by DGR News Service | Jul 29, 2020 | Colonialism & Conquest
The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh part of Will’s journey.
The Wind That Shakes The Goose Wings
By Will Falk / The Ohio River Speaks
“‘Twas hard the woeful words to frame, To break the ties that bound us, ‘Twas harder still to bear the shame, Of foreign chains around us…”
— Robert Dwyer Joyce, The Wind That Shakes the Barley
The Ohio River carried my ancestors to me. Arriving through traumatic memories recorded in history books and through a vivid nightmare, my ancestors’ presence was painful at first. Then, I asked my ancestors for help creating strength from the pain and they answered through wild geese.
When I was researching how settler colonialism affected the original peoples of the Ohio River basin, I also learned how settler colonialism affected my Irish ancestors. I read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. She characterizes the Protestant colonization of Ireland (along with the Christian Crusades) as “dress rehearsals for the colonization of the Americas.” During the late 1500s and early 1600s, at the same time English colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts were being established, Dunbar-Ortiz describes how
“the English conquered Ireland and declared a half-million acres of land in the north open to settlement. The settlers who served early settler colonialism came mostly from western Scotland. England had previously conquered Wales and Scotland, but it had never before attempted to remove so large an Indigenous population and plant settlers in their place as in Ireland. The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutalized. A ‘wild Irish’ reservation was even attempted.”
I learned that the brutal practice of scalping originated in Ireland. Dunbar-Ortiz explains:
“The English government paid bounties for Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Although the Irish were as ‘white’ as the English, transforming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples of North America and to Africans.”
I found a connection with the ancestors of the original peoples of the Ohio River basin when I learned that many Englishmen who were involved in the colonization of Ireland were also involved in the colonization of North America. In the late 1500s, the English Governor of the newly conquered Irish province of Ulster, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, invaded the Irish province of Munster (where my ancestors lived), and ordered that
“the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the place where he [Gilbert] incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledying into his own tente so that none could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem…[It brought] greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kindsfolke, and friends.”
Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “The same Sir Humphrey Gilbert who had been in charge of the colonization of Ulster planted the first English colonial settlement in North America in Newfoundland in the summer of 1583.”
Reading this breached a dam within me. I was flooded with ancestral memory.
I saw the gruesome lane Gilbert constructed. I tried to keep my eyes on the path ahead of me. Hurry through, I told myself. These heads are too rotten, too disfigured to recognize. But, some of my loved ones had yet to come home. The desire for closure was too strong.
Why does that nose look so familiar? Is it my brother’s? Is that red hair? My sweetheart’s hair is red. But, she was miles from the fighting. She’s safe. Isn’t she? Each step down the lane became more difficult. Each head I passed made the terror stronger. My grief became so overwhelming that I envied the lifeless eyes staring at me as I passed, oblivious to the horrors they manifested.
Despite my ancestors’ prodding, I was sick of confronting the violent history of settler colonialism. I was still reeling from my writing about Macutté Mong and the slaughtered Christian Delawares. I was self-conscious that much of my writing about the Ohio River, so far, had been dark and heavy. I wanted to write about something beautiful, something hopeful, something that didn’t involve massacres.
Then, my ancestors sent me a nightmare.
It was a sunny afternoon. I stood in waist-high, fragrant grass next to a wide, slow river. Despite my waking mind being fixated on the Ohio River, the shape of the land and the dark, almost mahogany color of the water suggested this was not the Ohio River. I was reminded of a river I spent some time with in Ireland in 2018 – the River Blackwater in Munster, not far from my McCarthy ancestors’ home.
The nightmare began with beauty. I ran my hands through the thick grass. My bare feet sunk pleasantly into damp, warm soil. The grass imitated the river’s face as the breeze rippled in similar patterns over both. As the tune to “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” filled my ears, beauty slipped into melancholy.
Peace shattered when angry men came running over a distant hill. Sunlight glinted off weapons. I ducked down hoping the grass would hide me. The men spread out along the river bank. I saw their hands covered in mud and blood reach into the grassroots. I watched them wrap grass around their hands, intertwining their fingers with grass stalks. Then, they tore the grass up in patches, leaving flayed spaces of naked dirt. Each time they ripped, I felt pain like someone was ripping skin from my body.
I did not want the men to see me. At first, I managed to contain the pain in soft whimpers. Eventually, with each patch of grass ripped from the earth, the pain became unbearable. I screamed. The men noticed me, grabbed me, and rubbed my face in the bare dirt. When they wrapped the hair on my scalp around their hands, intertwining their grubby fingers with my hair, I knew the pain that was coming. They ripped the hair from my forehead to the top of my skull. I woke writhing and screaming.
At first, I thought this nightmare was simply a message to remind my readers of the cruel settler colonialism Ireland endured – especially my Irish American readers who have benefited so much from the colonization of North America. After I wrote the section about the colonization of Ireland being a dress rehearsal for the colonization of North America, however, my ancestors were not satisfied. I felt an itchy determination to bring some beauty out of this terrible history.
While I was researching and writing about this history, several times I found myself absent-mindedly humming the tune of the “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” When I remembered that the tune was in my nightmare, I knew I had to learn more about the song.
“The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is a haunting Irish ballad that was written by Robert Dwyer Joyce in the mid-1800s about theIrish Rebellion of 1798. The song tells the tale of a young Irish rebel who says good-bye to his lover before he joins the rebellion. His lover is shot during the fighting and the young rebel returns home to bury her.
