In this article, Erik Molvar outlines the serious nature of climate change. He offers evidence-based clarity on why destroying fragile woodlands, that holds carbon in place, needs to stop.
The dawn breaks each morning on a hundred different mountain ranges in the Great Basin, with few human eyes to see it.
Many of these mountain chains will be unfamiliar to most – the Toquimas, the Wah Wahs, the Goshutes, the Sheeprocks, the Fox Range – but the one thing they all have in common is their juniper woodlands that have been here for thousands of years. On the mesas and tablelands of the Colorado Plateau, guarding the slickrock canyons and mazes of badlands that are American icons, are the fragile woodlands (don’t bust the crust!) of pinyon and juniper that perfume the air with that ineffable scent of wild country. Today, just as the world awakens to the reality that we need as much carbon sequestration as possible, these arid woodlands are under assault from a coordinated campaign to deforest the West, orchestrated by the livestock industry.
Action to address climate change has been announced as a central policy priority with the Biden administration, putting the significant role of domestic livestock in climate disruption in the spotlight. Methane emissions (both from the four-chambered digestion system that allows ruminants to digest cellulose, and from the breakdown of manure) get the lion’s share of the attention, in keeping with America’s end-of-tailpipe fixation on measuring pollution. But the carbon cycle is circular, and livestock exacerbate climate disruption at many points in the cycle. One key effect is by bankrupting soil carbon reserves by eliminating deep-rooted perennial plants and replacing them with annual weeds, and another is through deforestation to create cattle pasture. While deforestation for livestock is widely-recognized as a major climate problem in the Amazonian rainforests, deforestation of pinyon-juniper woodlands is ramping up across the American West, and similarly contributes to the climate catastrophe.
The real reason that pinyon-juniper woodlands are so aggressively targeted for “control” and “treatment,” even though they are an ecologically important and natural component of western ecosystems, comes down to the almighty dollar. A recent survey of Bureau of Land Management employees by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility contains this clue: “with ranchers, one employee noted that the current excuse to cut pinyon juniper and sagebrush to prevent wildfire, which have been the native species for thousands of years, has no scientific reasoning. Instead, it’s to benefit cattle.”
During the dying days of the Trump administration, an all-out war on juniper woodlands was underway under the guise of fire prevention. The Tri-State Fuel Breaks Project planned almost a thousand miles of strips; scientists criticized the project, predicting it
“will not achieve success and may in fact exacerbate degradation of the native flora and fauna of the region.”
The Idaho portion was approved in May of 2020, authorizing
“manual, mechanical, and chemical treatments, along with targeted grazing and prescribed fire.”
The Great Basin Fuel Breaks Project was even bigger, authorizing 11,000 miles of fuel breaks in April of 2020. The selected alternative authorized wiping out 121,000 acres of woodlands. And for what? A federal review of the science found inconclusive benefits from fuel breaks constructed throughout the West over the past five decades. In effect, these are make-work projects that, while causing significant ecosystem destruction and habitat fragmentation, have little or no benefit in reducing the extent or intensity of fires.
Fuel breaks are but the tip of the deforestation iceberg.
In January 2021, during the twilight of the Trump presidency, a program called “Fuels Reduction and Rangeland Restoration for the Great Basin” was completed. Under this plan, more than 26 million acres would be targeted for a variety of environmentally destructive projects euphemistically labeled “vegetation treatments” as if the native vegetation is somehow sick. “Targeted grazing” is one such treatment authorized, even though a federal court ruled that livestock grazing actually increases the spread of flammable cheatgrass, instead of reducing fire risk, after hearing expert testimony on both sides of the issue.
Pinyon-juniper woodlands would bear the brunt of the projects, facing chainsaws, chaining with bulldozers, and herbicides. Some 3,088,468 acres of pinyon-juniper woodlands are now scheduled for “restoration treatments.” The Administration pre-approved this massive program habitat destruction under a single Environmental Impact Statement, which could allow the agency to approve future projects without analyzing the site-specific impacts, or perhaps even public notification.
