![Webinar with Will Falk: Protect Thacker Pass [Dispatches from Thacker Pass]](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2021/08/Bildschirmfoto-29.jpg)
Dear Friend,
Please join NCRN on Wednesday August 25, 8 pm ET for a Webinar with Will Falk: Protect Thacker Pass.
Will Falk is an attorney, writer, poet, activist, and organizer with Protect Thacker Pass. Protect Thacker Pass is an “independent, grassroots collective of people” protecting the land and all life from a proposed lithium mine in the Central Basin, Nevada. For Thacker Pass Facebook click here.
Register here.
On January 15th of this year Will Falk and Max Wilbert staked their ecological hearts and souls on Protecting Thacker Pass, or Peehee mu’ Huh as the area is known to the Indigenous. Members of the local Fort McDermitt tribe are currently petitioning the courts to stop the destruction of the land and their native ancestors buried beneath it from the bulldozers of Lithium Americas.
The NCRN, in conversation with Will and tribal members, will discuss how the structure of our system negates tribal rights and tribal history in order to obtain natural resources – in this case, lithium, used to feed the electric car manufacturers who have convinced so many that electric cars are ‘green’.
For more information go to the NCRN post here. See you soon!
Susie Beiersdorfer
President NCRN
For more on the Protect Thacker Pass campaign
CONTACT: media@resistline3.org or 406-552-8764
Jennifer K. Falcon, jennifer@ienearth.org, 218-760- 9958
(St Paul)- Indigenous water protectors and allies will gather at the Minnesota State Capitol in late August for Treaties Not Tar Sands. From August 23rd to 26th, Indigenous grandmothers from White Earth Nation will hold ceremonial space on the Capitol lawn. On August 25th, hundreds of people will gather for a rally from 2 – 5 PM to call on Governor Walz and President Biden to stop the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline from transporting tar sands oil across northern Minnesota. On Wednesday night after the rally, some water protectors intend to hold space and camp out on the Capitol lawn.
The primary public event, the rally on August 25th, coincides with the end of the Treaty People Walk for Water. Led by Indigenous water protectors, the walk began on August 7th from the headwaters of the Mississippi River, which is the site of several recent Line 3 spills. The walkers are bringing a message from the frontlines to Governor Tim Walz and President Joe Biden at the Capitol: “Stop Line 3!”
August 25th: Treaties not Tar Sands Rally details:
August 24th: Additional Media Availability
Press are invited to attend a media availability with the Indigenous grandmothers leading ceremony and other organizers at the Capitol at 11:30 AM on August 24th.
Press are welcome to attend the second day’s ceremonial opening that morning at 10 AM. While you may be permitted to document some elements of ceremony, please respect requests from Indigenous leaders to stop filming or photographing at any point.
There are opportunities for photo and scheduled interviews Monday the 23rd to Friday the 27th.
The Ceremony at the Capitol has been organized by elder women from the White Earth Nation, and the events including the rally and encampment are organized by groups including the RISE Coalition, Indigenous Environmental Network, and MN350, and are endorsed by a broad coalition of Minnesota racial and environmental justice groups. For more information visit: Treaties Not Tar Sands and the event Facebook page.
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Established in 1990, The Indigenous Environmental Network is an international environmental justice nonprofit that works with tribal grassroots organizations to build the capacity of Indigenous communities. I EN’s activities include empowering Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, the health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities.
Learn more here: ienearth.org
This article originally appeared in Common Dreams.
“We must keep Arctic oil in the ground if we want a livable planet for future generations.”
By Jake Johnson
A federal judge on Wednesday tossed out construction permits for a sprawling, multibillion-dollar Alaska oil drilling project that the Trump administration approved and the Biden Interior Department defended in court earlier this year, infuriating Indigenous groups, climate advocates, and scientists.
In a 110-page decision (pdf), Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court for Alaska ruled that the Trump administration failed to adequately consider the climate impacts of the Willow project, which—if completed—would produce up to 160,000 barrels of oil a day over a 30-year period.
“We are hopeful that the administration won’t give the fossil fuel industry another chance to carve up this irreplaceable Arctic landscape with drilling rigs, roads, and pipelines.”
