Written by Caroline Williford: a Letter and Poem, from North Carolina to Thacker Pass. Caroline outlines her concerns regarding Lithium Mining. Regardless of whether the minerals are used for fossil fuels or for electric vehicles, as far as the natural world is concerned, any form of industrial mining is as destructive as the other. We strongly believe it is of utmost importance to shift our allegiance from these destructive industries to the natural world.
Featured image: Pictured here is the Foote mine, a large open-pit lithium mine in spodumene pegmatite, located on the south side of the town of Kings Mountain, North Carolina. The Foote mine project was initiated in 1938. This photograph was taken in 1983. 45 years later. The photograph shows the mine viewed from its western rim looking east toward the Pinnacle of Kings Mountain. For those curious as to what an open-pit lithium mine in Thacker Pass might look like after its 40 year run, this may give you an idea. Photograph by J. Wright Horton, Jr., U.S. Geological Survey.
On Thursday, February 11, 2021, a court decision overturned the Trump administration action that would have allowed mining, primarily for fossil fuel projects, on 10 million acres of previously protected land in western states. This decision sounds like a triumph, halting potential mining projects and preserving threatened habitat that would otherwise have been destroyed. This ruling sends the message that mining processes that harm the environment are unacceptable.
Unfortunately, this ruling is aimed only at fossil fuels.
What about the mining project at Thacker Pass, in Nevada, approved in the eleventh hour of Trump’s presidency, that still has the green light? The 5,700 acres of also previously protected land, now currently slated for mining, that would be destroyed for the extraction of lithium?
This lithium would be used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and as storage for renewable energy. Because of this, the destruction of Thacker Pass is being described as “green.”
If you start to dig into what it means to construct an open-pit lithium mine on a piece of land, you will learn that there is nothing green about it. The Thacker Pass mine would burn some 11,300 gallons of diesel fuel per day, the carbon emissions from the site would ultimately exceed 150,000 tons per year, and producing one ton of lithium would require strip mining and processing of up to 500 tons of earth. Tons of sulfuric acid would be produced every day, in addition to other harsh chemicals that could leach into the groundwater. The project would require over 1.7 billion gallons of water annually from a local aquifer which is already over-allocated. The effect on native wildlife and vegetation would be catastrophic, including species that are rare and already en route to extinction.
This is the native, ancestral, sacred land of Paiute and Shoshone people.
Such a project may provide job opportunities for some locals, but for all locals it would impact air and water quality for future generations. This mining project would continue for four decades. The project that begins at 5,700 acres could expand over time to 17,000 acres, which could triple all numbers mentioned here. Furthermore, the Thacker Pass lithium mine is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. On February 24, 2021, an executive order was put into place by the current administration that could potentially unleash a whole new era of lithium mining in the US.
My question is, why is it acceptable to mine for this purpose, for lithium, if the well-being of the earth is our actual concern? It is mining all the same. This is not actual change. It is more of the same. More destruction, more extraction and decimation, and for what purpose? Continuing a way of life that perpetuates a depletion of the earth’s resources and a number of species that also make this planet their home? Must we destroy the earth in order to save it? Where is the common sense in this equation? We are doing ourselves in. We are not thinking outside of the box. We are on one hand condemning mining efforts for fossil fuels due to the negative impact on the environment, and on the other hand not only advocating mining for lithium, but championing it, pushing it forward to the front of the room under the name of clean and green, all the while hiding its own equally catastrophic impacts on the environment in the periphery.
It’s capitalism and consumerism bullying ahead with an agenda that prioritizes profit over the critical thinking and sound decision making that could actually set us on a path to take care of the earth, rather than destroy it, as we attempt to save it.
Simply said: it’s greenwashing.
As someone who has been a part of the environmental movement for the majority of my life, I hate having to form that word upon my tongue, and to acknowledge such a divide among those of us who would otherwise be unified in a purpose to preserve the well-being of the earth. And yet, that word is upon my tongue, and it’s bitter. Yes, I can agree to forward-thinking actions to protect our environment, but not to those that require further destruction. We are already so far behind. We are already in the midst of a literal sixth mass extinction event on the planet, and this time it is driven by us, human beings. As one of those human beings, I want to do things differently this time.
