Bitcoin = Death Processors

Bitcoin = Death Processors

     by Darin Stevenson / Medium

bitcoin Is Makeworky Unmoney

bitcoin is not exactly money. It’s a potentially valuable abstraction of computational ‘work’ that ‘earns’ bitcoin value. But what is bitcoin value and what is the nature of the work? The answers are bizarre because they are nonsensical.

bitcoin value is an abstraction of participation in the history of the network and its transactions. ‘Work’ is a (largely) nonuseful recomputation of, first, the transaction history of the network — which has to be reprocessed each time there is a bitcoin transaction. Then, continual banging away at some useless math with added ‘weight factor’ that makes it arbitrarily difficult for computers to accomplish the generation of a new record-set over time.

The bitcoin algorithms adjust this factor in order to require enough ersatz work so that the heartbeat of the system pulses (produces a block) approximately every ten minutes… and they scale the computational complexity accordingly via input from bitcoin’s own daily developmental activity.

By crossing an invented computational abyss, millions of computers and other machines, many of which have been secretly compromised by hacks, are working full tilt, around the clock… to simply generate a deeper abyss requiring ever-more powerful and numerous computers to cross. And this generates ‘blocks’ in an economy of numbers in machines. These numbers are not exactly money, and their actual value is more complex than cash. And the machines must be serviced, cooled, attended and backed-up, as must the results of their nearly useless hyperactivity.

Most participants are using machines specially designed to resolve these invented computational targets, and as we make faster computers to do this, the network amplifies the difficulty to throttle the pulse.

What is all this about? Well, it’s not a simple question.

Let’s start with money.


What Is Money?

To understand money, one must begin to understand its sources. Perhaps the most fundamental of such introductions is the direct and fascinated observation of animals in nature. The origins of money (and memory) are in nature; exploring them has profound implications for own developing creativity and intelligence.

Beavers, squirrels and other small creatures, including the incredibly inventive corvids, store food (and sometimes treasures) in hiding places we call caches. Some predators may also cache food briefly (meat tends to go bad or get eaten by other creatures who can sense its presence). So, too, ants, wasps, bees and other social insects. This is actually a mode of living memory.

Notice the homonomy here? Cache and cash are the same sound, and this isn’t accidental. Direct relation with nature as and through living places is the original source of our concepts of value. Our relationships with environmentally accessible resources and caching are not merely the beginning of our monetary systems, they are the probable origin point of the peculiar forms of memory and cognition that are the hallmark of our species.

We carefully cache and value our dead. And money is an abstraction of dead people, places, and moments.

Our kind of mind was born in forests and places fraught with elaborate relational constellations of biodiversity and symbiotic intelligence. Alas, the nominal treasure we acquired there went haywire, and now we have nearly wiped those places off the map and erased them from our experience. What was their replacement?

Money (and machines). A representation of cached value, extensible to nearly any common domain of exchange.

There are no living places anymore. We do not encounter or create value… we get cash. Most of the time… that means that someone, or some ecology somewhere, is being wiped out. The results are representational forms of wealth and power.

We don’t have ancient forests any more, and the futures they portended are gone. What there are, are sheets of paper, ingots of gold, diamonds, and little banks of numbers… in machines. On balance sheets.

***

Numeric Supremacy

Numbers. We keep track of them. Too often they become lethal fictions with which ‘we’ (ostensibly: our societies and their systems) determine who lives and who dies. Who is wealthy and who bereft. Everyone is identified by and for the sake of numbers. We imagine these numbers to be true, just, inviolable. But we do not really understand the valuations or applications we celebrate and avow as real; there are always many aspects of value with crucial bearing on any analysis that we leave out of our accounting. Living beings, for example. Minds.

Many of our bizarre celebrations of monetary value or obedience to statistical analyses are simply flawed. It’s hard to get reasonable statistics for any real-world situation. Sometimes we are using stats that are cripplingly outdated or merely wrong. Assays attempting to discover the (astronomical) number of birds killed by electricity transmission only counted those found near wires. What’s the actual number, or a very close guess? We don’t know, because statistics are not entirely reliable beyond their well-behaved purposive contexts. Statistics, it turns out, are very often both manipulable and conveniently monodimensional.

So, too, the cash that stands sovereign behind them.

Such ‘numbers’ and our mishandling of them partly determine or suggest to us what to believe or think about ourselves, each other… the nature of the real. They portend what resources are protected, abstracted from nature, transported or obliterated, for what purposes, and whose ‘profit’.

We seem to have a serious vulnerability as regards representations. Our peculiar fantasies about the meaning of progress or success have cast life on Earth into direct competition with their outcomes—living beings and places now compete for terrain, safety and survival directly against not only objects, habits and machines… but mere data. And they lose.

So do we.

photograph can become so popular that hundreds or even thousands of creatures must die simply to sustain and transmit it millions or billions of times. As unthinkable as this is, it is a fact: people die because numbers in machines merit more resources, attention, care, and nurturance than living beings.