—Jeremy Lieb, Earthjustice
Specifically, Gleason deemed “arbitrary and capricious” the Bureau of Land Management’s failure to include potential greenhouse gas emissions from foreign oil consumption in its analysis of the project, which was planned by ConocoPhillips. Gleason also faulted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for not detailing how polar bears would be protected from the massive fossil fuel initiative, which would include the construction of several new oil drilling sites and hundreds of miles of pipeline.
A spokesperson for ConocoPhillips said the company intends to weigh its options in the wake of the judge’s decision, which environmentalists hailed as a “resounding win” for the climate.
“We were very surprised to see the Biden administration, which has promised historic progress on climate change, defending this plan in court—but today’s decision gives the administration the opportunity to reconsider the project in light of its commitment to address the climate emergency,” Earthjustice attorney Jeremy Lieb said in a statement. “We are hopeful that the administration won’t give the fossil fuel industry another chance to carve up this irreplaceable Arctic landscape with drilling rigs, roads, and pipelines.”
“We must keep Arctic oil in the ground if we want a livable planet for future generations,” Lieb added.
Kristen Miller, acting executive director at the Alaska Wilderness League, said Gleason’s ruling vindicates environmentalists’ warnings that “the Trump bureau downplayed the significance of climate change, underestimated emissions, and ignored the concerns of local Indigenous communities toward increased oil and gas extraction in the region.”
“The Biden administration must now review Willow with a fresh eye,” said Miller. “The reality is that a massive oil project like Willow, so close to local communities and projected to emit hundreds of millions of metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere over the course of its lifetime, moves us away from our nation’s long-term climate and environmental justice goals and simply should not move forward.”
The Willow decision comes as the Biden administration is facing mounting criticism from lawmakers for shielding major fossil fuel projects from legal challenges. In recent weeks, scientists have made increasingly clear that oil and gas extraction must stop immediately if the worst of the climate crisis is to be averted.
On Monday, dozens of Democratic members of Congress sent a letter imploring President Joe Biden to revoke permits for Line 3, a major pipeline project that would damage the climate as much as 50 new coal-fired power plants.
“President Biden: please quit greenlighting fossil fuel projects!” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), one of the lawmakers who led the Line 3 letter, tweeted last week. “This must stop.”
This article originally appeared in Protect Thacker Pass.
By Max Wilbert
The great poet and playwright James Baldwin wrote in 1953 that “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.”
Perhaps never has this been truer than in this era of converging ecological crises: global warming, biodiversity collapse, desertification and soil erosion, ocean acidification, dead zones, plastic pollution, sprawling habitat destruction, and the total saturation of our environment with radioactive or toxic chemicals.
Ignorance is not bliss; it is dangerous.
That is why I am so concerned that, while searching for solutions to global warming, many people imagine that fossil fuels can be simply replaced with solar and wind energy, that gas tanks can be swapped for lithium batteries, and that this will solve the problem.
For years, I have been arguing that this is wrong, and that we need much more fundamental changes to our economy, our society, and our way of life.
For the last 6 months, I have been camped at a place in northern Nevada called Thacker Pass, which is threatened by a vast planned open-pit mine that threatens to destroy 28 square miles of biodiverse sagebrush habitat, release millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions, bulldoze Paiute and Shoshone sacred sites, and leave behind piles of toxic waste for generations to come.
Electric cars and fossil fuel cars don’t differ as much as lithium mining companies would like us to believe. In fact, a direct link connects the water protectors fighting the new Line 3 oil pipeline in the Ojibwe territory in Minnesota and the land defenders working to protect Peehee Mu’huh, the original name for Thacker Pass in the Paiute language.
The new Line 3 pipeline would carry almost a million barrels a day of crude oil from the Alberta Tar Sands, the largest and most destructive industrial project on the planet, to refineries in the United States. On the way, it would threaten more than 200 waterbodies and carve a path through what CNN called “some of the most pristine woods and wetlands in North America.” The project would be directly responsible for millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
For the last 7 years, indigenous water protectors and allies have rallied, petitioned, established resistance camps, held events, protested, and engaged in direct action to stop the Line 3 pipeline from being built. More than 350 people have been arrested over the past few months, but pipeline construction continues to progress for now.