Barley is a symbol of Irish resistance to colonization.
Irish rebels, most of whom were woefully impoverished, often carried barley in their pockets to eat while on the march. Many of these men wore their hair closely cropped as a sign of opposition to the powdered wigs worn by British aristocrats. Because of this, these Irish rebels were called “croppies.” When the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was brutally suppressed, the British threw slaughtered rebels into mass unmarked graves known as “croppy-holes.”
The barley in the pockets of the slain rebels grew from the croppy-holes. And, just as the barley grows every spring from the croppy-holes, fed by the bodies of Irish rebels, Irish resistance to colonization sprouts anew in each generation, fed by the memories of our ancestors – those men and women brave enough to sacrifice everything to resist colonization.
I wept when I learned about the barley growing from the mass graves of massacred Irish rebels. I wept for their courage. I wept for the beauty of their story. I also wept because I yearned for a symbol with as much power as barley that could remind the Irish in America of our ancestors’ legacy of resistance.
When I finished weeping, my ancestors gave me the symbol I yearned for.
I heard the Canada geese before I saw them. My ancestors’ songs carried with the honking geese songs to announce their arrival. The geese swept low in a disciplined formation over the Ohio River. In flying columns, they evoked the rebels of old on the march. They got so close I could see their silver feathers quivering as they descended. I sensed my ancestors on the wind that shook the goose wings.
Originally used to describe the departure of an Irish Catholic army to France after being defeated by William of Orange’s Protestant army in 1691, the term “wild geese” has been used in Irish history to describe Irish soldiers who left to fight in foreign armies. Most of these soldiers fled poverty. Many of them joined foreign armies to fight against the British. Some of these soldiers joined foreign armies to gain valuable training that they could return with and use to defend their homes.
I am American because some of my ancestors fled Ireland in the early 1850s, just after the Potato Famine and British colonial policies killed millions of Catholic Irish. Like the Irish wild geese, my ancestors fled poverty and starvation. They survived. So, I live.
Now, whenever I hear echoes of honking geese, I hear my ancestors. They are with me. They say: Resist.
Will Falk is the author of How Dams Fall: On Representing the Colorado River in the First-Ever American Lawsuit Seeking Rights for a Major Ecosystem and a practicing rights of Nature attorney. Rights of Nature advocates work to transform the legal system so that it recognizes the “personhood” of natural beings. Throuout 2020, Falk will travel through the Ohio River Basin asking the Ohio River the two questions he asks any client who steps into his office: “Who are you?” And, “What do you need?”
![[The Ohio River Speaks] Shitting Geese, Omega-3s, and the Arithmetic of Atrocity](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2020/06/Shitting-Geese-Omega-3s-and-the-Arithmetic-of-Atrocity.jpg)
by DGR News Service | Jun 30, 2020 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, and fourth part of Will’s journey.
By Will Falk / The Ohio River Speaks
Sometimes I ask the Ohio River questions. And, sometimes she asks me. West of Salamanca, New York, a few miles before the Kinzua Dam traps the Ohio River in the Allegheny Reservoir, I sat in a kayak listening. She was speaking, but I did not understand.
The water was slow. The river’s face was smooth. And, the surface reflected a blue and white mosaic created by lazy cumulus clouds drifting across the sky. She pulled me ever so gently downstream. The sensation was powerfully familiar, but I did not know why.
A mother merganser swam with her five chicks along the closest shore. I smiled at what looked like exasperation on her face as she tried to keep her children moving in the same direction. For a few moments, she anxiously eyed a space downstream where a bald eagle had disappeared into the trees. When she looked back, one duckling had gone one way and one another. The other three didn’t know who to follow.
My mind slowed to match the river’s pace. The random, anxious firing of disparate images that form my moment-to-moment consciousness throttled down until my thoughts almost disappeared entirely. They were replaced by the fullness of my experience of the river. The sun, glinting off a passing dragonfly, left a trail of turquoise light. Bugs skimmed the surface, and appeared to me like the tips of invisible pens writing disappearing messages that only the bugs could comprehend. On the edge of my vision, I saw a splash and the telltale ripples of a leaping trout.
The enchantment continued until a wedge of passing Canada geese pointed right at me. They swept low and the goose flying point shat. The shit slapped my plastic kayak – a direct hit. The honking geese laughed. And, I did, too.
***
I knew the metaphors she presented me with were meaningful. What could be more meaningful than being shit on? But, I wasn’t sure what the Ohio River was trying to communicate until a few days later.
I was listening to an interview given by agricultural critic Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization and other great books. Manning was asked about the global food shortage and whether there would be enough food to feed the world’s human population over the balance of the 21st century. Manning answered no and pointed out how we are already failing to do so “drastically.” He explained that the people who say we are not failing often assume that humans need a certain amount of calories per day (2000 is the most common number). They multiply this number by the world’s total human population. Next, they calculate the total caloric value of the planet’s corn, wheat, and other grain production. Because the total caloric value of agricultural grain production is greater than the calories they claim are needed by humans, many people declare there is no food shortage.
Manning argued, however, that 2000 calories of carbohydrates are not adequate daily nutrition. He pointed out that high carbohydrate diets are, in fact, making humans sick, and that most humans are not getting the nutrition we have evolved to need. Omega-3 fatty acids are one of the most important things missing from most human diets. Omega-3 fats are vital for brain health and, thus, for achieving human potential.