Our electronic activity and transactions have absolutely lethal real world costs that no one is paying attention to. And as we continue to invest human attention and work in an increasingly unreal electronic representation of reality, those prices become staggering. They were unsurvivable 20 years ago. Today, they are simply an ever-expanding array of new forms of environmental, social and psychological rape. For profit. And they can hide in our cultures and lives in ways that are as deadly as they are invisible.

***

When Costs Go Explosive — And Invisible

One of the statistics that is modestly important here is the present population of our species and its growth over say, the last 100 years or so. These figures project their significance on everything we do, and dramatically magnify the repercussions of our common choices simply by increasing the power and frequency of the activities that produce them. An automobile trip to the grocery store has an environmental impact that rises precipitously as populations repeating it double or quadruple.

And this is what has been happening with our population for quite a while now. Perhaps it is nearly as significant that the number of objects per person… particularly machines… has skyrocketed in developed nations. In other words: there are at least two population problems. Ours, and that represented by our machines. Most are happy to complain about the humans. Nearly no one is complaining about the machines.

I find this suspicious.

Here are some ‘interesting numbers’: the statistics of human population growth. It took us at least 2 million years to reach our first billion. It took us approximately 123 to reach the next.

A mere 33 took us to our third.

 

The population gradient for ambient human bodies on Earth.

Prior to around 1800, the most serious human threats to the living planet were deforestation for the sake of construction, war or fuel and maybe wildfires. Secondary to those was mass hunting—particularly the vast atrocities that wiped out entire populations of animals for sport, base ignorance, commerce, or purposes related to human habitation of terrain.

But between the 2nd and 3rd tiers of the human population explosion, new and profusely invasive competitors for resources, attention and terrain were multiplying madly—at rates no one really bothered to examine. During this period, two specific human activity-threats skyrocketed into cultural and ecological dominance, and their impact continues to inscribe a deadly and indelible mark on both human history and terrestrial ecology. I speak here of the machine and the product-for-profit.

Machines are objects against which human beings and living places must directly compete—and we are losing this competition. Inert objects merit more care, attention, valuation, developmental interest, terrain rights, fuel and ‘freedom to reproduce’ than their human originators or the ecologies that are the sources of life and planetary homeostasis. Every living being and place has been subjected to their intrusion, emissions and domination—especially in war. Further, the invention and development of mechanical technology has had profound and unexpected impacts on human development.

Over the past 150 years, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has effectively redirected or even replaced our evolutionary developmental progress in a number of unexpected ways by inhibition, substitution, self-poisoning and, most significantly, by wiping out the ecologies which were the original sources of our evolutionary ascent; standing nearby as both agency of accomplishment and cause we find ‘the machine’.

I would argue that our broad-scale fascination with machines has derailed the development of the intellectual and relational assets necessary to direct our own cultures, let alone the technologies in question, with any degree of insight or wisdom. We have become materialists, and in so doing, we have sounded the death knell of the nurseries of life and intelligence on Earth.

Our extended cultures and collectives are not properly equipped to direct the forces that value, pursue and accomplish technological and industrial development. Our ordinary activities produce results so incredibly ill-considered that were we to pause even briefly in contemplation of them we would prohibit them absolutely. We do not thus pause. Money and the need for it fuel the conversion of the living planet to representations such as cash or goods. And so, too, our human potentials and minds.

It’s murder for money.

Numbers in machines that represent value.

Representations like money arise when what is being represented is no longer available to common experience or expression. As the forests of oral memory were wiped out, we acquired writing. As the experience of the profound value of living beings and places disappeared from common experience, we got a new kind of greenery: cash.

And as cash begins to disappear, we will achieve the ‘third wave’ of re-representation: digital money. Stuff that is not even an object. Nothing more than numbers in machines.

In the case of bitcoin, we are talking about machines that compete against living places and human lives for energy, space, resources, and … attention.

***

Hashing For Cash: Machines Get busy

So, let’s get down to business. What is bitcoin, really? You can think of it as a machine contagion—a network of devices amped to their performance tolerances—machines that do nothing but reprocess every transaction that ever occurred on their network (thus achieving ‘consensus’) while, at the same time, ‘mining’ new blocks of coins (currently worth about 25 btc) by solving a purposefully cumbersome mathematical formula which doesn’t actually accomplish anything other than enforcing computational difficulty. That is: making millions of machines grind away madly at nothing.

This mining process is both the reprocessing of transactions (to join the network), and a ‘weight’ factor that is incremented to insure that the average time for the entire network to ‘solve’ a block (that is, to produce an accurate guess close enough to a mathematically supplied target) is ‘about 10 minutes’.

When you initiate a new machine into the network, you download the current transaction record (a 6-gigabyte file) of the entire history of bitcoin and reprocess it (this takes around 24 hours). You then either ‘mine’ alone (an almost useless endeavor which would take ~98 years to solve a block) or you join a pool of machines. By joining a pool, you get statistically better performance in terms of satoshi (currently: USD $0.0000046543 each) earned as you are ‘rewarded’ for work done by your machine’s participation in the pool.