The drive to get rid of pinyon and juniper woodlands began several years ago.
Senators Hatch and Heinrich slipped a rider into the 2018 Farm Bill instructing the Bureau of Land Management to create a “Categorical Exclusion” exempting pinyon-juniper logging and chaining projects of up to 4,500 acres from having to go through environmental analysis otherwise required by the National Environmental Policy Act. This legislation was pushed by sportsman groups, spearheaded by the Mule Deer Foundation. Western Watersheds Project and other conservationists warned that pinyon-juniper removal was bad for wildlife – including mule deer – but these warnings were ignored by Congress. Ironically, several months after Hatch-Heinrich passed, a new scientific study was published demonstrating that pinyon-juniper woodlands were an essential habitat component for mule deer, and that juniper removals have a negative effect on the species.
Then the Trump administration took it a giant leap farther, authorizing that pinyon-juniper removals as large as 10,000 acres could be approved under a Categorical Exclusion.
Cutting down juniper woodlands is often promoted as a method to create or improve habitat for the imperiled sage grouse, which requires undisturbed sagebrush steppe habitats and avoids trees of any kind. While juniper removal might seem to make sense, the reality is that logged-off juniper woodlands seldom result in sage grouse habitat. Mature and old-growth stands of junipers typically have very little understory at all, neither sagebrush nor native grasses. When bulldozers and other heavy equipment move in and the trees are torn down, what you get is disturbed bare ground. It’s the perfect breeding ground for the non-native invasive weed, cheatgrass.
If the goal is fuel reduction, cheatgrass infestations are the worst possible outcome.
When livestock add their impacts into the mix (as they almost always do), suppressing native bunchgrasses and breaking up fragile soil crusts, cheatgrass proliferates. Highly flammable, cheatgrass predictably dies each July (escaping the drought stress of high summer in seed form). Drying out, it creates the perfect tinder for fires to burn, and those fires wipe out sagebrush and other fire-intolerant shrubs creating a monoculture of cheatgrass that fuels a cycle of frequent wildfires in perpetuity.
There is a widespread myth that pinyon pines and juniper are an “invasive species” that are unnaturally expanding their range as a result of human activities like fire suppression or heavy livestock grazing. The reality is that these woodlands have been expanding and contracting for thousands of years in a natural cycle, following changes in precipitation patterns.
In addition to mule deer, there are a number of other native wildlife species that benefit from pinyon-juniper woodlands. Scott’s oriole, juniper titmouse, and Bewick’s wren are a few of the songbird species that are considered juniper obligates. Pinyon jays are pinyon obligates, as their name suggests. Obligate species are animals that require a specific type of habitat to sustain their populations.
As for the climate impacts, when you replace juniper woodlands – or sagebrush-bunchgrass steppes – with cheatgrass, it reverses the enormous carbon sequestration capability of western desert shrublands, hemorrhaging soil carbon into the atmosphere. We typically think of forests as the most important carbon immobilizers, but desert shrublands can pull even more carbon out of the atmosphere and safely lock it away in the soil.
The removal of pinyon-juniper woodlands across the American West draws a direct parallel with rainforest destruction to create livestock pastures in the Amazon Basin. It’s all about the fool’s errand of trying to mow down native ecosystems and replace them with idyllic grassy pastures ideal for adding pounds and profits to beef cattle. Nevermind that cattle are ill-adapted to arid environments, and do so poorly on western public lands that the vast acreage dedicated to beef production on western federal lands amounts to little more than two or three percent of the nation’s beef production. Even if western public lands had no recreational value to the Americans for whose benefit they are supposed to be managed, the carbon sequestration value of juniper woodlands would still eclipse the scanty private profits that are wrung from marginal western livestock operations.
Climate change is a serious problem, not least of all for the arid West now struggling with protracted drought and decreasing water availability. Let’s stop making it worse by cutting down the fragile woodlands that hold the carbon in place.
