WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONTANA: Montana and Yellowstone’s severe mismanagement of wild, migratory bison has caused a serious decline in Yellowstone’s Central bison herd. The current management practices have diminished herd viability to the point that bison biologists are recommending hunt closures in Montana’s Hebgen Basin, west of Yellowstone National Park, lands where only buffalo from the Central Herd migrate to.
So far, this recommendation is not being heeded. Bison from the imperiled Central herd are already being killed by hunters.
The burden should not be on hunters alone. Yellowstone National Park must also take responsibility for their actions and refuse to kill for Montana cattle interests. Yellowstone’s unnecessary capture-for-slaughter operations far exceed the number of buffalo killed by hunters.
The Montana-based wild bison advocacy group, Buffalo Field Campaign, will hand deliver a letter to the Interagency Bison Management Plan (IBMP) decision-makers at an IBMP meeting held today in Chico Hot Springs, Montana. The letter urges hunt managers and Yellowstone to both take the necessary steps that will allow the Central bison herd to recover. The letter will also be sent to Montana Governor Steve Bullock as well as the Tribal Councils and Tribal Fish & Wildlife Commissions of the five Tribes hunting under treaty right.
“If Yellowstone moves forward with capture-for-slaughter operations, they will be neglecting their responsibility to the buffalo, ignoring the tragic shift that they recognize and have directly caused, and will be placing the bulk of the conservation burden on the five Tribes hunting under treaty right,” said James Holt, Buffalo Field Campaign Board Member from the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) Tribe.
Bison managers know Central herd buffalo migrate west into the Hebgen Basin and also north into the Gardiner Basin. These distinct migrations doubly expose and impact the Central herd to capture and slaughter, hazing, and hunting firing lines on Yellowstone’s border.. The Central herd is in dire straits, hovering now at around 830 individuals, one-fourth the size it was in 2005. Barring a few radio-collared females, slaughter managers can’t differentiate Central from Northern herd buffalo.
“The Central herd is in this predicament because of Montana’s and Yellowstone’s gross negligence, and now Yellowstone biologists are calling for a hunt closure to offer a respite to Central herd buffalo, yet still want to kill up to 1,250 buffalo this winter – from both the Central and Northern herds – as they migrate north into the Gardiner Basin,” said Buffalo Field Campaign Board President Mike Mease. “While a hunt closure on the west side is badly needed, Yellowstone needs to do their part and stand up to Montana and refuse to capture. It is irresponsible and negligent for them to recommend hunting cease while they carry on with indiscriminate slaughter.”
The Central herd needs to recover before they disappear completely.
“The reality is Montana’s and Yellowstone’s “management” is causing a fundamentally tragic shift in buffalo behavior, migrations, and population structure,” said Buffalo Field Campaign media coordinator Stephany Seay. “Without additional habitat and protections, the Central herd will soon be gone, and the entirety of this last wild population is at risk of extinction.”
For more information about what is happening to America’s last wild buffalo, our National Mammal, visit www.BuffaloFieldCampaign.org.
When I was asked to tell in pictures the story of the Colorado river, I’ll admit that besides being honoured to be asked, that I also felt a little overwhelmed. How could I, an immigrant settler, tell one of the most American stories of all? Before I even began I was humbled by the river’s story.
We know of the Colorado’s significance in the spiritual and practical lives of the native peoples who lived in harmony with her flow. Historical accounts recall her part in the ‘taming’ of the west by European colonisers. Powell, his expeditions and novels were lauded for the accounts of their grand adventures down the river and her canyons, adding to the aura of the west.
Her beauty is world renowned. As she winds her way around Horseshoe bend and carves her majestic path through the red sandstone of the Grand Canyon, she is the Mona Lisa of the natural world. Since the dawn of time she has been sculpting the earth as it rose to meet her, working her way to its heart, unveiling its history layer by layer as she went. For millions of years.
In a relatively short timespan of 150 years humans industrialised and multiplied to such as extent that we felt compelled to change what a river had been doing for millennia. So along the Colorado we built massive dams and thousands of miles of infrastructure to control her according to the insatiable energy and water needs of 40 million of us across 7 states. But what is the complete story today that plays out along her foreshortened journey from the clouds to the sea?
In September a first of its kind lawsuit was filed in federal court in Denver seeking Rights of Nature for the Colorado river. The Rights of Nature movement seeks protections for nature that assert that nature has inalienable rights to flourish and regenerate regardless of it’s use to humans. The concept of the Rights of Nature movement is built on the premise that If the corporations that profit from earth’s resources have rights then why can’t nature have rights? Why is one awarded privileges and protections and the other not? Nature is not our subject so why do we act like her master?