The more processing power (raw computational force over time) you can bring to bear on ‘the problem’ … the better a chance you have to earn incremental additions to your ‘wallet’ or account. Of course, most of the problem is invented… to be this kind of problem—one that requires more and more computational activity to qualify as complete. And we have now invented specialized machines and chips just to solve this problem.

Machines involved in mining are pressed to the limits of their power consumption and performance profiles; they are ‘pinned’ at 100%+ of their computing power, ceaselessly, and thus generate heat (as well as consuming copious quantities of electrical power).

Because they remain hot, they have to be electronically ventilated. This process of power-heating something we must in turn power-cool, for the phony ‘sake’ of mathematical processes intended to make more work each time they are implemented is deranged. We’re essentially turning computers into heaters that we have to cool to recompute previous computations with. On purpose. A single day of the environmental costs of this process are so catastrophic that if we ever did the accounting — if anyone did — we would immediately understand that this entire idea is a mode of ‘fracking the whole environment’ whose costs rise explosively with every moment we continue the process.

These traditionalists worry that a larger block size will raise the minimum amount of computing power required to fully participate in the Bitcoin network’s peer-to-peer process for clearing transactions. To fully participate in this process, a computer needs to receive a copy of every transaction that has ever been made on the network, which can add up to gigabytes of data every month. If the block limit is raised, then running a Bitcoin node will become even more resource-intensive, potentially pricing out smaller players.

— Ars Magna: A New Deal could End Bitcoin’s Running Civil War

Only a species that had gone entirely insane, and consciously intended to wipe out life on Earth would ever consider such a process. But any species that could actively celebrate and expand it — must be understood as both emphatically suicidal and openly omnicidal. In short: they intend to kill everything, anything, and themselves — and are hell-bent on the continuous and unlimited expansion of this agenda.

The activity of the bitcoin process and some similar networks are not only burning down the future; they are also obliterating the history of humanity and life on Earth, faster and more aggressively every moment, by destroying the living results and opportunities established by this history, and insuring that the benefits that might otherwise blossom into astonishing ‘interest on investment’, are killed off by the necessity of breeding, operating, heating and cooling millions of machines that do makework for a resource that only exists as numbers in machines.

No one with anything resembling a mind would ever allow, let alone celebrate this, and the fact that our modern cultures are doing both is a symptom more serious than our obsessions with war, ecological atrocity, rape-for-profit, and the generation of other lethal processes such as the automobile, the atomic bomb, nuclear reactors and prisons.

bitcoin is an invisible, self-expanding prison/war that, like fracking ‘hides the damage’ in every place and life on Earth. It is a way of violently undermining the very bases of life on Earth, and the fact that no one is doing the accounting is a sign that the social and environmental intelligences of our species have become actively self-compromising.

Imagine if your immune system started producing new forms of HIV instead of macrophages and antibodies… and you begin to get the picture.

Thankfully, there is a limit to the process, but it’s taking a while to get there. The limit is 21 million bitcoins, at least in the present implementation. What does this mean? Well, it means that, according to some sources, 80% of mineable bitcoins will have been acquired within about a year. It also means that the miner margin will shrink, making the process less attractive. It’s not clear what will take place, or if the tail end of this process can be completely accomplished. It’s also not impossible that the present implementation will begin to transform, or reiterate itself once all bitcoins have been mined.

bitcoin forks into two processes 08.01.17.


 

Money is cached torture, murder, atrocity, and domination. It represents possible transactions in future time by obliterating living beings and opportunities in present time.

The only ‘value’ of the computation thus accomplished is that it leverages statistical complexity against computational power in order to mathematically throttle block (and thus bitcoin) production. So, we are inventing increasing quantities of work for increasing quantities of computers to do and the easier it becomes, the more we throttle it to make it harder… faster.

Purportedly, all of this bother results in profit, at least in theory. I say in theory because the putative returns require investments… of time, space, electricity, temperature, attention… and… computation. What one invests in one way is lost twice, both in the investment and in what more profitable or noble work might have been done with the same effort or resources.

There are a wide variety of other problems here, from the fact that malware that infects vast numbers of machines has been found mining bitcoin (resource diversion), to the embarrassing ‘sudden disappearance’ of thousands (or occasionally millions) of dollars worth of bitcoins in thefts from ‘exchanges’ or technical bungles (wallet loss).

Why are we purchasing banks of highly specialized computers and heating them up with computational burdens that tax their performance spec and then paying to cool them back down—in order to accomplish nothing useful?

The answer is that we have invented a ‘false problem’ that tens of thousands of machines now work to achieve the result for relatively uninterrupted, and these machines are themselves resources which require resources to build, run, track, back up, and otherwise maintain. How much varies widely by installation, but as you can see in the image that begins this essay, many people are building banks of machines that do nothing but process bitcoin blocks. Nothing else. Just that. And these have to be housed, stored, powered, repaired, attended, backed-up, protected, and cooled.