This article was written by Eric Molvar and published on Counterpunch on March 12, 2021. You can read the original version here!
Erik Molvar is a wildlife biologist and is the Laramie, Wyoming-based Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting and restoring watersheds and wildlife on western public lands.
In this article, Kelli Lundin describes her experience at Thacker Pass and the culmination of her analysis that every landscape deserves sovereignty for its own sake.
By Kelli Lundin
I’ve always found my attempts quite taboo in trying to put my experiences into a container—such as words. How can any arrangement of words, especially mine, fully describe feelings, emotions, visions, colors, dreams—or in particular, Life from the perspective of a specific place? My experience at Thacker Pass holds for me the same dilemma. What can be said of such a place to make a difference in the hearts of others? How can I describe with words something so sacred, something so elemental, something so necessary that it merits protection, honor, and reparations from us all?
What comes to mind is this: every place, whether it be Thacker Pass or any other Landscape, deserves sovereignty for its own sake, or rather, IS sovereign. Land, like any other body, is its own, just like mine and yours, the Songbird’s, the Sage Brush, every body of water, every mountain, woodland, valley, and prairie.
“First, and above all, an explanation must do justice to the thing that is to be explained, must not devalue it, interpret it away, belittle it, or garble it, in order to make it easier to understand…”
Words, I feel, (or again, at least mine) never fully justify, explain, or have the ability to assign value to what is Sacred. And like Thomas Berry said,
“There are no unsacred places; there are only Sacred places and desecrated places.”
Thacker Pass is Sacred.
And, I believe what weaves throughout all sacredness, or literally what defines the Sacred, is Relationship. Here in the high landscapes nestled amongst Mountains and Valleys, relationships abound in abundance. These relationships are so intimate—my voice, my thoughts, my very presence feels intrusive. Being in this place, my eyes wide open, I am in awe. My heart relaxes, my mind empties, and I feel at home in a quiet comfort that is rarely afforded to me.
I wander in solitude, and the wild of this place soothes the ache and loneliness I find in the city, the noise and bustle of everyday goings-on. The sound of Ravens, Chukars, Coyotes, Rain, and the explicit emotions of Wind repair and bring back to Life all my senses. The ever-constant numbness that protects me from the underlying and overwhelming grief of all that I know, slowly fades. I feel again, what it is to be alive.
I trail them—Deer, Coyote, the flight of a Sage Grouse, Bobcat, Mouse, even a Mountain Lion and wonder about their lives—what they know, how they feel, the meanings of their songs. I also wonder, “how do the sounds of my song inspire others?”
I have seen the spectrum of desecration swing from dismissiveness, blatant willful ignorance and callousness, all the way to blasting, shredding and annihilating bodies to dust, leaving death forever more in its wake. Lithium Americas wants to obliterate Thacker Pass. It doesn’t matter that they have a reason. It’s not their body. It’s not their Lithium. It belongs to the land. It’s Hers for her own purpose.
Does it take being raped and knowing that experience to empathize with the raping of Land or any body that is being taken from, used, resourced, controlled, exploited, or any other word describing desecration? I don’t know. What I do know is this: rape equals death. Something dies that is never reborn and no amount of grief will ever bring it back.
When will we all see this with our own eyes?
ALL of Life is depending on us to open our eyes and hearts to see the Sacred, in us and all around us. Death is one thing, but the end of birth is entirely something else.
For me, it all comes down to one word. Love (verb): to give Life, protect Life, honor Life, to see all Life as Sacred. For every Body.
Thank you Will Falk and Max Wilbert for continuing to offer justice, through your words and actions, that speak to the truth of how I feel and what I know. I’m so proud of you both. You are true humans being. Your courage is remarkable and a clear demonstration of how we all can expand our awareness in knowing every Body as Sacred.
Kelli Lundin is an environmental activist, land defender and writer.
