by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 28, 2017 | Lobbying, Protests & Symbolic Acts
Editor’s note: The first Rights of Nature lawsuit in the United States, Colorado River v. Colorado, was filed September 25, 2017, in Denver, Colorado. The full text of the complaint can be found here.
by Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition
Denver, CO – The Colorado Attorney General has threatened the attorney who filed the first federal rights of nature lawsuit with sanctions if he does not voluntarily withdraw the Complaint.
Rights of Nature activists will gather at dusk (4:30 pm) on Friday, December 1st, outside the Alfred A. Arraj Federal Courthouse, 901 19th St, Denver, CO 80294 in a display of creative resistance. They will demand that the Colorado River have her day in court, condemn the Attorney General’s intimidatory tactics, and call for the American legal system to grant the Colorado River Ecosystem the same rights as corporations.
Attorney Jason Flores-Williams, in a letter he sent to the Colorado Attorney General’s office Tuesday morning, November 27th, stated, “The Attorney General’s threat of sanctions is a legally baseless attempt to harass and intimidate a civil rights attorney in good standing who has dedicated his career to protecting the powerless from the powerful.” A copy of the letter is published here.
“They didn’t threaten to sanction Exxon attorneys for lying about global warming, or Bank of America attorneys for fraudulently foreclosing on people’s homes, or Nestle attorneys for privatizing our water and selling it back to us—but try to equal the playing field between corporations and the environment and they try to personally damage you,” Flores-Williams has also pointed out. “It’s the playbook.”
Will Falk, a writer, attorney, and one of the next friends in the lawsuit, denounced the Attorney General’s threats, saying, “The Attorney General is duty-bound to work solely for the good of the people, but through these threats the Attorney General is working solely for the good of corporations.”
by DGR Editor | Nov 23, 2017 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Featured image by Michelle McCarron
by Michelle McCarron
When I was asked to tell in pictures the story of the Colorado river, I’ll admit that besides being honoured to be asked, that I also felt a little overwhelmed. How could I, an immigrant settler, tell one of the most American stories of all? Before I even began I was humbled by the river’s story.
We know of the Colorado’s significance in the spiritual and practical lives of the native peoples who lived in harmony with her flow. Historical accounts recall her part in the ‘taming’ of the west by European colonisers. Powell, his expeditions and novels were lauded for the accounts of their grand adventures down the river and her canyons, adding to the aura of the west.
Her beauty is world renowned. As she winds her way around Horseshoe bend and carves her majestic path through the red sandstone of the Grand Canyon, she is the Mona Lisa of the natural world. Since the dawn of time she has been sculpting the earth as it rose to meet her, working her way to its heart, unveiling its history layer by layer as she went. For millions of years.
In a relatively short timespan of 150 years humans industrialised and multiplied to such as extent that we felt compelled to change what a river had been doing for millennia. So along the Colorado we built massive dams and thousands of miles of infrastructure to control her according to the insatiable energy and water needs of 40 million of us across 7 states. But what is the complete story today that plays out along her foreshortened journey from the clouds to the sea?
In September a first of its kind lawsuit was filed in federal court in Denver seeking Rights of Nature for the Colorado river. The Rights of Nature movement seeks protections for nature that assert that nature has inalienable rights to flourish and regenerate regardless of it’s use to humans. The concept of the Rights of Nature movement is built on the premise that If the corporations that profit from earth’s resources have rights then why can’t nature have rights? Why is one awarded privileges and protections and the other not? Nature is not our subject so why do we act like her master?
Will Falk, a writer, attorney and member of the activist group Deep Green Resistance is one of 7 individuals named on the lawsuit as a ‘friend’ of the river. Will and I came together to tell the river’s story, highlight the case and prepare for what it’s outcome may mean in the stakes to protect life on earth. What will it mean for us and other species if the legal system refuses to grant nature the protections she needs given the current crisis, that might save her from annihilation by corporations? Have you thought about what that world looks like? I have.
When we can’t watch the birds or hear their song anymore, when all the polar bears are gone, when we can’t go to the beach because the beach is there no longer and the glaciers have all melted.
The intrinsic worth of nature has no value in the industrialised global economy. An endangered species knows this and so too do four endemic fish species of the Colorado river on the brink of extinction. Whether or not you value life, one thing is certain. Extinction is forever.