Bitcoin Energy Usage Analysis.

bitcoin is an essentially mechano-vampiric paradigm where massive amounts of actually usless computation are done with increasing ferocity while producing nothing of any value whatsoever except a kind of pure abstraction of computing having been done, and the glorious ‘record of transactions’ which becomes a veritable church of common computational record—and remains just as meaningless in that guise.

Those who are involved in this racket have chosen to dedicate cash, space, power and other resources to the process. But what is the process? It is to process a meaningless series of processes, ever-more ineffectively, on purpose.

That’s the wrong thing to dedicate resources to, and it produces direct mechanical competition against our own minds, cultures, needs and development. The idea of a homegrown electronic cryptocurrency is not entirely misguided. Personally, I think it would be powerful to develop something that produces value based on merit of actual work, discovery or contribution… accomplished by individuals or collectives. This is something I hope we may see relatively soon. But what bitcoin is and is doing is stridently malformed.


What exactly is profit? A crucial part of the answer is that it is the abstracted remains of obliterated lives, pricelessly irreplaceable ecosystems and precious relationships we never noticed or acknowledged, let alone understood. It is the remains of what might have been revolutionary intelligence, discovery, mutual uplift, evolution, wonder and actual human progress. It is the bodies and remains of animals, human beings and families, dreams of access to new developmental and creative opportunities, and living worlds of possibility that were burnt down and turned into little sheets of paper.

***

In all too many cases, the ‘next big thing’ is actually the next endlessly self-amplifying graveyard.

 

It is well-known that a ‘materially successful’ male or female represents an attractive mating partner for a variety of reasons, both profound and superficial in nature. In effect, the ‘standing cache’ of a given person or group is a signal about how effective various aspects of their skills and/or intelligence are in the specific domains that these representations are derived from.

The problem is this: the message is mixed, because their cache is social power… but its sources and functions often begin with atrocities,, some of which reach far back into the history of our people and the land.

The Kwakiutl called their money objects yaklelwas, which means “bad things,” a word that has the same root as ‘dead bodies” and “intestines.” When they had their potlatch money-destruction ceremonies they said they were “wiping off the shame” from their body, like one wipes off shit, by giving money away or destroying it.(11)

Bitcoin Block Reward Halving Countdown (many interesting up-to-the-moment statistics about the current state of the process).

Note : There are now a large number of cryptocurrencies, each with unique features, benefits and costs of operation. While some of these may utilize similar processes that require vast amounts of computational activity to generate, others do not. I am presently doing some research to understand more about the other systems, some of which are mentioned in the comments.

Photos: Life inside of China’s massive and remote bitcoin mines

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Medium.  Republished with permission of the author.

Time is Short: Stopping Trains

Time is Short: Stopping Trains

     by Norris Thomlinson / Deep Green Resistance Hawai’i

Puget Sound Anarchists and It’s Going Down have reported on four recent incidents of simple sabotage against rail operations. Using copper wire to signal track blockage (as depicted in a video on how to block trains), actionists have executed cheap and low-risk attacks to temporarily halt:

The Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy of Deep Green Resistance aims for cascading systems failure to shut down industrial destruction for good. Though these acts of sabotage are unlikely to cause more than minor inefficiencies in rail transport, they offer more return on investment than even the most successful aboveground actions.

For example, last year three DGR members halted a coal train for 12 hours before being arrested. Compared to other aboveground efforts, this was a very efficient operation, achieving a lengthy stoppage with a minimum of arrests. However, the total cost to carry out the action was high. Not only did the three activists spend significant time planning and executing the blockade itself, but a support team ensured rail employees and police couldn’t harm the activists without being documented (though this by no means guaranteed their safety.) Afterwards, the three arrestees faced multiple court dates consuming time and money, and causing stress. All charges were eventually dropped, but presumably the state would be less lenient for recidivism, raising the cost for repeated use of this tactic.

Contrast that to the statement by the Columbia River track saboteurs: “Trains were stopped for at least several hours and maybe more. Carrying out the action took less than an hour, about $40 materials, and little-no risk of being arrested.” (Presumably they also spent time beforehand to scout and plan.) Their use of underground tactics allowed them to hit and run, minimizing their risk, stress, and total investment in the action, and leaving them free to repeat the attacks at will. Not sticking around to be arrested is an enormous advantage, and our resistance movement must increase its use of guerrilla tactics to leverage our relatively meager resources.

DGR members don’t have the option of using underground tactics. By publicly opposing industrial civilization and calling for physically dismantling it, we’re obvious suspects for law enforcement to monitor and interrogate following underground attacks. Our role is to spread the analysis of the necessity and the feasibility of bringing it all down, and to support anyone who is able to carry out underground attacks.

We commend and thank those involved in these recent successful actions. We hope they’ll use the skills and confidence they’ve built in a low-risk environment to escalate their attacks to critical industrial infrastructure. And we hope none of them ever get caught, but if they do, we’ll be there to support them.