A major problem, however, is that the world is running out of this essential nutrient. Omega-3 fats primarily come from animals, especially cold-water fish. Manning mentioned a study conducted by British scientists. I found the study titled “Is the world supply of omega-3 fatty acids adequate for optimal human nutrition?” by Norman Salem, Jr. and Manfred Eggersdorfer.
Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) are the most important Omega-3 fatty acids for human health. The study’s abstract stated that “EPA and DHA originate in the phytoplankton and are made available in the human food chain mainly through fish and other seafood.” However, “the fish catch is not elastic and in fact has long since reached a plateau.” These acids do occur in vegetables, but “vegetable oil-derived alpha-linolenic acid, though relatively plentiful, is converted only at a trace level in humans to DHA and not very efficiently to EPA, and so cannot fill” the gap in human need for EPA and DHA. The study “concluded that fish and vegetable oil sources will not be adequate to meet future needs, but that algal oil and terrestrial plants modified genetically to produce EPA and DHA could provide for the increased world demand.”
The realities of human nutritional needs, fish population collapses, and human population growth confronts us with a series of choices. We can attempt to provide all humans alive today with adequate nutrition. And, in the attempt, exhaust cold water fish, turn the oceans into algae farms, and violate the very DNA of terrestrial plants, while creating mutant plants to serve us. We can work to reduce human population to a point where humans and cold water fish can both thrive and exist. Or, we can do nothing. And, the most privileged among us may enjoy adequate nutrition – for a time – while more and more humans fall victim to malnutrition, while fewer and fewer of us may realize our full human potential.
I remembered the trout I saw leaping near the Allegheny Reservoir. I remembered the ripples whispering with the trout’s passing. I thought of other fish who provide Omega-3 fats: the mesmerizing schools of mackerel twirling like underwater whirlpools, the once mighty runs of red salmon who made so much noise swimming upriver you could hear them a mile away, and the hardy cod who call the deep, cold seas of the North Atlantic home.
***
While I was trying to understand the Ohio River’s message contained in these experiences, I went looking for information on her fish, specifically. I landed on the Ohio River Fish Consumption Advisory Workgroup’s website. This Workgroup is a “multi-agency workgroup consisting of representatives from the six main stem states (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia) as well as the US EPA and the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission.”
The website featured rows of photos of fishermen holding up individual fish of different species. Under each photo, text described how often each species can be eaten and the chemical reason for the advisory. Under a photo of a walleye, for example, the text read “1 meal per month – PCBs.” Under a photo of a sauger, the text read “1 meal per month – Hg.” Under a photo of a white bass, the text read “6 meals per year – PCBs.” But worst of all, under the photos of both a common carp and a channel catfish, the text read “Do not eat – PCBs.” PCBs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency “belong to a broad family of man-made organic chemicals known as chlorinated hydrocarbons.” Hg is mercury.
This made me nauseous. But, probably not as nauseous as eating a common carp or channel catfish would. I wondered how it made the fish feel. I wondered how the chemicals made other animals who eat the fish feel. Mergansers eat fish. Bald eagles do, too. Canada geese are primarily herbivores, but they occasionally eat fish. Hopefully, they observe the advisories and eat less than one meal per month or 6 meals per year.
As I thought of all these creatures, I sensed I was getting closer to understanding the Ohio River’s meaning. That’s when the familiarity I felt while floating in my kayak came back to me. The first physical sensations I ever experienced must have been those I felt floating in my mother’s womb. But, I’m not just my mother’s son. I spent the first, most formative years of my life drinking the Ohio River’s water. I am the Ohio River’s son, too.
But, that wasn’t all of it. The Ohio River pushed me on. My memory drifted farther into the past. Floating was likely our oldest ancestors’ first activity. Floating is familiar because the first motions of Life on Earth began in the movement of water. I saw the primordial oceans receding, glaciers melting, and the Ohio River being born. The Ohio River is a mother. She is also a daughter of the Earth.
Her voice became clear then. I understood what she was saying. On the kayak trip, she showed me her children – mergansers, a bald eagle, a dragonfly, and shitting geese. A few days later, she drew my attention to global problems confronting humans, fish, and her kin, the oceans. To understand these problems, I delved into studies describing the extent of global destruction and found the fish advisories. Then, as I considered the pain industrial poisons cause the Ohio River’s children, she evoked the familiar sensation of floating in a mother’s womb.
The key was the word “familiar.” The Ohio River was asking me for news of her family. She gossips with her sister, the Mississippi, when she joins her near Cairo, IL. But, the Mississippi only offers correspondence from around North America. She listens to her cousins in the global water cycle, the clouds. Clouds and rivers speak similar, but not the same, languages. Sometimes the wind brings tidings from the oceans. But, the wind talks too fast and never stays long. With access to global information at my fingertips, she wanted my help.
Her questions may have been clear all along. Perhaps, my heart prevented me from hearing.
***
The news, of course, is heartbreaking. The 2018 Living Planet Index and Zoological Society of London’s Living Planet Report found that on average the abundance of vertebrate species’ populations monitored across the globe declined by 60% between 1970 and 2014. The study’s authors explained that humans are causing this decline through overexploitation of species, agriculture, and land conversion. This means that, in just 44 years, humans have destroyed more than half the world’s vertebrates. Things are worse for global freshwater species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish which have declined by 83 percent between 1970 and 2014, equivalent to 4% per year since 1970.