Will Falk, a writer, attorney and member of the activist group Deep Green Resistance is one of 7 individuals named on the lawsuit as a ‘friend’ of the river. Will and I came together to tell the river’s story, highlight the case and prepare for what it’s outcome may mean in the stakes to protect life on earth. What will it mean for us and other species if the legal system refuses to grant nature the protections she needs given the current crisis, that might save her from annihilation by corporations? Have you thought about what that world looks like? I have.
When we can’t watch the birds or hear their song anymore, when all the polar bears are gone, when we can’t go to the beach because the beach is there no longer and the glaciers have all melted.
The intrinsic worth of nature has no value in the industrialised global economy. An endangered species knows this and so too do four endemic fish species of the Colorado river on the brink of extinction. Whether or not you value life, one thing is certain. Extinction is forever.
As Will and I began our journey, I realised that I had been perhaps a little naive to think that at the Colorado’s headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, I would find some wildness intact. The reality is a river shackled by a canal called ‘The Grand Ditch’ wrestling her into compliance at her birthplace, sending her through valleys and rusty culverts to a series of reservoirs. From there she is forced uphill and through a 13 mile tunnel blasted beneath the peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park. From west of the great continental divide the Colorado is wrangled east to front range farmland and thirsty cities where no cities should be. This is just the beginning of her life.
Moving southwest through her Upper Basin, along the Yampa and Green Rivers we followed a sea of oil and gas wells in Colorado and Utah. We took a random diversion off the highway near Roosevelt, Utah and followed it into the mesa, uncovering a litany of drill pads disemboweling the earth of its carbon. Any road would have revealed the same thing. Coal fired power plants and their tailings ponds put the finishing touches on an industrial landscape where city billboards proclaim their love for coal and drilling. Out here is energy nirvana for oil and gas fracking companies getting drunk on the resources beneath America’s public lands.
However we spend our lives, one thing is clear. Nothing happens without nature. Without nature we have nothing. Yet nothing may be what we deserve. Though not what other species deserve or future generations who have played no part in our narcissism. We have a choice which we need to wake up to and act upon. Do we continue to let corporations do what they want? Including mining and destroying our lands, displacing us, poisoning our water and selling it back to us in plastic bottles? Or do we protect what we love and stand for something much bigger than ourselves? It’s a choice between doing nothing or doing something.
Wherever you are there’s a Colorado waiting to hear your choice.
Featured image: Red Butte. Located just 6 miles from the south rim of the Grand Canyon, this sacred site is in danger because of the Canyon uranium mine that operates adjacent. Photo Garet Bleir
More than five million people visit the Grand Canyon each year. It’s one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, yet the public knows next to nothing about the indigenous nation living on its floor.
Geography has a lot to do with it: the territory of the Havasupai Tribe is only accessible by helicopter–or, for those more daring, through an arduous 10-mile walk to the canyon’s floor. But it’s also by choice: even though the Havasupai now survive on tourism, they don’t make most of their knowledge and customs available to the public.
Unfortunately, that isolation has failed to protect them from the threat of uranium mining. According to officials in the Sierra Club and USGS, the Canyon Mine has already contaminated millions of gallons of clean drinking water beneath the tribe’s sacred site of Red Butte and directly above the aquifer that feeds the tribe’s main source of water.
The uranium mine represents a major threat to the tribe’s cultural practices and the traditional ecological medicine knowledge held by the nation’s medicine people.
Historically, Havasupai medicine people served as an advisory council to the chief. “Any decisions that affected the entire tribe were sent through the medicine people for spiritual input before decisions were made,” Uqualla, a Havasupai medicine man and spiritual traditionalist, told IC. “There is no longer direct guidance over political decisions, but there is still a constant flow of spirituality held by individuals, which is reinforced, reignited, rejuvenated, and re-divined by a source.”
Uqualla, a Havasupai Medicine Man and Spiritual Traditionalist, stands in front of Red Butte. Photo Garet Bleir
Medicine people continue to serve as emissaries for the Mother Earth in their practices today, Uqualla said. The tribe seeks to protect the specifics of Havasupai medicinal collections and spiritual practices from the public to avoid misunderstandings and potential dangers that come from incorrect replication by non-spiritual practitioners. Unlike Western medical traditions, the Havasupai’s spiritual medicine practices do not solely focus on applying generic treatments for anyone that suffers from a specific ailment. Rather, in spiritual medicine, the individual “patient” informs these practices and use of medicines.