Analysis of Efficacy

On an Earth First! Journal page hosting the video on how to block trains, two commenters suggest this tactic isn’t effective at all:

“Lol if theres no reason a train should have a red signal, the dispatcher will have a crew sent out to find the problem, and in the mean time simply give trains authority past it. Try again.”

“Railroads have signal maintainers on duty 24/7/365 to troubleshoot issues like track circuits and keep trains moving on any given operating subdivision. I guess what you don’t understand is regardless of what you’re jumpering out there, trains can still move down the line.”

The posts are anonymous, and the authors express contempt for the actions of the saboteurs. Since they’re clearly not trying to give constructive feedback, it’s hard to know how seriously to take the critiques. If anyone has concrete knowledge of the impact of this tactic, please share. The better we understand the systems we want to disrupt and dismantle, the better our chance of success.

Read about more attacks on rail and other infrastructure at our Underground Action Calendar

To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org

Is the School System Redeemable? No.

Is the School System Redeemable? No.

     by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance

Last night, I dreamt that I was trapped in a box.

I was in high school again, sitting at an antique desk with a wraparound writing surface (right-handed of course, for a left-handed child) and I was more bored than any person should ever be. As the teacher played out their sanctioned role, trying to make compulsory education “fun” and “engaging,” I sat in a stupor, craving some stimulation lest the torpor become permanent and turn me into a compliant drone for life.

I refused to be turned into a cubicle occupant. In the dream, my solution was to stand up and start removing the bug screens from the windows. My boredom was temporarily cast aside, and the fresh air flowed into the classroom, enlivening the other occupants, reminding them of the real world. The teacher frowned in annoyance.

It was a win-win. A small act of rebellion, no doubt, but I would not be cowed into sitting meekly.

This dream could have been a flashback. I behaved this way in high school, pushing the boundaries as far as I could, ignoring teachers unless they earned my respect (and even then ignoring rules that seemed silly to me), giving friendship only to those teachers who in turn pushed the boundaries. I respected them as people, but after all, they were being paid to attend school. I was legally obligated.

Education can be a great experience, but at least here in the United States, the school system exists entirely to serve the dominant economic system. Grades separate out those with the combination of traits—intelligence (defined in the most culturally blinkered and capitalist terms) and obedience—that make them suitable to be the next managers. Those who fail will make up the poor and working class from which wealth will be extracted. Punitive measures and the brutal, relentless school-to-prison pipeline enforce and inculcate white supremacy.

It’s the Prussian educational model, barely modified in the last 250 years.

Industrial schooling also deepens the damage caused by abuse, homelessness, and neglect. Children in distress, far from receiving the love and care and attention that they need, are expected to sit still, shut up, and play nicely. The school system’s academic framework not only fails to serve these kids; it makes everything worse. Bullying, social competition, stigmatization, criminalization, and social cliques that mature in full-blown xenophobia are the inevitable results of a framework designed for one demographic: white, bourgeois, nuclear-family, patriarchal households.

As a system of education and social control within a brutal empire built on slavery, imperialism, and land theft, our schools function perfectly.

I’m all for reform. Small improvements are meaningful where they can be made. My 10th grade journalism teacher kept me—and countless others—thinking critically with his hard-hitting analysis of how advertising and mass media manipulates thought to encourage racism, nationalism, warmongering, consumerism, and objectification. There were a few other bright spots, islands of sanity in an ocean of conformity to the status quo.

But by itself, reform is never enough. The school system isn’t broken; it’s functioning exactly as it was meant to. Liberalism’s incessant focus on education as the solution to social problems channels endless streams of idealistic young people into the school system, where they are almost inevitably broken by endless bureaucracy and 50-hour work weeks. Otherwise that energy could be put to revolutionary purposes, and that doesn’t suit the system.

My dream last night reminded me of the truth. School, far from enlightening us, is stultifying. The school system—like capitalism, like American empire, like industrial civilization—is functionally irredeemable. Beyond a certain point, it’s incapable of being meaningfully reformed. Sure, improvements can (and should) be made. But might we be better off just scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?

I’ve been told that in Mohawk culture, children are treated as “miniature adults,” and are expected to learn mainly through participation in the activities of the community. Real learning comes from being embedded in a functional community engaging in the tasks of survival and self-governance—not from being trapped in a box.

This is taken so seriously that children remained beyond the barricades during the Oka standoff near Montreal in 1990, standing with the warrior societies as the Canadian military flexed its colonial muscle to stifle indigenous sovereignty. We can learn from this level of commitment to teaching children things that have real value, and exposing them to the real world.

In a world flush with refugees, overwhelmed by neo-colonialism, sweltering under global warming, sweating in fear of rising fascist elements, and yoked with the chains of sex and race oppression, perhaps it’s time we gave up on the school system and started working to tear it, and the system it supports, down.

***

Max Wilbert is a writer, activist, and organizer with the group Deep Green Resistance. He lives on occupied Kalapuya Territory in Oregon.