As Will and I began our journey, I realised that I had been perhaps a little naive to think that at the Colorado’s headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, I would find some wildness intact. The reality is a river shackled by a canal called ‘The Grand Ditch’ wrestling her into compliance at her birthplace, sending her through valleys and rusty culverts to a series of reservoirs. From there she is forced uphill and through a 13 mile tunnel blasted beneath the peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park. From west of the great continental divide the Colorado is wrangled east to front range farmland and thirsty cities where no cities should be. This is just the beginning of her life.
Moving southwest through her Upper Basin, along the Yampa and Green Rivers we followed a sea of oil and gas wells in Colorado and Utah. We took a random diversion off the highway near Roosevelt, Utah and followed it into the mesa, uncovering a litany of drill pads disemboweling the earth of its carbon. Any road would have revealed the same thing. Coal fired power plants and their tailings ponds put the finishing touches on an industrial landscape where city billboards proclaim their love for coal and drilling. Out here is energy nirvana for oil and gas fracking companies getting drunk on the resources beneath America’s public lands.
However we spend our lives, one thing is clear. Nothing happens without nature. Without nature we have nothing. Yet nothing may be what we deserve. Though not what other species deserve or future generations who have played no part in our narcissism. We have a choice which we need to wake up to and act upon. Do we continue to let corporations do what they want? Including mining and destroying our lands, displacing us, poisoning our water and selling it back to us in plastic bottles? Or do we protect what we love and stand for something much bigger than ourselves? It’s a choice between doing nothing or doing something.
Wherever you are there’s a Colorado waiting to hear your choice.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 22, 2017 | Listening to the Land
Featured image by Michelle McCarron
Editor’s note: This is the latest installment from Will Falk as he follows the Colorado River from headwaters to delta, before heading to court to argue for the Colorado River to be recognized as having inherent rights. More details on the lawsuit are here. The index of dispatches is here.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition
Water is life. But, water is also death. Water brings 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 a 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 on the air. Somewhere out of sight, but perilously near, I could feel the stirrings of anger. I sensed 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 beginning 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 multi-story hotels were washed away.
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 humans 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.
Image by Michelle McCarron
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 17, 2017 | Listening to the Land
Featured image by Michelle McCarron
Editor’s note: This is the latest installment from Will Falk as he follows the Colorado River from headwaters to delta, before heading to court to argue for the Colorado River to be recognized as having inherent rights. More details on the lawsuit are here. The index of dispatches is here.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition
Tuesday, I stood on the steps of the Alfred A. Arraj Federal Courthouse in Denver before a crowd gathered to hear my thoughts as one of the “next friends” in our lawsuit seeking personhood for the Colorado River. We were supposed to have a hearing, but the court 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.
It wasn’t the anxiety public speaking can induce that produced the tremor in my hand, the acid in my gut, or the quiver in my voice. It was a simple question, unresolved: Is it dishonest to speak of hope when you feel none?
Tuesday also marked the beginning of my fourth week traveling with the Colorado River. For going on four weeks now, I’ve pestered her with two questions. Who are you? And, what do you need?
I began my speech explaining that I arrived there after 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 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, CO where peaches are grown in the middle of the desert and criss-crossing 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 a 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 three 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, I would have wept. But, the presence of the crowd steadied me and as the despair trickled away, rage rushed in to take its place. That rage burned with the heat of the desert sun from the Colorado’s face and I learned that ghost or not, she who haunts is not dead.
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by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 9, 2017 | Listening to the Land
Featured image by Michelle McCarron
Editor’s note: This is the latest installment from Will Falk as he follows the Colorado River from headwaters to delta, before heading to court to argue for the Colorado River to be recognized as having inherent rights. More details on the lawsuit are here. The index of dispatches is here.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition
In most places, Life protects the modern 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 while human bones shiver in the shadows and foreshadows whispered by stones, boulders and the bones of the land.
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 never got the photograph of the Confluence we sought. At first, we were angry at 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 which required muscles we forgot we had. We thought that we did it all for nothing. Worst of all, feeling a responsibility to tell the Colorado River’s story, we thought that we let the river down.
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 elder wisdom. “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.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