I am not going to jump on the bandwagon of lesser evils. I am not going to believe the claim that an action is green or clean, unless I can dig all the way to the depths of it and find that it fully honors life just as it is at this moment and it requires no further assault in order for us to move forward. I ask that we do better this time. Lithium mining is not the answer. And, I am here making this statement: I do not support lithium mining, anywhere. I do not support lithium mining at Thacker Pass.
I want to protect Thacker Pass.
I have been following the efforts of Protect Thacker Pass from North Carolina over the last month, and the more I’ve learned about the mining project, the more appalled I’ve become. I had no idea what lithium mining entailed a few months ago. I’ve entered into one long conversation after another, sharing what I’m learning with friends, and with each conversation I’ve observed yet another person, like myself, waking as if from a deep slumber, shaking their head, astonished, and asking endless questions. How did we not know about lithium mining? How did we get so disconnected from the goings-on in the world that we no longer see what is actually happening around us, or ask the critical questions of how things are actually made? Such as, what does it take to make a lithium battery? And why do some people care while others do not? I can’t answer these questions for anyone else and so I am looking at myself.
Have I been asleep? Is it too late? How did I get to a place of such complacency and blind trust, that I stopped actively looking at the world around me, really looking? Looking in the way that matters. And, what can I do about it, now? When I can’t find answers any other way, I sit down and write. What follows is my attempt at answering these questions in my relationship to Thacker Pass. What I ultimately discovered is this: now is the time for action, and it’s time to go to Thacker Pass.
***
Now is the Time
It seems to me that there are many ways of looking at the world.
There is the way of looking when we are caught
layers deep
in our stories
of yesterday’s confoundments
of tomorrow’s yearnings
to the extent that we simply cannot see
one inch beyond
where our glazed over eyes might meet the world.
And there is the way of looking
when the rug has suddenly been pulled out ruthlessly, beneath us
and we are searching
eyes keen as eagles
for the thing that has just been lost. How could we not have seen this coming?
Everything is seen painfully anew.
What is now missing like a holy gap,
a tear in the great fabric of the world.
The loss pounds our gut with regret.
And there is the way of looking
that is now
without the stories clouding view. The moment before the thing is lost.
The one that is in fact here, everyday upon waking
if we take up its humble, quiet call.
It requires us to participate.
To shelve the stories.
To get down on our knees and see the world before us.
Really see it.
Every fine tuned rake of the sand, marked
by the talons, hooves, and claws that daily grace this place.
And perhaps the call is not quiet at all.
But a continuous, piercing cry.
The kind of which we as humans may think we cannot hear, may claim
we cannot hear, like other animals.
But we can. If we just lean in. Closer.
Now.
This is the time before.
The imminent hour.
When the stories are rising up,
teeming and swelling and clamoring
to be heard before it’s too late.
This is the time of choice. When we can choose something different than before.
Trading one heartless destructive act for another is not the way.
Destroying in order to save.
Not the way.
The lesser of two evils.
Not the way.
Is this really the only choice we have to make?
No.
We limit ourselves.
Perhaps we are so smothered by the din of
our culture’s mighty noise
that it’s hard to hear. It’s hard to see.
But we owe it to the earth to which we belong
to take off the blinders, to quiet a moment, and listen
to the urgent message being issued forth: please just stop.
Stop mining.
For any reason: coal, oil, lithium.
Not for fossil fuels, not for supposed clean energy.
This is not clean energy.
Drilling into the earth to break, leach and deplete
the elements that make up our very foundation.
Displacing the native inhabitants of a place,
greater sage-grouse already in their ongoing dance with extinction,
pygmy rabbits, golden eagles, pronghorn antelope,
from the burrows in the ground to the nests arching up in the sky.
Poisoning the water as far as 150 miles downstream.
Depleting the water supply of the driest known state in our entire country.
Leaving the land scarred, barren, empty, parched, destroyed.
I want to live this way, and this way only:
Stirred from sleep each waking day
with an ear to the world’s whisperings,
loyal to its call to hear and think critically
outside of the green washings of capitalism and industry
where the solutions are tinged with blood, death and loss.
I want to walk my feet out the door and help trace lines around
that which is mapped for destruction
which we have somehow forgotten is also our very destruction,
our death, our loss.
I don’t ever want to forget that we are one and the same.
We, and this earth beneath our feet.
The only difference between us, the rivers, the mountains,
and the other creatures of this vast place
is the voice with which we speak.
The cadence, the language.
