thirty Meter Telescope’s proposed construction on Mauna Kea and Kanaka Maolis’ opposition to it as fundamentally a question of science versus culture. On the benign end, the word “science” has come to connote something close to cool and objective rationality – nothing more nor less than a collection of knowledge to be used in man’s (isn’t it always “man’s”?) noble aim to transcend nature. More malevolently, however, pitting science against indigenous culture is nothing more than insidious racism. This racism operates on the often unchallenged claim that science is an inherently western way of knowing and therefore superior to indigenous ways of knowing.
In fact, some Mauna Kea protectors wish to avoid this rhetorical ploy so strongly they can be heard saying, “We’re not against science, we’re just against building this telescope on Mauna Kea.” Their words imply that the telescope could be built somewhere else and western science allowed to run its course everywhere but here.
Personally, I am against the construction of telescopes anywhere and I have lots of problems with western science. I am careful to emphasize the adjective “western” in western science because Kanaka Maolis often remind me that they’ve always known many of the things western science claims to have discovered. Remember, as Mauna Kea protector Hualalai Keohula has reminded me, that Kanaka Maoli navigated the world’s largest and greatest ocean in canoes built with wood and stone, aided with nothing more powerful than the naked human eye, centuries before the West realized the world was round. This, it should be said, is the right way, the least destructive way, the non-violent way to practice astronomy.
I speak only for myself, here, but I will go so far to say I wish western science never existed. I know in today’s dominant culture my wish is pure blasphemy. As my friend Derrick Jensen noted in his brilliant work Dreams, science is the new monotheism. The old monotheisms – Christianity, Judaism, Islam – succeeded in removing meaning from the natural world and placed meaning in the hands of a jealous, abstract God dwelling in far-off heavens. Science, then, erased God and obliterated any possibility of meaning with Him. When I make these arguments, I’ve found it to be like Jensen has observed, when you blaspheme God, you are called a disbeliever. When you blaspheme science, you are called an idiot.
Still, on the whole, science has been a disaster for life on Earth. The first problem with science is the first problem with so many products of the murderous culture we live in. The first problem with science is science’s epistemology is rooted in this culture’s epistemology. And, this culture’s epistemology is based on domination. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know.
One way to understand science is to trace what the leading scientific epistemologists have to say. Remember Sir Francis Bacon from your 6th grade science class? He invented what we call today “The Scientific Method.” He said his “only earthly wish is to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe” by “putting her (nature) on the rack and extracting her secrets.” As if that wasn’t scary enough, Bacon went on to say, “I am come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave.”
Or what about the hugely popular science apologist, Richard Dawkins? He writes in his book A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love that “Science boosts its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops on command, and to predict what will happen and when.”
“To make matter and energy jump through hoops on command” is a soft way to spell domination. Substitute yourself for “matter and energy” (that is what you are, of course). How would you feel if a scientist pointed a gun at you, or shot electrical currents through your muscles, or stuffed you into a cage, starved you, pumped your body full of chemicals and forced you to jump through hoops at his command?
The culture we live in is based on domination. How else do we account for the fact that one in five women will be raped in her lifetime? One in four girls and one in six boys sexually abused before they turn 18? How else do we account for the fact that 2.6 people are killed by American police every day?
Why, then, would we expect western science – a product of this culture – to be any different?
***
There’s a better way to judge science. It is a question that should form all of our moralities. The question is simple.”Is the real world better off because of science?” I think the answer to that question is a resounding no.
I come to that conclusion because my morality takes the needs of the real, physical world as primary. Water, soil, air, climate, my body, your body, and the food that sustains us are all formed by complex relationships of living beings. These living beings form the communities that make life possible. The needs of these communities must inform every action humans take. Anything else is suicidal.
I understand that science can be useful. Western science gives us modern medicine, for example, but modern medicine is more often than not a leaky band-aid applied to a wound created by science in the first place. Many tell me that western science is going to give us the cure to cancer while they forget that most cancers are produced by environmental toxins that exist because of science. I understand that western science can help us predict the devastating consequences of climate change, but science opened the road to the technologies responsible for climate change in the first place. Western science is responsible for napalm, agent orange, and atomic weapons. Of course, the surest way to prevent the destruction those weapons caused would have been to never open the doors of knowledge that lead to them.