This article offers clarity regarding the risks of continuing in an ‘economic growth mindset’. All life on earth needs a stable climate, healthy soil, and protective ozone layers. Without significant, meaningful, global change humans remain on a course that invites climate collapse, this includes pandemics.
By Tom Pegram, Associate Professor in Global Governance and Deputy Director of UCL Global Governance Institute, UCL,
and Julia Kreienkamp,Researcher at the Global Governance Institute, UCL
As governments around the world roll out COVID-19 vaccine programmes and seek to kickstart their economies back to life, recovery seems to be within reach. However, hard questions must not be sidestepped. How did this pandemic happen? And how resilient are we to future global risks, including the possibility of deadlier pandemics?
Importantly, COVID-19 was not a “black swan” event – an event that cannot be reasonably anticipated. As Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s emergencies programme, made clear in an impassioned address in February, COVID-19 is very much a human-made emergency. By continuing to privilege economic growth over environmental and social sustainability, “we are creating the conditions in which epidemics flourish … and taking huge risks with our future”.
Human civilisation is on a collision course with the laws of ecology.
Experts have long warned of zoonotic diseases jumping the species barrier as a result of growing human encroachment on nature. A 2019 landmark global biodiversity assessment showed that species and ecosystems are declining at rates “unprecedented in human history”.
Biodiversity loss is accelerating, driven by multiple interrelated forces, all of which are ultimately produced or greatly amplified by practices that push economic growth. These include deforestation, agricultural expansion and the intensified consumption of wild animals.
Climate change often steals the headlines, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the prospect of mass biodiversity loss is just as catastrophic. Crucially, these two challenges are deeply interlinked. Global warming is putting massive pressure on many of our most diverse natural ecosystems. In turn, the decline of these vital ecosystems weakens their ability to store carbon and provide protection from extreme weather and other climate-related risks.
These effects cannot be captured in simplified metaphors such as “the war on carbon”, which may be politically expedient but obscure the complexities involved in protecting life-sustaining ecosystems. There is no single measurement that captures the “the variability among living organisms from all sources including … terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part”. In fact, many of the living organisms on Earth are still unknown to humans.
Uncharted territory
Although it has long been argued that there are hard limits to unsustainable economic growth on a finite planet, these arguments have been largely dismissed by western economic powers. But market forces will not abolish natural scarcity or do away with planetary limits.
Belatedly, driven in part by growing public awareness of environmental destruction, economic planners are waking up to our ecological interdependence. As the recent Dasgupta Review, commissioned by the UK Treasury, puts it:
“Our economies, livelihoods and wellbeing all depend on our most precious asset: nature. We are part of nature, not separate from it.”
Buoyed by school climate strikes and the declaration of climate and nature emergencies around the world, UN Secretary General António Guterres has declared 2021 as “the year to reconcile humanity with nature”. However, the lack of progress is sobering. Of the 20 global biodiversity targets agreed in 2010, none have been fully met a decade later.
The international community remains way off track when it comes to implementing the Paris climate agreement. And although the COVID-19 crisis has led major economies to make commitments to build back better and greener, much of the recovery spending is flowing into business-as-usual economies.
A fundamental shift in thinking
How can political reality be brought into alignment with biophysical reality to ensure our societies do not prosper at the expense of the ecological life support systems upon which they ultimately depend?
Economist Kate Raworth’s doughnut-shaped economic model for human development provides one prominent plan of action, placing social and planetary boundaries at the core of governance redesign. In other words making sure that no human being is deprived of life’s essentials (food, shelter, healthcare and so on) while collectively ensuring that we don’t put damaging pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, on which all humans depend (a stable climate, healthy soil, a protective ozone layer).
But this is just one in a long line of ecological economic blueprints stretching back to at least the 1960s. The question remains: is society ready to relinquish its deep-seated will to power over nature for a different accommodation – one where we live in agreement with nature?
As ecologist Gregory Bateson observed: “The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.” The COVID-19 pandemic is a canary in the coalmine; more are sure to follow. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear that the environmental challenge requires
“rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.