To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org

Time to Escalate? First-Ever Rights of Nature Lawsuit Dismissed

Time to Escalate? First-Ever Rights of Nature Lawsuit Dismissed

Featured image by Michelle McCarron     by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition

Our first-in-the-nation lawsuit seeking personhood for the Colorado River was dismissed. After the Colorado Attorney General filed a motion to dismiss and threatened sanctions against attorney Jason Flores-Williams for the unforgivable act of requesting rights for nature, Flores-Williams withdrew our case.

When I agreed to serve as a next friend, or guardian, of the Colorado River, I saw the opportunity as a win-win. Either, we would win the lawsuit and the Colorado River would gain a powerful new legal tool to protect herself. Or, the lawsuit would be defeated proving that the American legal system privileges corporate rights to destroy the natural world over the natural world’s right to exist.

I knew it was highly unlikely that corporations, the courts, and the Colorado Attorney General would let rights of nature gain traction in American law. I wanted to be there, when the case failed, to remind everyone who invested hope in our cause that lawsuits are not the only way change is made.

I do not want this essay to come off like I am saying “I told you so.” I am heartbroken. A small part of me clung to the hope that Flores-Williams could resist the threats, that the Colorado Attorney General would, at least, litigate the case on the merits, and that the legal system would do the right thing. This hope, of course, was misguided.

***

Side of Denver, Colorado Federal Building with projected sign reading "Colorado River Rights of Nature"

Federal Building, Denver, Colorado (Photo: Deanna Meyer)

Several weeks ago, I wrote for the San Diego Free Press, “When has the American legal system been concerned with doing the right thing? While every ounce of my being hopes we win, if we lose, I want you to know why. I want you to be angry. And, I want you to possess an analysis that enables you to direct your anger at the proper targets.”

We lost because the American government and legal system are designed to ensure that corporations maintain the right to destroy nature for profit. We faced a centuries-old American legal tradition that defines nature as property. Property rights grant property owners the power to consume and destroy their property. The Colorado River is defined as property, and those who own her, possess the right to use her, extract her, destroy her – and they are. Because corporations also wield most of the world’s wealth, they have the most power to gain property rights over nature. Or, in other words, they have the most power to buy living non-human communities to turn them into dead, human products.

Making matters worse, the American legal system grants corporations the same rights as citizens. So, courts recognize corporate constitutional rights to free speech, protections from search and seizure, and guarantees to due process, equal protection, and reimbursement for lost future profits. One of the worst political ironies of our time is that abstract legal contraptions like corporations have rights, but the natural communities who give us life don’t.

It’s not just that corporations, and the courts and governments that protect them, will not let the rights of nature movement take hold; corporations cannot let the rights of nature take hold. They cannot let the rights of nature take hold because granting nature the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve would restrict corporate access to the natural world, which is the very source of corporate power.

Corporations gain their power by turning nature into commodities, which are then sold for profit.  The more nature corporations can turn into commodities, the more profits they make. And, the more profits they make, the more nature corporations can turn into commodities. If this cycle does not stop, the planet’s life support systems will collapse.

In order to understand corporate dependence on the natural world, consider the five most powerful corporations according to this year’s Fortune 500 list: Walmart, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Exxon Mobil, and McKesson. Walmart, for example, depends on its ability to cheaply manufacture, distribute, and sell products as diverse as clothes, beauty items, toys, and food. To manufacture and distribute, a corporation must have access to raw materials to turn into products and must have access to energy to deliver those products. This is an abstract way of saying that Walmart must clear-cut (or pay someone to clearcut) living forests for wood, must rip-up (or pay someone to rip-up) living grasslands for agriculture, and must destroy (or pay someone to destroy) mountains and subterranean earth to extract oil for plastics, for the energy required to manufacture, and to power the planes, ships, and trucks that carry their products to markets around the world.

The same goes for Berkshire Hathaway who manages factory farms while running Dairy Queen, who burns massive amounts of fossil fuels while running BNSF Railway, who engages in one of the most destructive agricultural processes – cotton farming – while running Fruit of the Loom, and who perpetuates an ancient, bloody form of mining while running Helzberg Diamonds. Apple, similarly, could not produce iPods and iPhones without highly oppressive rare earth mining. McKesson could not create its pharmaceuticals without the highly toxic industrial processes that yield the necessary chemicals. Do we even need to talk about Exxon Mobil?

The rights of nature are diametrically opposed to corporate rights. Environmental philosopher John Livingston describes this opposition: “We sometimes forget that every time a court or a legislature – or even custom – confers or confirms a right in someone, someone else’s right is nibbled at: the right of women to equal employment opportunity is an infringement of the freedom of misogynist employers; the right to make a profit is at someone else’s cost; the right to run a motorcycle or a snowmobile reduces someone else’s right to peace and quiet in his own backyard; the rights of embryos impinge upon the rights of the women who carry them. And so on.”

Corporations cannot allow the Colorado River to possess rights because her rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve may trump their rights to destroy her for profit. This makes the rights of nature a dangerous idea.