We as humans hold a lot of power, too much, with what we choose to say, and when.
Our voices are crucial.
So I’m going to offer mine up, and say right here:
STOP.
DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. We acknowledge that they are victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that not humans as a species are inherently destructive, but the societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy we call civilization.
The Amazônia Minada reporting project has revealed 1,265 pending requests to mine in Indigenous territories in Brazil, including restricted lands that are home to isolated tribes.
Brazil’s federal agency for Indigenous affairs, Funai, holds 114 reports of isolated tribes, of which 43 are within Indigenous lands targeted by mining.
In addition to the spread of diseases such as COVID-19 and malaria, mining activity poses health threats from the mercury used in gold extraction, which contaminates rivers and fish.
Indigenous groups have filed a lawsuit with Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court against the government, demanding protection for isolated Indigenous peoples.
With much of the world under some kind of lockdown over the past year, working from home has become the default for many. But not for miners in Brazil, who have stepped up their efforts to start exploiting Indigenous territories in the Amazon, including areas that are home to isolated tribes.
Mining on demarcated Indigenous lands is prohibited under Brazil’s Constitution, but that didn’t stop miners from filing 143 requests last year, the highest number in 24 years, with the National Mining Agency (ANM). Of those requests, 71 are for areas where isolated Indigenous tribes live, according to data from Funai, the federal agency for Indigenous affairs. Indigenous activists and researchers warn that isolated groups have no contact with society and are highly vulnerable to any disease brought from outside.
In a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Federal Court last July, the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) and eight political parties denounced illegal mining in areas of identified isolated peoples. They called on the federal government to adopt measures and avert what they called a “real risk of genocide” due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet even as the pandemic was entering its fifth month in Brazil, the lawsuit revealed the government had not implemented any protective measures in several areas that are home to isolated peoples.
The threat from mining, which can bring disease into rural forest areas, becomes tangible when considering the hundreds of requests from mining companies to operate on lands where isolated peoples live. Of the 114 reports of isolated peoples that Funai holds, 43 are within 26 Indigenous territories in the Amazon. These same territories are targeted by at least 1,265 requests for prospecting or mining activities, according to mapping data from the Amazônia Minada reporting project as of Jan. 29 this year.
“Isolated peoples have a strong connection with their environment,”
says Leonardo Lenin, who worked for 10 years with Funai’s unit for isolated ethnic groups, and who is currently executive secretary of the Observatory of Human Rights of Isolated Peoples and Recent Contact (OPI).
“Any invasion has a violent impact on their lives because the land is what guarantees their well-being,” he says.
Luísa Pontes Molina is an anthropologist who investigates illegal mining in the Indigenous Munduruku territories in the state of Pará. She warns of the health risks that mining poses to Indigenous peoples. In addition to spreading diseases such as malaria and COVID-19, mines harm the environment. Liquid mercury, used to bind gold particles, contaminates the rivers and fish that Indigenous communities depend on, according to a recent study by the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) and WWF Brazil. The study found traces of mercury in the entire population tested in the central region of the Tapajós River in Pará state, which includes the municipalities Itaituba and Trairão where the Munduruku people live.
Molina says there is evidence of isolated people living in the municipality of Jacareacanga, in southwest Pará, which have not been reported to Funai. That region is also the subject of 106 requests for gold mining that overlap with the protected Munduruku Indigenous Territory. Funai records at least one isolated Indigenous community in this area.
“Many communities of the Alto Tapajós have been reporting of and denouncing illegal mining and other crimes in the region since 2015. This also includes invasions near isolated groups. But despite these reports, Funai’s budget for inspection is cut more and more,” Molina says.
She adds she has tracked cases of illegal mining and public enforcement, and found that,
“in October 2020, just 2,000 reais [$345] were allocated toward monitoring and inspection in the region of Tapajós.” The study is still in progress, but preliminary findings suggest “state neglect in fighting illegal mining on indigenous lands,” Molina says.
The Amazônia Minada project, an initiative of the InfoAmazonia journalism outlet, cross-references the location of mining applications filed with ANM against demarcated Indigenous territories in the Amazon. Its Twitter feed, @amazonia_minada, tracks ANM processes in real time and tweets when a new mining application is filed within a protected area of the Amazon.