The TMT project serves as a perfect reflection of the insanity of western science. Just like western science gains knowledge through domination, the TMT project is only possible through the domination of Kanaka Maoli. If the original people of Hawai’i were not exterminated by genocidal processes, were not made second-class citizens on their own islands, their culture not beaten to within inches of its life by American denationalization programs, Mauna Kea would be truly protected with the highest reverence.
But, western scientists have arrived, confident in the role Francis Bacon has laid out for them, to stretch Hawai’i on the rack and extract her secrets from her. The cops have come twice, with guns on their hips, to make Mauna Kea protectors vacate the Mauna Kea Access Road like Dawkins’ scientists who make matter and energy jump through hoops on command and arresting anyone who refuses the command.
Again, let’s ask the most important question of all. Is the real world better off with or without the TMT?
One way to answer this is to examine the physical processes needed to construct the TMT. Included in these physical processes are the actual materials used in construction. I am no expert on telescope construction and I’ve found it difficult so far to find detailed lists of the materials that will form the TMT (probably because acquiring these materials are a disaster for the environment.) From what I can tell, though, the TMT will be built with materials like steel, aluminum, and other rare earth metals.
You cannot have the TMT without steel, aluminum, and other rare earth metals. You cannot have steel, aluminum, and other rare earth metals without mountain top removal, open pit mining, and the combustion of vast quantities of fossil fuels. You cannot have mountain top removal, open pit mining, and the combustion of vast quantities of fossil fuels without climate change, mass extinctions, the forced removal of indigenous peoples, and the violent labor conditions present in extraction industries. So, before the materials needed to build the TMT ever even arrive in Hawai’i, they will be covered in the blood of humans and non-humans alike.
Telescopes are a disaster for the real world just like western science has been. Telescopes cannot be anything other than disasters for the real world because they are products of a murderous system of knowledge. It might be really super cool to discover the 832nd star in the 412th known galaxy with a new, massive telescope. This knowledge, however, comes through the domination of life on earth.
Mauna Kea – and I would argue all mountains – might be best understood as a complex community of living creatures living in mutual relationship. The needs of this community trump the desires of science. Mauna Kea itself acts as a giant water filter and houses the largest freshwater aquifer on Hawai’i Island. Everyone needs clean drinking water, but there have already been seven documented mercury spills associated with the telescopes on Mauna Kea. Currently threatened, endemic species call Mauna Kea home. The needs of mamane trees and ahinahina to live trumps the curiosity of astronomers to peep at other worlds.
***
Before I finish, let me anticipate the objections I will receive. Yes, I am quite aware of the comforts brought to some of us by western science. But, when we talk about how great science is for “us,” who are we talking about? Are we talking about the few indigenous societies clinging to their traditional ways of life, clinging to the only human ways of life that were ever truly sustainable? Are we talking about polar bears? Sumatran tigers? Bluefin tuna? We can’t be talking about West African black rhino because they just fell into the deepest dark of total extinction.
I know that science produced the internet, the laptop I’m typing on, and brought the delicious cold brew coffee I’m drinking. People often criticize me asking, “How can you condemn these wonderful tools you are using? You get on planes and travel to Hawai’i, you get in cars to visit places across Turtle Island, aren’t you a” – and they gasp – “a hypocrite?”
My answer is simple. Yes, I might be a hypocrite, but I believe my friend Lierre Keith who said, “Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible – its to dismantle those systems.” Western science is a system of power and must be dismantled if we have any chance of surviving the catastrophe facing us. Sitting Bull used American made rifles to defend his people from American cavalrymen. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian poet who was murdered for resisting Shell Oil in his homeland, wrote in English – the language of his oppressors.
I wish with all my heart that I could live as our ancestors lived – a life free from the deepest anxiety that in a few years everything might be gone. I was raised in the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains of Utah – a place I just visited – and I wish with all my heart that I could spend my life walking in Indian paintbrush, columbine, daisies, and lupine consumed in the total wonder and beauty of life. I wish with all my heart that I could sit still in simple expression of the love I feel. But, while everyone I love is under attack, it is simply unforgivable not to do everything within my power to protect them. It is simply unforgivable not to use every tool at my disposal to defend them.