***

Side of Denver, Colorado Federal Building with projected sign reading "RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE"

Federal Building, Denver, Colorado (Photo: Deanna Meyer)

But, the natural world needs more than dangerous ideas.

After we filed the lawsuit, I spent a month traveling with the Colorado River. As a “next friend” or guardian of the river, I agreed to represent her interests in court. To better understand her interests, I set out with the brilliant photographer Michelle McCarron to ask the river, “What do you need?”

I was naive to believe I could receive her answer in a month. After a month, I had only traveled the northern third of the river from her headwaters in La Poudre Pass, CO to just north of the Confluence where the Green River joins her in Canyonlands National Park. It wasn’t that she didn’t try to answer. She answered. And, her answer overwhelmed me.

In La Poudre Pass, standing in half a foot of snow in mid-October, she told me she needs snowpack and lamented that climate change causes less and less snow to fall. Near Grand Lake, where her waters are pumped through an industrial tunnel under Rocky Mountain National Park and across the Continental Divide, she showed me how theft is weakening her. In the orchards of Palisade, CO, where she is lacerated with ditches and canals to grow peaches and grapes, she begged to flow to willow thickets and marshes, instead, where she could grow birds and fish. Through the red rock near Moab, UT, where the wind sings in praise across the canyons the river has sculpted, she shuddered and whispered about the new, concrete walls that dam her path and that she cannot topple.

I will need much longer than a month to listen to everything the Colorado River needs. But, in all the time I spent listening, I did not hear her speak of a judge’s gavel, of evidentiary proceedings, or of the State of Colorado’s motion to dismiss. She cited no precedent, no binding legal authority,  and no argument made by silver-tongued attorneys. She did not fear questions of jurisdiction or the threat of sanctions.

No, the Colorado River’s needs are real and physical. She needs snowpack. She needs a climate that facilitates her replenishment. She needs humans to stop manipulating her flows. She needs industry to stop wasting her waters on cash crops when wild beings are desperate for her. She needs dams to be removed.

We can give the Colorado River what she needs. We can stop burning fossil fuels. We can fill in the ditches and canals. We can let the desert reclaim the peach orchards and vineyards. We can, finally, remove dams.

Winning rights for the Colorado River would have helped, but they are not necessary. Better than the right to naturally evolve is naturally evolving. Better than the right to replenish is replenishing. Better than the right to exist is existing. And, better than the right to flourish is flourishing. Yes, it would have been a hell of a lot easier, if we could have gained a court order to remove dams along the Colorado River. But, court orders aren’t the only way dams fall.

When those who are supposed to protect us fail to do the right thing, we have to do it for them. There are recent examples of activists putting this principle into practice. On October 11, 2016, five climate activists (now famous as the “Valve Turners”) traveled to remote locations in North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, and Washington state and turned shut-off valves on five pipelines carrying tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada into the United States. Elected officials would not shut down oil pipelines, so the Valve Turners did it for them.

Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, two brave women involved in Iowa’s Catholic Worker social justice movement, began a sabotage campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline on Election Day 2016. Reznicek and Montoya burned heavy construction equipment, pierced steel pipes, and used oxyacetylene cutting torches to damage exposed empty pipeline valves. These actions delayed completion of the pipeline for weeks. Elected officials failed to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, so Reznicek and Montoya stopped it for them.

The brave actions of the Valve Turners and Reznicek and Montoya notwithstanding, most of us are engaged in tactics that leave it up to someone else to do the right thing. The dismissal of our lawsuit is one more failure in a long list of failures to recognize the power we do possess and to use that power to protect the natural world. We fail and Earth continues to heat up. We fail and human population continues to grow exponentially. We fail and the rate of species’ extinction intensifies. Each failure begs us to answer the question: Why do we still seek change through means that have never worked?

Lawsuit Targets Trump’s Slashing of Protections at Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante

     by Center for Biological Diversity

WASHINGTON —Hours after President Donald Trump issued a proclamation taking an axe to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, conservation organizations today filed a lawsuit attacking the order as an abuse of the president’s power. Earthjustice is representing eight organizations in a suit charging that the president violated the 1906 Antiquities Act by stripping monument protections from this national treasure: The Wilderness Society, the Grand Canyon Trust, the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, Center for Biological Diversity, WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and Natural Resources Defense Council are co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit and represented by in-house counsel.

“President Trump has perpetrated a terrible violation of America’s public lands and heritage by going after this dinosaur treasure trove,” said Heidi McIntosh, managing attorney in Earthjustice’s Rocky Mountains office. “While past presidents have used the Antiquities Act to protect unique lands and cultural sites in America, Trump is instead mangling the law, opening this national monument to coal mining instead of protecting its scientific, historic, and wild heritage. We will not let this stand. We will use the power of the law to stop Trump’s illegal actions.”