This is the arithmetic of atrocity. Every year, due to human destructiveness, the Ohio River’s family grows smaller and smaller.
The 2016 version of the Living Planet Report found that almost half (48 percent) of global river volume had been altered by flow regulation, fragmentation, or both. The authors noted that completion of all dams planned or under construction would mean that natural hydrologic flows would be lost for 93 percent of all river volume.
Most of the Ohio River’s sisters, like she is, are held captive by dams.
Just like the numbers are grim for the animals who live in water, the news is gut-wrenching for the global water cycle. Water is being poisoned on a massive scale. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization states that every day 2 million tons of sewage and other effluents drain into the world’s water. Industry discharges an estimated 300-400 megatons of waste into water bodies every year. And, globally, it is likely that over 80% of wastewater is released back into the water cycle without adequate treatment.
The water forming the Ohio River’s body and the bodies of her relatives is being poisoned.
I read these statistics out loud to the Ohio River. I’m not sure how I thought she’d respond. I waited for several days. Nothing came through my dreams. Inspiration was absent. Writing about other aspects of the river failed. For the first time, the Ohio River had nothing to say to me.
Will Falk is the author of How Dams Fall: On Representing the Colorado River in the First-Ever American Lawsuit Seeking Rights for a Major Ecosystem. He is a practicing rights of Nature attorney and a member of DGR.
by DGR News Service | Oct 18, 2019 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Indigenous Autonomy
Editors note: The Columbia River has been turned into a slave of civilization, forced to provide hydroelectricity, barge transport, and irrigation water to cities and big agribusiness. It is shackled in concrete and dying from dams, from overfishing, from toxins, from nuclear waste, from acoustic barrages and armored shorelines and logging and endless atrocities.
We at Deep Green Resistance do not believe that the federal government will accede to demands such as these. Furthermore, there are thousands of dams currently under construction or proposed worldwide. There are millions of dams in the “United States.” The salmon, the Orca whales—they have no time to waste. Everything is heading in the wrong direction. Therefore, we call for a militant resistance movement around the world to complement aboveground resistance movements and to dismantle industrial infrastructure.
Featured image: The Columbia River is constrained by Bonneville Dam, and bracketed by clearcuts, highways, and utility corridors. Public domain.
Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, October 14, 2019, the Yakama Nation and Lummi Nation hosted a press conference urging the removal of the lower Columbia River dams as part of a broader call for federal repudiation of the offensive doctrine of Christian discovery, which the United States uses to justify federal actions that impair the rights of Native Nations. The press conference took place this morning at Celilo Park near Celilo Village, Oregon.
“The false religious doctrine of Christian discovery was used by the United States to perpetuate crimes of genocide and forced displacement against Native Peoples. The Columbia River dams were built on this false legal foundation, and decimated the Yakama Nation’s fisheries, traditional foods, and cultural sites,” said Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman JoDe Goudy. “On behalf of the Yakama Nation and those things that cannot speak for themselves, I call on the United States to reject the doctrine of Christian discovery and immediately remove the Bonneville Dam, Dalles Dam, and John Day Dam.”
The doctrine of Christian discovery is the fiction that when Christian European monarchs obtained what was for them new knowledge of the Western Hemisphere, those monarchs had a religious right of domination over all non-Christian lands. This doctrine was propagated by the Roman Catholic Church through a series of papal bulls in the 15th century, including a papal bull authorizing Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans” and to place them into perpetual slavery and take their property. The Roman Catholic Church then implemented a framework where the right to subjugate the Americas was split between Spain and Portugal, although they were later joined by other European states. The doctrine was therefore one of domination and dehumanization of Native Peoples, and was used to perpetuate the most widespread genocide in human history.
In 1823, the United States Supreme Court used the doctrine of Christian discovery as the legal basis for the United States’ exercise of authority over Native lands and Peoples. See Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823). The Court found that the United States holds clear title to all Native lands subject only to the Native Nation’s right of occupancy, which the United States can terminate through purchase or conquest. In relying on the doctrine of Christian discovery, the Court described it as “the principle that discovery gave title to the government . . . against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Id. at 573. The Court used this religious doctrine of domination and dehumanization to unilaterally deprive Native Nations of their sovereign rights, racially juxtaposing the rights of “Christian peoples” against those “heathens” and “fierce savages.” Id. at 577, 590.
In the years that followed, this false religious doctrine became the bedrock for what are now considered to be foundational principles of federal Indian law. In United States v. Kagama, 188 U.S. 375 (1886), and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553 (1903), the Court announced Congress’ extra-constitutional plenary power over all Indian affairs—the plenary power doctrine — which it justified by pointing to Native Nations’ loss of sovereign, diplomatic, economic, and property rights upon first ‘discovery’ by Europeans. In The Cherokee Tobacco, 78 U.S. 616 (1870), the Court applied the doctrine and held that Congress can unilaterally abrogate Treaty rights with subsequent legislation unless there is an express exemption provided in the Treaty—the last-in- time doctrine. In Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978), the Court deprived Native Nations of criminal jurisdiction over non-members based on the statement in M’Intosh that Native Nations’ rights “to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished” by European ‘discovery’ — the diminished tribal sovereignty doctrine. These legal doctrines have been weaponized against Native Nations ever since, including by Congress in authorizing construction of the Bonneville Dam, Dalles Dam, and John Day Dam without the Yakama Nation’s free, prior, and informed consent.