Ironically, the proposed Thacker Pass lithium mine would require importing nearly 700,000 tons of sulfur per year — roughly equivalent to the mass of two Empire State Buildings — for processing the lithium. This sulfur would likely come (at least in part) from the Alberta tar sands, perhaps even from oil that would flow through Line 3.
Almost all sulfur, which is used in a wide range of chemical processes and fertilizers, comes from oil and gas refineries, where it’s a byproduct of producing low-sulfur fuels to meet air-quality regulations around acid rain.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, tar sands contain 11 times as much sulfur as conventional heavy crude oil, and literal “mountains” of sulfur are piling up in Alberta and at other refineries which process tar sands fuel. Sulfur sales revenue is important to the economics of tar sands oil extraction. One report released in the early years of tar sands extraction found that “developing a plan for storing, selling or disposing of the sulfur [extracted during processing] will help to ensure the profitability of oil sands operations.”
This means that Thacker Pass lithium destined for use in “green” electric cars and solar energy storage batteries would almost certainly be directly linked to the Line 3 pipeline and the harms caused by the Tar Sands, including the destruction of boreal forest, the poisoning of the Athabasca River and other waters, and an epidemic of cancers, rare diseases, and missing and murdered indigenous women facing Alberta First Nations. And, of course, the tar sands significantly exacerbate global warming. Canadian greenhouse gas emissions have skyrocketed over recent decades as tar sands oil production has increased.
Mining is exceptionally destructive. There is no getting around it. According to the EPA, hard-rock mining is the single largest source of water pollution in the United States. The same statistic probably applies globally, but no one really knows how many rivers have been poisoned, how many mountains blown up, how many meadows and forests bulldozed for the sake of mining.
The water protectors at Line 3 fight to protect Ojibwe territory, wild rice beds, and critical wildlife habitat from a tar sands oil pipeline, oil spills, and the greenhouse gas emissions that would harm the entire world. Here at Thacker Pass, we fight the same fight. The indigenous people here, too, face the destruction of their first foods; the poisoning of their water; the desecration of their sacred sites; and the probability of a toxic legacy for future generations. I fight alongside them for this place.
Our fights are not separate. Our planet will not cool, our waters will not begin to flow clean again, our forests will not regrow, and our children will not have security unless we organize, stop the destruction, and build a new way of life. The Line 3 pipeline, and all the other pipelines, must be stopped. And so must the lithium mines.
The wind howls at Thacker Pass. Rain beats against the walls of my tent. A steady drip falls onto the foot of my sleeping bag. It’s June, but we are a mile above sea level. Summer is slow in coming here, and so the storm rages outside, and I cannot sleep. Nightmare visions of open-pit mines, climate breakdown, and ecological collapse haunt me.
James Baldwin gave good advice. In this time, we must not shut our eyes to the reality that industrial production, including the production of oil and the production of electric cars, results in industrial devastation. And with our eyes wide open, we must take action to protect our only home, and the future generations who rely on us.
Also available at The Sierra Nevada Ally, Dispatches from Thacker Pass series.
For more on the Protect Thacker Pass campaign
#ProtectThackerPass #NativeLivesMatter #NativeLandsMatter
Editor’s note: In addition to running away from the unnormal normal this culture has created (which in my understanding means to stop identifying with the culture of empire which most people perceive as normal) we must take bold action to protect our only home, and the future generations who rely on us.
Featured image: “Strip” by Nell Parker
This article originally appeared on the blog By My Solitary Hearth.
By Eliza Daley
Central Vermont is under a heat advisory today. There is also smoke from fires on the opposite side of the continent, though rains are periodically washing it out of the sky. Thus sometimes we don’t have the air quality advisory to go with the heat, though last night I could see no Perseid meteors through the combined haze of smoke particulates and equatorial Atlantic humidity. In my small and rural county where around 83% of the eligible population is vaccinated, Delta variant cases are sending people to the hospital at roughly ten times any rate that has been seen in the previous eighteen months of pandemic. A local summer camp outbreak is at 25 sick kids and increasing. Local schools are scrambling to figure out how to pack our unvaccinated children back into classrooms in a few days with no good ideas and quite a lot of hand-wringing. My co-worker on a landscape job had to pull a dead rat out of an active well this week. And there are no tomatoes.