The Grand Staircase-Escalante contains dinosaur fossils found nowhere else in the world. Since its designation, 21 new dinosaur species have been unearthed by scientists in the monument, leading some to call these lands a “Dinosaur Shangri-la,” and a “geologic wonderland.” Grand Staircase holds one of the richest collections of fossils from the Late Cretaceous Period, which gives scientists and the public alike an unparalleled window into the dinosaurs that lived in these lands 10 million years ago. In mid-October, scientists airlifted one of the most complete tyrannosaur skeletons ever found out of Grand Staircase. These fossils are largely found in the Kaiparowits Plateau, where the coal industry has long coveted access for coal mining that would wreak havoc on this dinosaur treasure trove that belongs to the American people.

“I’m a resident of Kanab, and there are a lot of local businesses that are completely dependent on tourism related to Grand Staircase-Escalante,” said Laura Welp of Western Watersheds Project, and a former BLM botanist at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. “The entire ‘staircase’ of spectacular geological layers, with its world-class fossil resources, deserves to be protected intact from the threat of coal mining and other types of commercial exploitation.”

President Trump’s executive order to revoke and replace Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument came on the heels of a review conducted by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Over 2.7 million Americans voiced their support for national monuments across the country, and public participation in the comment period was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping these public lands and waters protected just as they are.

“President Trump is attempting an unauthorized remodel of the Grand Staircase, knocking out not only geologic steps but cornerstones of the evolution of species, human history, and our cultural heritage as well,” said Tim Peterson, Utah Wildlands program director with the Grand Canyon Trust. “We’ve spent 20 years working to preserve Grand Staircase, and now we’re asking the courts to help us reconstruct what was torn down today.”

“The Trump administration’s effort to sell out our public lands is deeply unpopular and goes against American values,” said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “We will work to ensure our lands and waters remain open to the public and protected for future generations to explore and enjoy.”

“For more than two decades, through Democratic and Republican Administrations alike, we have worked with the BLM, paleontologists, local landowners, ranchers and business owners to ensure the monument’s resources are protected,” said Nada Culver, senior counsel for The Wilderness Society. “This unlawful, short-sighted action by President Trump is an affront to that collaborative work happening and to the benefits the monument provides to research, the local economy, and all Americans.”

“Despite the call for public comments, Trump never cared that we, the public, wanted him to keep his hands off our monuments,” said Chris Krupp, public earth guardian at WildEarth Guardians. “He’s not concerned with those of us that camp, hike, fish and hunt. He’d rather give another handout to oil, gas and coal companies.”

President Bill Clinton protected the lands of Grand Staircase as a national monument on Sept. 18, 1996 using the Antiquities Act, a century-old law that has been used by 16 presidents since Theodore Roosevelt to protect some of our nation’s most cherished landscapes and cultural heritage. Congress enacted the law in 1906, granting presidents the authority to create national monuments on federal lands to protect significant natural, cultural, historic or scientific features. The Antiquities Act does not, however, grant presidents the authority to diminish or rescind the monument designations of their predecessors.

“Grand Staircase is a cradle of biodiversity and losing even an acre would be a crime,” said Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Scientists have identified nearly four dozen new species of butterflies here. We must protect this monument’s wildlife, stunning landscapes and cultural treasures for future generations. Trump and the fossil-fuel industry have picked the wrong battle.”

“If the Trump administration thinks Grand Staircase-Escalante can be sold out without a fight, they’re in for a huge surprise,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. “We’ll be seeing them in court.”

“The Trump administration has ignored overwhelming support for the monument. It’s a punch in the face to local businesses who support it, and all of us who treasure it,” said Shelley Silbert, executive director of Great Old Broads for Wilderness. “Our organization got its start in the Escalante Canyons nearly three decades ago and we’ve worked tirelessly for proper management of the national monument since its designation. We will fight this illegal action to take any portion of this monument away from the American people.”

“Americans from across the nation should be outraged by President Trump’s unlawful attempt to eviscerate the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, one of our country’s wildest and most scientifically significant federal public landscapes,” said Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Utah’s largest conservation organization. “No one will look back on this decision in 15, 25 or 50 years and say Trump did the right thing by protecting less of this magnificent place. And by promoting this illegal act, Utah’s parochial congressional delegation and local politicians have firmly come down on the wrong side of history.”

After President Clinton designated Grand Staircase, an intricate land swap between the state and federal government was completed. Congress passed legislation modifying the monument’s boundaries in 1998 and then approved a land swap in which the state of Utah received 145,000 acres of mineral-rich federal lands and $50 million from the federal treasury. That $50 million has since gone to support Utah’s public schools, and the swap would be incredibly difficult to unravel. The Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration established the Land Exchange Distribution Account to dole out the proceeds from these state-federal trades. At least 27 Utah counties have since received a total of $441 million.

Grand Staircase-Escalante has proven a tourism and economic boon for Southern Utah since its designation. Between 2001 and 2015, the population in the two counties bordering Grand Staircase grew by 13 percent, jobs increased 24 percent and real personal income grew 32 percent. Travel and tourism boomed in the region, offering 1,630 jobs around Grand Staircase. In the big picture, recreation from adventure-seekers, hikers, amateur geologists and families simply getting outdoors now funnels more than $12 billion into Utah’s economy.