The history of the lower Columbia River dams can be traced back to 1792, when United States Merchant Robert Gray sailed up our N’chi’Wana (Columbia River) and claimed the territory for the United States. Mr. Gray entered our lands and performed a religious doctrine of discovery ceremony by raising an American flag and burying coins beneath the soil, thereby proclaiming dominion over our lands and our families without our knowledge or consent. Following the War of 1812, the United States and England falsely claimed joint authority over what became known as the Oregon Territory until 1846, when England relinquished its claim south of the 49th parallel. Having eliminated British opposition, Congress passed the Oregon Territorial Act of 1848 and the Washington Territorial Act of 1853. Both Territorial Acts reserve the United States’ claim to the sole right to treat with Native Nations, thereby maintaining the federal government’s doctrine of Christian discovery-based claims.
At the Walla Walla Treaty Council in May and June of 1855, the Yakama Nation’s ancestors met with United States representatives to negotiate the Treaty with the Yakamas of June 9, 1855. Article III, paragraph 2 of the Treaty reserves the Yakama Nation’s “right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places . . .” including many places throughout the Columbia River basin. At no point during these negotiations did the United States express a claimed right of dominion over the Yakama Nation’s traditional lands that would allow the United States to unilaterally ignore the Treaty. Territorial Governor Isaac I. Stevens did not explain that the United States would dam the rivers and violate the Yakama Nation’s Treaty-reserved fishing rights without the Yakama Nation’s free, prior, and informed consent.
What followed was a 100-year conquest of the Columbia River by the United States. First, the United States Supreme Court paved the way by affirming federal regulatory authority over navigable waterways like the Columbia River in Gilman v. Philadelphia, 70 U.S. 713 (1866), and Congress’ extra-constitutional plenary authority over Indian affairs in United States v. Kagama, 188 U.S. 375 (1886). Congress then exercised this supposed authority by passing a series of legislative acts without the Yakama Nation’s consent, including Rivers and Harbors Acts, Right of Way Acts, the General Dams Act, the Federal Water Power Act, and the Bonneville Project Act, all of which facilitated construction of the lower Columbia River dams without regard for the Yakama Nation’s Treaty-reserved rights.
During the Depression, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act authorizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to approve public works projects like the Bonneville Dam. Construction started in 1933, but President Roosevelt’s approval of the project was quickly deemed unconstitutional in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). The authorization was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority from Congress to the President. It should have been deemed unconstitutional under the United States Constitution’s Supremacy Clause — which says the Treaty of 1855 is the “supreme law of the land” — because it was inconsistent with the rights reserved to the Yakama Nation by Treaty. Any argument to the contrary is an argument that Congress has plenary power over Indian affairs rooted in the false religious doctrine of Christian discovery.
Congress quickly re-approved the Bonneville Dam’s construction, which was completed in 1938. The Dalles Dam was built from 1952 to 1957, and the John Day Dam was built from 1968 to 1972. The Yakama Nation, as co-equal sovereign and signatory to the Treaty of 1855, never approved the construction of these dams. They inundated the villages, burial grounds, fishing places, and ceremonial sites that we used since time immemorial. Celilo Falls was the trading hub for Native Peoples throughout the northwest. The United States detonated it with explosives and drowned it with the Dalles Dam. After the Dalles Dam’s construction had already started, the United States negotiated an insignificant settlement with the Yakama Nation for the damage caused by the Dam. This was domination and coercion, not consent.
Today, the lower Columbia River dams stand as physical monuments to the domination and dehumanization that the United States continues to impose on Native Nations under the false religious doctrine of Christian discovery. “Columbus Day is a federal holiday celebrating the Christian-European invasion of our lands under the colonial doctrine of Christian discovery. Today, the Yakama Nation rejects that narrative by celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day and calling on the United States to remove the lower Columbia River dams that were built without our consent using the same false religious doctrine,” said Chairman Goudy.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 7, 2018 | Listening to the Land
Featured image: Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. © Michelle McCarron
by Will Falk / Voices for Biodiversity
I need to come clean. When I joined Colorado River Ecosystem v. Colorado, the first-ever federal lawsuit to seek personhood and the rights of nature for a major ecosystem, my intentions were not completely sincere. The truth is, I never thought we had a chance in hell. I saw the lawsuit as an opportunity to guide concerned people through a process that would shatter their false hopes, replace them with experiential knowledge of the vast difficulties inherent in working for change within the legal system and catalyze more effective action.
The lawsuit failed, of course. The Colorado Attorney General privately threatened the attorney representing us, Jason Flores-Williams, with sanctions if he did not withdraw the case. When he refused, the Attorney General formally filed a request for sanctions with the court and a motion to dismiss in the same afternoon. Flores-Williams, afraid that he could not respond adequately to both the sanctions and the motion to dismiss, voluntarily withdrew the case.
When filing a lawsuit, however, it’s best not to proclaim publicly that you expect the case to fail. Judges jealously guard their calendars from anything they perceive to be a waste of time. Corporate and government lawyers vigilantly monitor individuals involved in cases filed against them for any opportunity to argue that novel legal theories like the rights of nature are frivolous, to label them as attempts to harass corporations or government, and to demand that they be punished with sanctions. Media pundits search for audio clips and social media posts to take out of context while accusing grassroots groups of filing lawsuits as a backhanded fundraising ploy.