What is perhaps less clear from this statement is that the mindset, models and metaphors which shape society’s goals and aspirations must also change. Where might we look for inspiration? According to the Yale Environmental Performance Index, Botswana and Zambia rank first and second in the world for biodiversity and habitat protection. In fact Botswana is unique in that most of its biodiversity remains intact. Such examples hold lessons for how we can converge towards a reconciliation with nature.
Political scientist William Ophuls argues that political struggle must now urgently focus on making ecology the master science and Gaia the key metaphor of our age. In other words, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as somehow above or outside the natural systems that support us. Humanity’s efforts to embrace the politics of ecology could well prove to be the defining story of this century if we are to avoid indulging the tragedy of homo (in)sapiens.
You can read the original article, published in The Conversation, on the 5th March 2021 here. The authors are:
Tom Pegram Associate Professor in Global Governance and Deputy Director of UCL Global Governance Institute, UCL
Derrick Jensen returns to The Stoa, along with Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, his co-authors of the new book: Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (Politics of the Living).
This event caps our meta-crisis symposium and it also serves as a book launch party.
The second event will start right after the first at 5pm Pacific Time (Los Angeles) and will be hosted on Facebook:
The authors of the book “Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It” are hosting a virtual launch party. The event will feature the authors Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen, and Max Wilbert.
WHAT: You are invited to an online event with Facebook Live
DATE: Tuesday, March 16, 2021 at 5 PM Pacific Time
Editor’s note: In this excerpt, Samir offers an outline of the rationale for the harmful development of lithium mines. In parallel we are also offered an outline of the development of the protest camp. While we are happy that a popular outlet like Vice News is writing about our campaign, we do not agree with all of the author’s statements. DGR is strongly opposed to any kind of industrial processes like mining because they are inherently destructive to life on planet earth. Hence we do not believe that there can be a “greener” kind of industrial resource extraction.
A mining giant wants to extract lithium from the Nevada desert to power electric cars. But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without costs.
One of the largest known lithium deposits in the world has sat undisturbed under the Nevada desert for centuries. Now, a mining giant wants to extract the resource to power electric cars using a potentially harmful method.
Before bringing in its equipment, however, the company will have to go through a blockade of environmental protesters that have been camped out at the site since December.
“Like the wildlife, we hunker down when the weather gets very bad and wait for the storm to break,”
said Max Wilbert, who started the Protect Thacker Pass, the grassroots organization leading the occupation.
“But we’re not backing down. What is at stake here is the soul of the entire environmental movement.”
Right now, Thacker Pass, a section of public land stretching hundreds of acres in northern Nevada, is several environmental permits—and lawsuits—away from becoming a massive open-pit mining project run by Canada-based Lithium Americas. The metal excavated from the planned 18,000-acre site will be used to manufacture rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for electric cars.
But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without its costs:
The proposed mining process at Thacker Pass uses sulfuric acid, which could seep into the water supply. The operation also requires tapping into groundwater, which could decrease its availability. Both would impact the ecosystems of several at-risk species, like golden eagles, pronghorn antelope, and Nevada’s state fish, the Lahontan cutthroat trout.
In an effort to protect the land, dozens of protestors from across the country have posted up at the site in freezing nighttime temperatures with heated tents and portable mini-toilets. Local ranchers, concerned about the welfare of their land and water supply, have also joined the cause.
The original article can be read in full on Vice News.
In this article, originally published on The Conversation, the authors describe how extractive industries use social engineering and counterinsurgency techniques to avoid or manage resistance.
Around the globe, concern is mounting about the unfolding climate and ecological catastrophe. Yet the extraction of natural resources through mining and energy projects continues on a large scale, with disastrous environmental consequences.
To understand how this is possible, one place to start is recognising that extraction is not just a physical engineering process. It requires social engineering as well. To be able to function smoothly, extractive corporations and their governmental allies sculpt social conditions. They “manufacture” consent and “manage” dissent towards their ventures.