These are the headlines of ecological collapse. This is not normal. There will be no return to normal. Normal was not normal. Normal, as we defined it in the late 20th century, was an ecological aberration, unsustainable in every way. We were merrily gobbling up all the easily accessible resources, especially those that create the abundant energy necessary to gobble up the rest efficiently (meaning profitably, not practically). We dug up, concentrated, and synthesized poisons of all sorts, relying on the magnanimous Earth to scatter and diffuse the toxins, murdering billions of life-forms in the process, right down to the life-sustaining microbes in our own digestive tracts. We killed off much of the biosphere both intentionally — as in the case of insect population crashes due to widespread insecticide use — and accidentally — as in the heat-induced bleaching of coral that is collapsing ocean ecosystems worldwide. We harvested far more than we needed of nearly every natural resource and agricultural product in order to turn the biosphere into wealth for some humans. And we concentrated far too many of ourselves into geographical areas that can’t produce the means to meet our needs at all — but are remarkably good at meeting the needs of viruses and other agents of infection. This is what normal has created.
This overly-hot summer, I’ve seen far too many bleating demands to return to normal. They claim that we have to get back to working in the resource intensive and micro-managed environments of our bullshit jobs. We have to send our kids back to over-crowded classrooms and day-care centers, mostly so that we are then free to go back to the office. We have to fly and drive and spend money on tourism and the service industry. We have to buy stuff — though this last is somewhat muted because there are many ineradicable kinks in the stuff supply lines and there is much less stuff to buy. We have to go to the movies.
Yes, that was an actual New York Times opinion piece. A rather long complaint about the writer’s diminished movie-watching joy because he sat in an empty theater. He also complained about the recent lack of mob emotion at sporting events and music venues and a reduced capacity to gossip around the office water cooler. I think maybe this person needs some real social bonding so he doesn’t have to rely on these shoddy substitutions. However, it must be pointed out that this is the type of person with a New York Times publishing platform. A person in a privileged position of power, influence, and wealth who has such inferior family and friendship ties that he must seek out relief to his feelings of isolation in economic activity. This is what normal has created.
This is what normal has created. But it will not continue. It will not continue not because we will stop it. We are not stopping. We are bleating about our inability to get back to normal. We are endeavoring in every way to keep that normal churning out death and destruction and isolation. The most vocal among us, those with the most wealth and status and public reach, are not even looking to a world that does not include normal. But that world exists; that world is the real world that is ruining normal for us. And it is winning. Normal is not normal. Normal is not sustainable. And the world is showing us that this is true in no uncertain terms, no matter all bleating to the contrary.
Normal will end, probably has ended in spite of all our efforts and bleating, because it is artificial and unsustainable. Reality wins every time. It has taken a while in human terms (though almost no time in geological terms), but normal is losing. In smokey air that covers a continent, normal is revealed as the aberration it always was. In variant viruses that fill hospitals and sicken our children, we see that normal is failing. In the sad isolation that cries out for contact of any synthetic form, we know that normal is wrong.
This week there was a kerfuffle over the latest IPCC report, telling us what we already know of the death of our normal. We have heated the planet — through burning fossil fuels — past any hope of averting disastrous change. They do not use the hyperbolic language because they are not allowed to do so, but the message is quivering underneath their stolid words. They are telling us that the normal we created has destroyed itself. There is no evidence that we can save it. It was never real enough to perpetuate without nearly infinite resources fed into it daily to prop it up in the face of reality. There is nothing of our normal to save.