History reveals western science as an accomplice to the murder of the real world. Western science is attempting the murder of Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea and the real world demand that we stop it.
Will Falk has been working and living with protesters on Mauna Kea who are attempting to block construction of an 18-story astronomical observatory with an Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).
Find an index of Will Falk’s “Protecting Mauna Kea” essays, plus other resources, at:
Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i: Protect Mauna Kea from the Thirty Meter Telescope
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Jul 9, 2015 | Colonialism & Conquest
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Sitting outside the 10 by 20 foot makeshift tent that has served as my home for the last 34 days on Mauna Kea, I watch the tent poles shudder to the concussion of US Army howitzer cannons firing live shells at their training grounds below. When the wind blows just right, from the south, the rattle of automatic rifle fire reaches the occupation. There’s no denying it: A war rages in Hawai’i.
It’s a war on native peoples, a war on women, a war on the land, a war on life itself. The war did not start in Hawai’i. The war began thousands of years ago with the dawn of civilization when some humans chose to live in population densities high enough that they overshot the carrying capacity of their homelands and turned to dominating other peoples in other lands. Imperialism was born, and one-by-one land-based, truly sustainable human societies were either eradicated or forced into assimilation.
The war swept west across Turtle Island (so-called North America) – where it is still being fought -leaving whole peoples destroyed and now largely forgotten. The war is carving peaks from mountains, drying rivers so they no longer flow to their ocean homes, and boiling the planet’s temperature to levels dangerously close to being unbearable for all but a few lifeforms. The war decimates the numbers of our animal kin, too. Buffalo walk the ledge above total extinction. So do salmon. So do timber wolves. So do grizzly bear.
The war in Hawai’i began in the late 1770s when Captain Cook first appeared. By 1897, a million Hawaiians were killed in battle, by introduced diseases, and through Christian missionary efforts. Half of Hawai’i’s endemic species have been exterminated since European contact. The minds of Hawaiian children were attacked when the illegal Republic of Hawai’i outlawed the Hawaiian language in Hawaiian schools in 1896. The bodies of these Hawaiian children were attacked when they were beaten for speaking their native tongue.
A genocidal program of desecration was initiated as well. Hale O Pa’pa and the Kanaka burials there were paved over by highways while Kahoolawe was bombed to hell by the American military – and that’s just to name a very few of the sites desecrated. Now, the TMT project wants to dynamite an eight acre patch of Mauna Kea’s hallowed summit to clear the way for their telescope.
***
Rumors are swirling that the TMT (Thirty Meter Telescope) project is poised to break its self-imposed moratorium on construction and send its equipment up the mountain with an armed escort. We have heard that Gov. David Ige is willing to send the national guard against the Mauna Kea protectors.
In the midst of these rumors, it is not uncommon to hear people say they hope the situation on Mauna Kea will not turn violent. The problem with expressing this hope is the situation on Mauna Kea is violent, has been violent for a long time, and will remain violent so long as those in power remain in control of the land.
Before you object to this, consider the bombs and rifle fire I am listening to as I write this.
Consider that the first time construction equipment tried to force a way over the objections of the Hawaiian people, it came with men carrying batons and pistols. These men carrying batons and pistols put 31 peaceful protectors in handcuffs, carried them to the Hilo jail, extracted 250 dollars from each one of them, and now force them to appear at a series of of court dates under threat of jail time.
Consider that David Ige, as I wrote earlier, has stated that he is willing to call in the national guard to clear the way for the TMT. Speaking of war, the national guard is an organization of soldiers. They will come with rifles instead of the police’s pistols.
This is violence.
I didn’t even mention the violence already done to Mauna Kea to build and maintain the 13 telescopes that already exist on the summit. These 13 telescopes required their own dynamite and 38 feet have been cut from the height of Mauna Kea’s summit already. There have been 7 reported mercury spills on the mountain that contains Hawai’i Island’s largest freshwater aquifer.
Mauna Kea
Plants, animals, and insects that live on Mauna Kea are murdered by this mercury and its more than likely that humans – especially children and the elderly – are harmed by this mercury, too.
Kanaka Maoli are genealogically related to Mauna Kea – it is literally a family member – so to do this kind of violence to the Mauna is to attack an older sibling.
Again, this is violence.