At the same time, and in order to shatter as many hopes as possible, it was necessary to attract attention. No one likes a loser. If our supporters caught so much as a whiff of my true disbeliefs, when the case failed, they could mistake the failure as the result of the half-assed efforts of activists who weren’t truly committed, instead of the result of a legal system designed to protect exploitation of the natural world.
So I suspended my disbelief and dove zealously into the work. For four months, the lawsuit was my full-time job. I sifted through case law for opinions supporting our position. I wrote a portion of the document, called the “complaint,” that signaled the official filing of the lawsuit. I wrote a series of articles describing the need for the rights of nature. I gave interviews to journalists, radio hosts and members of Comedy Central’s The Opposition production team.
And I bit my tongue over and over again.
In the five weeks before the case was dismissed, I put 4,000 miles on my 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee traveling with photographer Michelle McCarron around the Colorado River Basin. After all that stress, my poor Jeep’s transmission blew up yesterday, so I have nowhere to go and nothing to do but reflect. With time so short and the need for effective action so great, I wonder if I wasted my time appealing to a legal system that exists to protect those destroying the natural world. I wonder if I betrayed the trust of the good people rooting so hard for the lawsuit to succeed. Worst of all, I wonder if I betrayed the river.
***
I bit my tongue on the steps of the Alfred A. Arraj Federal Courthouse in Denver, for example. I stood before a crowd gathered to hear me speak about the lawsuit. We were supposed to have a hearing, but the court had postponed it at the last minute. With so many of us traveling to Denver from across the Colorado River Basin, we decided to proceed with the press conference anyway.
© Michelle McCarron
It wasn’t the anxiety that public speaking can induce that produced the tremor in my hand, the acid in my gut and the quiver in my voice. It was a simple question, unresolved: Is it dishonest to speak of hope when you feel none?
I began my speech explaining that I had arrived there after spending three weeks with the river. I recounted the violence I witnessed in La Poudre Pass, where the Grand Ditch lies in wait to steal the Colorado River’s water moments after the union of snowpack, sunshine and gravity gives her birth. I reported the energy expended in pumping the river’s water uphill from Lake Granby reservoir to Shadow Mountain reservoir and then into Grand Lake before the Alva B. Adams tunnel drags the water 13 miles across the Continental Divide and beneath Rocky Mountain National Park to meet Front Range demands. I described the view from Palisade, Colorado, where peaches are grown in the middle of the desert and crisscrossing canals, seen from the mountains, appear as vast, mechanical tattoos sewn into the flesh of the land.
I paused at this point, knowing that after presenting my audience with this series of distressing images, I was supposed to leave them with a positive message. While I reflected on what I had seen and said, however, I felt the river’s truth spill over me.
For weeks, I thought I had been listening to the Colorado River. But she isn’t a river anymore. Not truly. She has been so diverted and dammed, experienced so much extraction and exploitation, that the best way to describe her is not as a river, but as an industrial project, as a series of tunnels, concrete channels and canals, as another tortured corpse stretched across civilization’s rack.
While this realization washed over me, I considered our lawsuit and the rights of nature. I wondered if it is possible to grant rights to a ghost. I questioned whether the Colorado River could ever recover from what’s been done to her. Grief threatened to overwhelm me, to silence me in despair. If I had been by myself, caught in the flow of these emotions in private, or if I was simply being honest, I would have fallen to the concrete and wept. I steadied myself and as the despair trickled away, rage rushed in to take its place. That rage burned with the heat of the desert sun reflected in the Colorado’s face and I knew that, ghost or not, she who haunts is not dead.
But, again, I said nothing of her rage, of her attempts to knock down dams, of her furious floods. I said nothing to acknowledge her ghost. Instead, in calm, reasonably legal tones, I urged the crowd to support the rights of nature.
***
The case is now finished. I can stop biting my tongue and spit the blood out. I can be honest. If I betrayed you, I am sorry. If I betrayed the river, I beg forgiveness. As an act of penance, I offer the stories that follow. These stories are what I really think. These stories are what I wish I said when the journalists were scribbling down my words, when I sat, live and on air, at the radio microphones, and when the cameras were recording. These stories are the truth.
We listed the river as the only plaintiff, so it could be properly said that the Colorado River herselfwas suing the State of Colorado. Major ecosystems are not currently considered capable of bearing rights or filing their own lawsuits under American law, so I agreed, with four others, to serve as a “next friend” of the Colorado River. Similar to guardians ad litem, next friends represent the interests of those deemed legally incompetent, such as children, the mentally disabled and rivers.
Simply put, next friends speak for those who can’t speak for themselves.
On a general level, it’s not difficult to understand the Colorado River’s interests. A simple Google search will tell you that pollution kills the river’s inhabitants, climate change threatens the snowpack that provides much of the river’s water, and dams prevent the river from flowing to the sea in the Gulf of California. But, friendship, even legal “next friendship,” entails an intimate and personal relationship. To best represent the Colorado River’s interests, to be her friend, I wanted to build this intimate, personal relationship with her. To build a relationship with someone is to speak with her, to spend time with her, to listen to her. And that’s what I did.
My trip with Michelle around the Colorado River Basin was guided by two questions. Everywhere we went, I asked the Colorado River: “Who are you? And, what do you need?” I asked these questions out loud, so she could hear them. I will not apologize for talking with a river.
© Michelle McCarron
The Colorado River speaks, but apparently not in a language many humans understand. Water is one of life’s original vernaculars, and the Colorado River speaks an ancient dialect. Snowpack murmurs in the melting sun. Rare desert rain drops off willow branches to ring across lazy pools. Streams, running over dappled stones, sing treble while distant falls take the bass.