However, there is everything else. And for that everything, we must make some efforts. I’m not sure I agree with the IPCC findings, but they say there is still hope of saving something of this real world — with some mighty big IFs. IF we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 and IF no tipping points are breached, we have about a random chance — a coin flip probability — of remaining below 2°C of warming and recovering a true normal in some century down the road. These big IFs incorporate some even bigger IFs. To reduce emissions to net-zero means that we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere — with technology that we do not have or natural draw-downs that we have not yet planted. Trees need time to root in and mature, time that does not remain in this IPCC budget. And as to tipping points, we’ve already seen accelerated rates of warming and melting in the polar regions. We’ve already seen population crashes that happen in a year or two. We’ve already seen crushing feedback loops that decimate large portions of the hydrosphere overnight. In other words, we’ve already seen intensification in rates of change that indicates without much doubt that we’ve already breached many known tipping points. The main point of doubt now is what surprises await us.
So I don’t know about the hope of the IPCC. What I do know is that we can all build our own small resilience, and in doing that we might be better able to both effect a carbon draw-down and save what we can of the real world — the world we depend upon. We are already imbedded in the real world. Our failing normal tells us this. If we stop making huge efforts to prop it up, it will go away entirely. Very likely it will go away rapidly. Collapse, when it does happen, is a tipping point. It is sudden and largely uncontrollable. It will hurt. But my suspicion is that it will hurt money and privilege more than it will hurt people and places — largely because our normal doesn’t benefit most people or places. It hurts them. It’s my hope that removing this hurt will balance out the hurt that collapsing normal might cause for most people. Money and privilege can bear the hurt — they are not even as real as normal.
I don’t know about the hope of the IPCC, but I do have hope still. Ironically, it comes from the very headlines that scare me, the very air that is cooking my body and choking me. These tell me that the normal we created is destroying itself rapidly. These headlines are also showing me that we probably can survive that destruction. Not all of us, not without pain, not without massive upheaval. But we are surviving. We are coming together to help each other. We are building new systems to support ourselves in the face of the collapse of the old ones. And large numbers of people are turning their backs on the bleaters. Because humans are a rather practical bunch when it comes down to it, and the practical solution is to run away from all this isolation and destruction and help each other. We’re very good at running away from pain. And at helping each other — as long as we’re not being constrained by artificial normals.
So I’ll bear the smoke and heat and diseases philosophically — though not without grumbling. And I think most of you will do the same. And together we’ll get through this. Mostly by running away.
But I just don’t know about the tomatoes…
Hurricane Sandy didn’t kill East River Park, but New York City is planning to.
Featured image: New Yorkers protest plan to bulldoze a thousand climate-saving trees.
This article originally appeared in Climate&Capitalism.
by Elliot Sperber
If you live in North America, chances are you haven’t just seen the hazy skies blanketing much of the continent this week, but have been breathing the toxic air, too. Blowing in from the monstrous wild fires devouring the forests out west, it’s more than just a reminder that our planet can’t continue to swallow the pollution we’re pumping into it; more than a reminder, it’s a presence that’s killing us.
And with Covid’s delta strain now spreading like an invisible haze, one that’s possibly spreading into our lungs as well, poor air quality (that euphemism for our most ubiquitous carcinogen) is something we certainly don’t need more of.
And while we can’t stop the wind, that doesn’t mean we’re entirely powerless to clean the air. The cheapest and most effective way, of course (in addition to curtailing pollution — i.e., degrowth), is to plant trees. Trees and other plants not only capture CO2, but produce oxygen. So, if we value breathing (and, really, only a maniac doesn’t, right?), we must also value trees. We should plant trees, as many as possible. But, crucially, we should also conserve the trees and forests and green spaces we have already. Those in positions of power who don’t value, and don’t prioritize, such vital resources are putting us all on a path to catastrophe.
That’s why it’s so peculiar that Bill de Blasio (the mayor of New York City, who never tires of promoting himself as a friend of the environment) among others are planning to destroy over one thousand mature trees in a park here this coming October. At a time when we should be protecting our trees and green spaces most vigorously, the city is intent on destroying the thousand trees of East River Park, the nearly one-and-a-half mile long park that runs between the East River (really a tidal strait, an extension of the bay, particularly prone to flooding) and the FDR Highway on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. But why?
When Superstorm Sandy arrived nearly nine years ago, its high winds and floods spread destruction and havoc throughout the region. Knocking out the ConEd power station at East River Park’s northern end resulted in major power outages over much of Manhattan. From midtown to its southernmost tip, Manhattan was without power for days. And though other parts of the city, such as the Rockaways, suffered worse and for far longer, it was this, along with substantial flooding in the Lower East Side, that led the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to initiate a contest to find the best flood control and coastal resiliency project for the area.