18 mining requests for restricted lands
Most of the mining requests are for land within demarcated territories where most of the Indigenous inhabitants have already made contact with the outside world but where some groups also live in isolation. But there are also 18 mining applications targeting four protected areas with the special classification “restricted,” which means they have been demarcated based on the presence only of isolated peoples.
Six of these requests were filed by the company Bemisa Holding, controlled by the Opportunity Group. Its owner, banker Daniel Dantas, was investigated for financial crimes and convicted in 2008 on bribery charges, but was acquitted in 2016 on a technicality. All six of Bemisa’s mining requests are for copper prospecting on Piripkura land in the state of Mato Grosso. Although the territory was declared restricted in September 2008, ANM in the preceding months still granted exploration permits for the company’s six applications, valid until 2012. On Jan. 19, 2021, the Piripkura land became the target of another application for gold mining, filed by the Miner Cooperative of Vale do Guaporé.
The isolated Piripkura people first made contact with the outside world in 1989, when Funai worker Jair Candor encountered two of the community members who had remained on their land after invasions by outsiders. Over the next three decades, there have been 14 contacts with these two individuals. According to Candor’s account in the documentary Piripkura, evidence of traces of their life in the area guarantees the sustained restriction of the land. Any sign of the pair’s track is photographed proof. All the material is kept secret so as not to reveal the location of the area; the two men are believed to be the last members of the Piripkura ethnic group.
Mining giant Vale, responsible for the two biggest mining-related disasters in Brazilian history, in Mariana and Brumadinho, requested access to the territory of the isolated Tanaru, in Rondônia state. Its application to mine platinum came in 2003, three years before the territory was officially declared restricted. However, the ANM system shows the company managed to unblock the application in 2018. There is no record of ANM’s approval of this application.
Last year, Vale announced to its shareholders that it would abandon all its mining applications within Indigenous lands, only to back down right after.
It has more than 200 active applications within Indigenous lands, 62 in areas where isolated peoples live. Two applications are in the land of the isolated Ituna/Itatá nation in southwest Pará, through the company Mineração Santarém Ltda.
Vale has denied having any active mining bids in the Tanaru and Ituna/Itatá territories, saying that the processes “are no longer pursued by the company since 1989.” Although ANM records show 200 applications on behalf of the group and its various ventures, Vale says “most of these processes were dropped by Vale itself, while pending approval by the ANM.” However, application number 886.223/2003 in the ANM registry, which intersects with the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, does not indicate Vale has given up on its request to mine there.
The Ituna/Itatá land spans 1,420 square kilometers (548 square miles), about the size of São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city. It was declared restricted in 2011, following three decades during which Funai workers collected evidence of the presence of isolated indigenous peoples. However, the territory is a constant target of miners, landowners, ranchers and politicians. Zequinha Marinho, a senator from Pará, has even requested the end of the restricted status for the Ituna/Itatá Indigenous Territory through a legislative decree, saying there are no isolated tribes in the region according to “knowledge of the facts.”
In February 2020, an anthropologist linked to the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro was arrested for entering the Ituna/Itatá protected area without authorization. He had tried to block an intervention by the federal environmental agency, IBAMA, to remove cattle from the land. In November 2020, the Federal Public Ministry in Pará (MPF-PA) also recommended the suspension of an expedition by Funai. According to the agency, any entry into the area should only be allowed after the removal of invaders who had occupied the Indigenous land and who presented a threat to the life and security of public officials as well.
“You have to leave the Indigenous people in their territory, but that doesn’t happen. What we usually see is permissiveness from the state,”
says a Funai official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“The Ituna/Itatá lands, for example, are being taken over by squatters. Precisely because they are isolated, these people will not be vaccinated. The precaution with them must be permanent in regard to COVID-19 and any other disease that a miner or squatter can transmit,” the official says.
Denialism and indifference
In July 2020, when Indigenous organizations were already counting nearly 400 Indigenous victims of COVID-19, APIB and eight parties filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Federal Court to force the government to protect Indigenous peoples. Justice Luís Roberto Barroso ordered emergency “situation room” meetings: one for Indigenous peoples and another specifically to monitor regions of isolated peoples and peoples of recent contact.
The meeting on measures for isolated peoples was coordinated by the Institutional Security Cabinet (GSI) of the president’s office, and denounce as “mild” by Beto Marubo, a representative of APIB and leader of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley (Univaja).