I am human, so I am an animal. Even though the colonization of generations of my ancestors, personal trauma and cultural conditioning threaten to deafen me, I am still capable, through my animal body, of hearing the languages of life. And I believe you are capable, too. If you’ll only try.
Though the lawsuit failed, I made a friend. When your friend is in grave danger, you do everything in your power to protect her. If you don’t, you cannot call yourself her friend. The Colorado River is in grave danger and as her friend, I know I must do everything I can to protect her. If my animality gives me the ears to listen, friendship requires that I find the tongue to translate the languages of life.
Human, animal, friend…these three existences combine and compel me to translate her voice from the languages of life into English.
***
To truly understand someone, you must begin at her birth. So, Michelle and I spent two days looking for the Colorado River’s headwaters in the cold and snow above La Poudre Pass on the north edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. The pass was accessible by an unpaved, winding, pot-holed trek named Long Draw Road. It took us fourteen miles through pine and fir forests and past the frigid Long Draw Reservoir before ending abruptly in a flat where the red trunks and brown branches of winter willows braced themselves against the breeze.
The road was covered in an inch of frosty mud that required slow speeds to avoid sliding into roadside ditches. The road’s ruggedness and incessant bumps combined with sub-freezing temperatures to ask us if we were serious about seeing the river’s headwaters. I was worried that Michelle’s ’91 Toyota Previa might struggle up the pass, but the van continued to live up to the Previa model’s cult status.
Long Draw Road foreshadowed the violence we would find at the river’s headwaters. Swathes of clearcut forests escorted us along the road to the pass. The Forest Service must have been too lazy to remove any single trees that fell on the road because their employees had simply chainsawed every tree within fifty yards of the road. About three miles from the road’s end, we ran into a long, low dam trapping mountain runoff into Long Draw Reservoir. We had been expecting to find wilderness in La Poudre Pass, so encountering the dam felt like running into a wall in the dark.
The clearcuts, dam and reservoir were grievous wounds, but none of them were as bad as the Grand Ditch. We walked a quarter-mile from the end of Long Draw Road and found a sign marking the location of the river’s headwaters. On our way to the sign, we crossed over a 30-foot deep and 30-foot wide ditch pushing water from west to east. We were on the west side of the Continental Divide, where water naturally flows west, so we contemplated what black magic engineers had employed to achieve this feat. The ditch was as conspicuous in La Poudre Pass as a scarred-over gouge on a child’s face.
© Michelle McCarron
The Grand Ditch was begun in the late 1880s, dug by exploited crews armed with hand tools and risky dynamite. It was built to carry water, diverted from the Colorado River’s headwaters, east to growing cities on Colorado’s Front Range. About two feet of swift water ran through the ditch. Even before melting snowpack forms the tiny mountain streams identifiable as the Colorado River’s origins, water is stolen from her. Pausing in a half-foot of powder, I wondered whether the water stored here would end up on a Fort Collins golf course or stirred by the fins of a vaquita porpoise in the Gulf of California.
I asked theColorado Riverfor the tale of her nativity. She described her birth from a wild womb formed by the oceans, the sun’s consistency, heavy winter clouds, tall mountain peaks and snowpack. She rues that heremergence from this womb led immediately to her exploitation. And the young Colorado River hates the violence that will follow her the rest of her life.
***
In most places, life protects themodern human’s fragile sense of self-importance by veiling the weight of time in the soft accumulation of soil, by disguising the vastness of the universe in the reassuring consistency of an undisturbed horizon and by salving existential angst with a diversity of nonhuman companions. There are places, however, where life refuses to disguise herself and human self-importance disintegrates.
The red rock deserts and canyon lands of southeastern Utah, where we followed the Colorado River, are some of these places. The reality of time, frozen and piled where the land was rent into mesas and plateaus, crashes down on human consciousness where human bones shiver in the shadows and foreshadows are whispered by stones, boulders and the bones of the land.
© Michelle McCarron
She beckoned us south through these lands. She fled through the sheer red rock walls that she sculpted as monuments to her power. She paused, at times, in warm pools, to let the colors of stone reflect from her face and to rejoice in her own beauty. To interpret her work as vanity is to misunderstand; only her creations are worthy of her celebration. The waters flowing through our bodies coursed against our skin and tugged on our veins, yearning to mingle with their kin. We ached with regret for the moment life would necessarily drag us from her banks.
Mesmerized and seeking the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, we got lost in Canyonlands National Park. We failed to reach the confluence, and thus failed to speak with the two rivers. At first, we were angry with ourselves. We ended up hiking close to fourteen miles in seven hours, up canyon walls abruptly rising six or seven hundred feet, through a rainstorm and across canyon floors covered in several inches of loose sand using muscles we forgot we had. We thought we had done it all for nothing. Worst of all, feeling a responsibility to tell the Colorado River’s story, we thought that we had let the river down.
© Michelle McCarron
But the deeper I think about it, the clearer an image of the river, waving through the orange sunshine of a desert dusk, becomes. She seems to smile with the compassionate gleam of a wise elder. “You should have known,” she says. And now I do: We did not simply miss the cairns, lose the trail, and end up five miles south of the confluence and six miles from our cars after sunset. No, we lost more than the trail. We lost our self-importance. And only humility remained.