The winning plan proposed to transform the 1.4 miles of East River Park into a new and improved park, with terraced fields and, importantly, a flood plain designed to absorb future flooding. This design not only preserved East River Park’s trees and green spaces. Part of the BIG U that was to wrap around all of lower Manhattan to protect it from rising seas, the proposal won wide support, including from the lower-income community of color that surrounds the park.
Altering the waterfront promenade to gently descend into the East River (to function as a flood plain), it would have also covered the FDR, creating a flood barrier over where that poisonous highway now roars. And because cars account for a great deal of the greenhouse gases heating, poisoning, and flooding us, the covered FDR was to be converted from a source of global heating into a mass transit corridor.
With widespread community support, the plan was adopted, but in 2018 it was suddenly scrapped. Bill de Blasio and his constituency, largely real estate developers, decided to pursue a different, nearly twice as expensive plan. They refused, however, to disclose why. And when the studies they relied on were finally made public, following a court order, much of it was blacked out. What are they hiding?
Among other things, de Blasio et al argue that their new plan protects the nearby ConEd energy plant. But, with all their secrecy, it’s more likely that saving the FDR and serving the real estate industry (i.e., making money) is their true motive.
This would hardly be unprecedented. Trees have been at odds with making money and power since this civilization’s earliest days. Even the ancient Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BCE) includes an important episode in which the hero Gilgamesh, along with his companion Enkidu and the sun god Shamash, kills Humbaba, the protector of the Great Cedar Forest. And for what reason? In order to chop down the salubrious Forest (a use-value) and sell it for gold (exchange-value) and power.
This story illustrates a fundamental ambivalence inherent in the concept of value, one that inheres in the word itself. For value derives from the Latin word valere, which means strength; but this strength is defined both as health and as power. Among other places, this double even appears in the opening of the Old Testament, in the Garden of Eden. For the two trees, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, express this duality of value, too. If, as Francis Bacon put it, knowledge is power, then the tree of knowledge corresponds to power; and for Bacon this is the power to “conquer and subdue nature.”
As for the tree of life, this is nature itself; the nature that the tree of knowledge would subdue, just as Gilgamesh subdued Humbaba. Importantly, the tree of life is also associated with health. The leaves of the tree of life are described by John of Patmos in the book of Revelation (22:2) as being medicine.
We could go on and on with this, and elsewhere I have. Needless to say, the point is that there’s a fundamental conflict between trees and gold which is at play here, too.
And while we may not know precisely why de Blasio and his rich friends scrapped the earlier accepted design for the park we do know this. Instead of a flood plain they plan to build a sea wall. Instead of repurposing the carcinogenic, global heating FDR, the new plan aims to save the highway, by bulldozing a thousand trees and 1.4 miles of gardens and fields, an amphitheater, historic buildings, playgrounds, all of it, and cover all 56 acres of the park in a billion tons of most likely highly toxic garbage (no one knows what the fill will consist of, or where it will come from) to raise the park. Then a new park will be built, 8 to 10 feet higher than the present park, atop this material.
New trees will be planted, they say. But it will be decades before these trees provide any shade, or produce much oxygen, or provide any relief to the community.
With the climate emergency upon us, this is no time to destroy trees, open space, parks, and public health, as the city plans to do. To be sure, if one values human and environmental health one will recognize that if anything needs to be destroyed it’s the FDR, among other highways. Trees, and human health, are clearly valuable as ends in themselves. The lethal, pollution-generating, space-eating cars and highways, on the other hand, are mere means, and poisonous ones at that. Just as the word insane stems from the Latin in (not) and sanus (healthy), it is literally insane to not shut down these ecocidal entities.
What will happen? Will the trees survive the bulldozers of progress? Will the waters rising all around us lead us to rise to this world historical occasion? We’ll see.
For more information contact East River Park Action.
Elliot Sperber is a writer, attorney, and adjunct professor who lives in New York City. He can be reached at elliot.sperber@gmail.com and on twitter @elliot_sperber