“By calling on the Supreme Federal Court, we hoped to end the denialism of the Bolsonaro government, but it is clear that this has not happened and will not happen,” Marubo said. “The situation room meetings are coordinated by GSI members who have no idea how to protect an isolated Indigenous community. In practice, they are indifferent.”
At the end of July, with Brazil on track for the most COVID-19 deaths after only the U.S., the GSI admitted in a petition to the court that eight Indigenous lands did not have any kind of barrier to prevent people from entering. Three of them are home to isolated peoples: Alto Rio Negro (in Amazonas state), Alto Turiaçu (Maranhão), and Enawenê Nawê (Mato Grosso).
Eight months since APIB filed its lawsuit with the court, and with the COVID-19 death toll among Brazil’s Indigenous people at more than 1,000, the Bolsonaro government has presented no protection plans that Indigenous organizations, medical experts from Fiocruz, and other associations have been able to approve. Three versions have been rejected by Justice Barroso, and a fourth is under consideration.
Indigenous rights activists warn the scenario may only get worse, citing a bill proposed by the Bolsonaro administration that aims to allow mining activity on Indigenous lands. This bill, known as 191/2020 , was shelved last year by Rodrigo Maia, the speaker of the lower house of Congress at the time. But there are fears that it will be revived under the newly inaugurated speaker, Arthur Lira, whose campaign was supported by Bolsonaro.
On Feb. 15, Bolsonaro told supporters and the press during an event in São Francisco do Sul, Santa Catarina state, that “we have to regularize” the exploitation of Indigenous lands. He said it would be “very good because Indigenous people are no longer people who are living isolated, but they are integrating more and more into society.”
That same day, Mongabay requested clarification from the federal agencies ANM, Funai and GSI; as well as from Bemisa Holding. We received no responses from any of them by the time this report was originally published in Portuguese.
UPDATE
On February 15, we asked for a response from Bemisa on the processes mentioned in the report, but there was no feedback. After the publication of this article on March 17, the mining company wrote to Mongabay and informed that in 2011 it asked to waive the six requirements at Piripkura Indigenous Land, in Mato Grosso state. However, all processes are still active in the ANM system and on behalf of Bemisa.
This report is part of Amazônia Minada, a special project of InfoAmazonia with support from the Rainforest Journalism Fund/Pulitzer Center.
This story was first reported by Mongabay’s Brazil team and published here on our Brazil site on March 2, 2021.
The native oyster beds are gone. The vast saltmarshes that soaked up carbon and buffered the coast from stormy seas have been reclaimed for farms and towns. The species-rich maerl and horse mussel beds have vanished and now, in new research, we’ve uncovered the decline of another jewel in the UK’s marine environment: seagrass meadows.
Seagrass is a flowering plant that forms rippling underwater meadows in shallow coastal seas. Our study is the first to analyse all published data on this habitat in the UK, gathered from newspapers, diaries and other sources throughout history. We found that at least 44% of the UK’s seagrass has been lost since 1936 – most of it since the 1980s. But when we modelled which coastal areas were likely to have been suitable for seagrass, we found that as much as 92% of it might have disappeared.
Thankfully, there are still 8,493 hectares (20,987 acres) of mapped seagrass in UK waters. That’s about the same size as Newcastle upon Tyne. But seagrass may have once covered 82,000 hectares of seabed – an area as large as 115,000 football fields. While we may never know exactly how much of the UK’s seabed was once covered by this habitat – old data sets are often light on detail and contain inaccuracies – we know these underwater meadows were vast. We can only imagine how their loss has transformed the country’s coastal seas.
Widespread loss
Seagrass meadows are one of the world’s most efficient sinks of carbon and support 20% of the world’s biggest fisheries. We estimated that the UK’s meadows once stored 11.5 million tonnes of carbon, equivalent to the annual emissions of 7.7 million cars. With the destruction of the seagrass, much of that carbon has been added to the atmosphere and needs to be returned. These huge meadows could also have sheltered 400 million fish, and annually filtered pollution equivalent to the amount of urine produced by the entire population of Liverpool each year.
The first estimates of seagrass around the UK emerged in the 1930s. Descriptions and anecdotes suggest it was a common sight at the coast. Seagrass abounded in sheltered and protected spots, and there were plentiful populations in the lochs of Ireland and the west of Scotland.