These industries depend on shaping the perceptions and behaviour of governments, shareholders, consumers, and people living in the areas where large-scale resource extraction occurs.
Usually, the media and academics pay attention when people resist such projects. A well known case is the struggle of the Ogoni people in southeast Nigeria to hold the oil company Shell to account for massive pollution. But it’s also important to notice the way corporations, governments and other elites try to pre-empt opposition.
This means looking beyond obvious conflict and repression, to the less visible and long-term efforts to shape people’s opinions and behaviour. In a recent article in Political Geography, we analyse some of these corporate attempts at social engineering.
The counterinsurgency toolbox
Many of the corporate strategies and tactics to address opposition come from the toolbox of counterinsurgency. There are “hard” techniques, such as direct and indirect coercion, and “soft” tools aimed at “pacifying target populations”.
The “softer” forms often relate to “community relations” work, such as sponsoring local events, medical clinics and other social development programmes. Social investments foster sympathy for extractive projects and dissipate criticism. How can one fight a corporation that provides so many life-affirming opportunities?
The “soft tools” of social engineering also include bureaucratic procedures and practices. One example is legislation acknowledging indigenous people’s right to consent to or reject extractive projects on their land. A growing body of research shows how this legislation eases the way for projects to expand into community territories.
Another way that extraction is made acceptable is through seemingly neutral speech. A case in point is speaking of “lessons learned” in relation to involuntary resettlement for extractive projects. In Mozambique, representatives of the government and extractive multinationals use the language of “learning lessons” from previous forced displacement efforts. This is to prevent opposition to renewed resettlement plans for liquid natural gas extraction in the north of the country.
Directing attention to the technical procedures of displacement and how they can be “improved” takes attention away from displacement itself. And local NGOs become concerned with the resettlement initiatives, instead of critically monitoring the new projects.
Bureaucratic procedures can make it look as if the people affected by resource extraction are participating, influencing decisions and sharing in the benefits. But the procedures actually channel and control dissent. They make it seem as if individuals themselves are responsible for gaining or losing from extractive operations, instead of directing attention to structural power inequalities.
The chimera of ‘green mining’
Another set of social engineering strategies is “green mining”.
Since the 1990s, large-scale extractive companies have started to profile themselves as part of a global transition to sustainability. They engage in biodiversity offsets or draw on and invest in wind and solar power. More recently, corporations have attempted to depict deep-sea mining as sustainable. They claim it has limited impact on deep-sea ecosystems, in particular when compared to the dynamic and volcanic nature of the seabed.
But it’s debatable how much “green extractivism” reduces the ecological harm of large-scale resource extraction.
Offsets are based on the idea that mining corporations can make up for damage in one place by investing in biodiversity protection elsewhere. Research shows that the net benefits of these investments are very limited. Also, it’s difficult to compare the value of what is lost and what is protected.
Biodiversity offsets can be part of political pacification, as shown by the case of Rio Tinto in Madagascar. Through a vast programme of offsetting and restoration, this corporation has managed to counter criticism of its operations. Yet offsets have created conflicts and insecurities for locals. They have also allowed the corporation to extend control over land, people and resources to multiple sites.
The green economy has not only become a way to legitimise large-scale resource extraction. It has also become a new source of profit as corporations invest in market-driven nature conservation, ecotourism, and the production of biofuels and low-carbon energy.
Going forward
Without further economic transformation, the demand for so called “clean energy” will lead resource extraction to soar. For example, the production of minerals such as lithium and cobalt is expected to increase from 2018 by as much as 500% by 2050.
“Green growth” is a false narrative that industries push to continue business as usual. Academics and social movements should expose this narrative to avoid it becoming the cornerstone of climate policy.
To address the ecological and climate crisis, policies fostering degrowth and redistribution are needed. This is the only way to acknowledge the historical responsibility of rich countries and ensure climate justice on a global scale.