***
Water is life. But water is also death. Water brings a pleasant taste to the parched tongue, but water also brings stinging numbness to the warm-blooded. Water taken through the esophagus brings hydration. Water taken through the lungs brings suffocation. Water may be disrespected for a time, but the longer the passage of water is hampered, the angrier water becomes. Water has a long memory and, where others forget, water carries pollutants and poisons for decades.
When I think about what it would mean to fully recognize the rights of the Colorado River to exist, flourish, regenerate and naturally evolve, I know the river will demand a reckoning. I know this lyrically and I know this ecologically. Lyrically, the river is full of righteous rage. Ecologically, too many humans have come to depend on the exploitation of the river and the rest of the natural world. The balance that must be achieved will come with profound pain. Humans will die, their lifestyles will be dramatically changed and those who require the gifts of civilization will see those gifts taken.
The black waters of the dammed Blue and Colorado Rivers stroked the Dillon Reservoir walls with their dark thoughts and taught me these lessons. It was several hours after sunset and well below freezing. A certain morbidity rose from the artificial lake and crystallized to hang in the air. Somewhere out of sight, but perilously near, I could feel the stirrings of anger. I sensed that the anger was slow to swell, but irresistible when fully aroused. I was mesmerized by the stars spilling over ripples and by the crescent moon’s silver threads, two nights from new, dancing across the water. In the town of Dillon below, harsh electric lights sparked and crackled with a troubled tension.
The images came unbidden. The first faint crevice appeared in the earth-filled wall. Water hissed as it pushed through. Rivulets appeared as tears rolling down the dam’s face. Then, a series of sharp cracks rang out like the reports of heavy ordnance announcing the onset of battle. Earth and stone blasted away to fall into the valley. Water rushed into Dillon. Poles holding power lines snapped like toothpicks. Chunks of asphalt were ripped up. Automobiles flipped and tumbled like pebbles on a creek bed. Factory outlet stores, gas stations and multistory hotels were washed away.
© Michelle McCarron
The white torrents that cascaded from the broken dam were flecked with joy. The waters retook the Blue River’s original path. The waters from the Colorado, knowing they would never rejoin their mother, were gladly adopted by the Blue. It was all over in a matter of minutes. This sudden demonstration of natural power passed and a quiet peace settled where Dillon once stood. The peace wasn’t without pain. Human bodies floated facedown among the wreckage. The water regretted the deaths, but knew the human bodies would be broken down and used to heal the wounds humanity had created.
As the vividness of the images faded, I was left with the echo of a warning. I recalled all the dams in the Colorado River Basin, all dams everywhere, and I prayed that a peace could be made with the dammed waters of the world.
© Michelle McCarron
***
I have seen the silver sparks of minnows playing under brown stones. I have watched the wind shower gray pools with gold cottonwood leaves. I have been washed away in the vertigo caused by the river’s speed conflicting with the primordial stillness of canyon walls. Arundhati Roy wrote, “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
I’ll never be able to drive past a dam in the Colorado River Basin and ignore the highly endangered bonytail chub who can no longer visit most of their traditional spawning beds. I’ll never be able to read the billboards praising the peaches of Palisade, Colorado, or the melons of Green River, Utah, without remembering dried up willow forests where the songs of nimble southwestern willow flycatchers have fallen silent. And whenever I close my eyes to recall the Colorado River, that blue ribbon twisting through rocky mountains and red rock canyons, I won’t be able to unsee her suffering.
© Michelle McCarron
As I process the last four months, I’m left with Roy’s brilliant words: I am no longer innocent and it is time to be accountable. Disbeliefs may only be suspended for so long before they slither through slits in the veil separating consciousness and subconsciousness as anxieties. Anxieties, similarly, may only be silenced for so long before they push through lips and teeth as words.
Disbeliefs, anxieties and words, when true, spawn in reality. The reality is that the loss of life on Earth currently outpaces our various resistance movements’ responses. Those in power enforce infinite growth on a finite planet. The planet’s life-support systems are resilient, but they can be pushed beyond their ability to recover. This means there is a deadline. While it is unclear when that deadline will pass, the deadline exists. If we do not stop the assaults on the planet’s life-support systems like the Colorado River, life on Earth may be impossible for a very long time, if not forever. We have little time to waste on ineffective tactics.
Hear the white crash of her torrents on the boulders she drags through the desert, feel the unyielding red rock she pushes through, lose your balance in the impatience of her swift streams, and you’ll know: The Colorado River needs to provide her waters and yearns for her home in the sea.
© Michelle McCarron
In all my time 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, her fears are physical and real. She fears poisonous mercury and too much selenium. She fears climate change causing less and less snow to fall and depriving her of replenishment. She fears dams.
If I could start the lawsuit all over again, maybe I would refuse the interviews, refuse to write the complaint, refuse to write anything at all. Instead, I would insist that you sit on the river’s banks, listening. And if you hear the Colorado River’s rage as she slaps the face of a dam, you’ll know that court orders aren’t the only way dams fall.
© Michelle McCarron
This article and the photos therein are the sole property of Will Falk and © Michelle McCarron and may not be reproduced or republished elsewhere without the explicit permission of the author or photographer.
This article originally appeared at Voices For Biodiversity. VFB is grateful to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) for introducing us to Will Falk and Michelle McCarron. CELDF is doing excellent work helping communities fight for nature’s rights and we are honored to collaborate with their team.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 11, 2017 | Lobbying
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.
***
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.
***
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?