Seagrass was considered so abundant in the 1860s that entrepreneurs writing in the Times of London described it as a potential cash crop that could rival imported cotton. While accurate data on the past size and extent of seagrass meadows is rare, the information we do have paints a picture of widespread loss. And these declines continue. The seagrass that has persisted is in a poor state – beset by pollution, coastal development, and disturbance from boating.
Seagrass losses were widespread from urban coastlines to remote estuaries. While huge areas of the Humber, the Essex and Suffolk estuaries lost seagrass, so did more rural locations on the east coast of Anglesey in Wales, the Cromarty Firth in Scotland, and the inlets and estuaries of Cornwall. Areas once covered by seagrass are now lifeless seabeds in many cases.
These losses have numerous and complex causes, but most involve poor water quality resulting from sewage discharges and nutrients running off farmland. Coastal developments – and mines in the past – have also polluted and disturbed seagrass.
A chance for renewal
Our findings should not inspire blame, though. They should highlight the massive opportunities in restoring these habitats. Reviving the UK’s seagrass meadows could help fight the climate emergency, rebuild wildlife populations and put beleaguered fisheries back on a path to productivity.
The tide is turning for some marine habitats in the UK. Work led by the WWF is replanting seagrass in West Wales, oysters are being laid in the Durnoch Firth and coastlines are being reshaped to encourage saltmarshes in Somerset. But these projects must aspire to a bigger vision of coastal biodiversity, mirroring achievements in the US. In Virginia, thousands of hectares of seagrass have been planted. This is the scale of ambition the UK needs.
The evidence of its decline is stark, but seagrass was once common throughout UK waters and could be again. The opportunity for the restoration of this vital habitat is immense.
This article was originally published in The Conversation who are clear about that “Disinformation is dangerous. We fight it with facts and expertise.” You can read the original article here.
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.
Upon the Proposed Mining of “Thacker Pass, Nevada”. A poem by Sarah Gar, a visitor to the land of the Paiute and Shoshone people and the sagebrush creatures.
It’s quiet here.
And I’m not talking
about experimental silence,
American guru silence,
or any sleek human site
that seeks inner peace
(and other noise)
to drown out the drawing-down
and drying-up of every sacred thing.
I’m talking about silence
of lands beyond witness,
a silence embedded and embedding,
the one nestling in the nighthawk’s cries
and cradling these words.
Tall sagebrush touches it —
4 feet 33 millimeters
of branching space,
where voice and silence
play by listening,
weaving water and light
without worrying who
appears as what
before whom.
It’s as if nothing can be said
to arrive or leave in wild places.
Even our breath cannot be said
to enter this place
where it meets other selves
always here and already inside.
But when Grandmother comes,
wakes the fire with practiced taps,
the flames flare in reminder
of whose Spirits keep this place.
Even in “deserted” places
dry soil knows to gather
soft and firm around water,
forming delicate strata
to nourish roots
and catch the drifting seed.
We, too, know to gather,
asking if we are also this place,
and if so,
how we can return.
To get here
we must track ourselves
by species memory,
a long way back,
to when losing one’s way
first became possible.
We trace back to the end’s beginning,
when the volume had to rise,
to create an endless diversion,
to mask the pesky screams
of women and slaves.
Yes, we tracked ourselves,
even did a blood spatter analysis.
A few facts emerged to tell us:
We are the losing and the lost.
There’s nothing lonelier than empire, and nothing stranger than killing one’s beloved.
These facts cleared the room.
Even history couldn’t erase them.
The clock ticked.
Corporations continued to cut down the ancient ones.
And so we rose, rotating and revolving
pulled forward by the falling-apart feeling
which is love.
This must be love because,
as sung by Paiute and Shoshone,
danced by pronghorn and coyote,
this place would hold forever,
streams passing
through trouts’ gills,
sun glancing off scales
and into eagle’s eyes
as she watches over.
Past and future
would nest together,
quiet as grouse eggs,
speckled and constellating,
in tacit reference to each other.
Birth and death would spiral together,
strong and fragile as pyrg shell,
and we would learn again
to listen and to hold
this language,
the spinning of the silence
that found us first,
soft as jackrabbit,
buried as bones,
strong spines of sage
and mountain song.
As a former English professor from the East Coast, Sarah now focuses on writing and activism in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry grieves patriarchal and colonial violence, summons reverence for the natural world, and upholds matriarchal cultures which cherish life.
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.
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