I anticipate that some may accuse me of encouraging an atmosphere of violence by using words like war to describe the violent reality facing Mauna Kea, facing Kanaka Maoli, and facing the long, necessary road to Hawaiian independence. Describing reality, however, is not the same thing as encouraging violence. I want this violence to stop and the first step to a cure is the proper diagnosis.
As a haole, I understand that when push comes to shove the State will crack down much harder on people of color than they will white people, and I do not want to provoke this crack down. I do think, though, that we need to be prepared to react when the State does not treat the protectors with the kapu aloha that the protectors will show those who come to destroy Mauna Kea.
Those who deny we are at war are wrong. Maybe, they cannot recognize the war because war has become so utterly pervasive. The wars of the past led to the rape of women. The war we’re fighting now causes one in six women to be raped in her lifetime worldwide. The wars of the past were fought to beat armies, to eradicate cultures, and to topple nations. The war we’re fighting now causes the extinction of whole species – 200 species a day, in fact, day after day after day.
Maybe, they cannot recognize the war because they are privileged enough not to confront the reality of this war. I think Palestinians understand this war. I think Catholics in Northern Ireland understand this war. I think Afghanis and Iraqis understand this war. I think hammerhead sharks, California condors, mamane trees, and ahinahina understand this war. They have to, because their survival depends on it.
Maybe, those who deny the war is happening think they can avoid the war’s dangers by ignoring it. It might be possible to avoid bullets, gas, and bombs by agreeing and cooperating with the cops as they place you in handcuffs, but you are just as susceptible to the environmental toxins the dominant culture unleashes on us every day. Denial saves no one from cancer.
Yes, Hawai’i with the rest of the world, is at war. This war – more than any other – is a war that we absolutely must win. If we lose, we lose life on this planet. To win a war, you must destroy your enemy’s ability to make war. The battle on Mauna Kea against the TMT is a mini-war in the larger war on life. The surest way to win this war is to undermine the TMT’s ability to build their telescope.
There are many strategies currently being employed to win this war – to undermine the TMT’s ability to build their telescope – but the weakness of most of these strategies is that they rely on our enemies to do the right thing. The countless sign-waving events conducted in support of Mauna Kea are designed to persuade the public of the justness of our movement. The incessant social media campaign we are waging is geared towards changing the hearts and minds of the world. The court cases challenging the TMT project, for example, rely on a judge to agree with the arguments made by our lawyers.
And why do we appeal to the courts to protect Mauna Kea? The answer is simple. If the judge rules in our favor, the decision will be backed with the full force of the State. The judge’s ruling and it’s enforcement will be backed with an organized group of men carrying guns – the police, or another organized group of men carrying bigger guns – the national guard. If we were to win in court and the TMT tried to build it’s telescope, it would be them and not us for once, who would be staring down the barrels of rifles. Of course, we do not trust the courts to do the right thing.
That’s why we stand on the Mauna Kea Access Road at this occupation.
Another way to say all this is: the State can, will, and already has used violence against us and our relations in the natural world. We must understand this in order to be effective. We must understand that writing really clever essays might not stop them. We must understand that hugging cops when they come to arrest us might not stop them. We must understand that we may not have an opportunity to place leis around the necks of national guardsmen when they point their guns at us.
I hear many people within the movement state confidently, “We will stop the TMT project.” But, if we do not understand the violence the State is capable of I feel like what we are really saying is “We will stop the TMT project as long as the police or the national guard agree to what we think are the rules.” I am not writing these things to cause despair. Rather, I am writing these things to encourage the deepest levels of commitment to protecting Mauna Kea.
Of course, those who think I am calling for violence demonstrate their own belief that only violence will stop the destruction of Mauna Kea, the destruction of Hawai’i, and the destruction of what is left of the world. I do not claim to know what will stop the destruction of Mauna Kea, but I do know that we must understand the way the State frames our tactics for us before we even begin. Once we understand this, we must ask tough questions.
I’ll walk my talk and begin: If the police or national guard overwhelms the protectors on the Mauna Kea Access Road, what do we do next?
From San Diego Free Press: http://sandiegofreepress.org/2015/06/protecting-mauna-kea-this-is-a-war/
Find an index of Will Falk’s “Protecting Mauna Kea” essays, plus other resources, at:
Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i: Protect Mauna Kea from the Thirty Meter Telescope