“There is an alchemy with the preparations of medicines,” Uqualla explained. “The alchemy is inclusive of the person in ailment. The collection and preparation of plants is directly connected to the person being healed. It is dependent on the patient’s openness and beliefs to what is coming in during the process. So, the key for spiritual medicine is that it come from a pure place, a pure collection method, and a pure intention.”
Havasupai horse grazing beneath Wigleeva, a sacred sandstone rock formation overlooking Supai village in the Havasupai Reservation. Photo: Garet Bleir
In sharing this wisdom, Uqualla hopes to benefit the broader, non-indigenous or non-spiritual population and to communicate how these lands continue to serve the indigenous peoples in the area.
Throughout his practices, Uqualla uses a variety of sage, juniper and pinon pine, as well as berries, acorns, talons, bones, feathers, cones, rocks, and plants that are found in the region of Red Butte, while incorporating the essence of these objects and other elements to bring strength to the healing process, he explained.
In Havasupai culture, the desire to safeguard stories and practices is also born from a concern that their practices will be appropriated and applied in an inappropriate manner. “When it comes to sharing information, you want to share elements that will bring clarity, illumination, healing, and well-being for people,” Uqualla said. “Because our practices are very individualized, it comes with risk when a major non-indigenous or non-spiritual demographic sees or reads something and [tries] to replicate, because they are likely to make an incorrect interpretation of it.”
Instead, Uqualla urges those searching for this kind of healing to locate an expert. “Every place in the Mother Earth has a medicine people, and it is important for those looking to benefit from these practices to be able to recognize them.”
Another reason the Havasupai guard their sacred places and practices is due to the greed of those who appropriate their culture.
The Havasupai have experienced their fair share, like most other Native American nations. For instance, the Havasupai now only have access to “traditional use sites”after being forced at gunpoint from their traditional grounds within the Grand Canyon National Park. In a broader context, Indigenous Peoples have been repeatedly subjected to acts of “biopiracy” at the hands of pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology firms and even universities.
Indian Gardens, Grand Canyon National Park. This land was a traditional area for farming and medicine collection until the Havasupai were forced out, twenty years after the Grand Canyon was declared a national monument. Photo: Garet Bleir
“We have found the only way we can protect a thing that we do not want disturbed is by being very, very silent,” said Rex Tilousi, former Havasupai Chairman. “Not speaking about that painting, that rock, what is behind that rock, because we know what is going to happen to these things if we talk about them. They are going to be destroyed.”Red Butte serves as a critical example of this appropriation, given that this unique and sacred space in Grand Canyon’s biocultural landscape, is now occupied by a uranium mine.
Owned by Energy Fuels, the Canyon Mine has already contaminated millions of gallons of once clean drinking water beneath the grounds surrounding Red Butte. Now, this contaminated water is being sprayed into the air, trickling into the nearby forest, according to the president of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter, Alicyn Gitlin. All of this is occurring upon traditional and current medicinal collection sites within the sacred land of Red Butte.
The destruction of this land has a history that dates to the late ‘70s, when the Canyon Mine was first being developed by Energy Fuels Resources (EFR). “Without letting us know, EFR had already scraped the ground, the sage, and underneath the dust they destroyed ancient grinding stones, baskets, the pottery work our people traded with other tribes, and even bones,” said Tilousi. “They had scraped away everything getting that place ready for mining.”
After being accused of desecrating sacred land and failing to communicate with the Havasupai before the company started working, EFR denied the sacred nature of the area.
Some 30 years later, Mark Chalmers, the President and COO of EFR, stands behind his company’s claim. When IC interviewed Chalmers last month he commented,
“You know it’s interesting…I built the mine in the ‘80s, and it was interesting because the Red Butte was never brought up as a cultural site back when they built it, but now it has emerged as a cultural site.”
Chalmers said he spoke with a local rancher who ran cattle in the area for 20 or 30 years. “He’s the one who said it.“And I’m not saying this to be derogatory against the Havasupais, because I do respect the Havasupais, but he had never seen Havasupai in that ground until the mine was approved.” [sic]
Chalmers went on to say that he had given some of the Havasupai their first rides to the Canyon Mine, because they had never seen it before. “I’m not saying that some Havasupais wouldn’t consider Red Butte sacred, but it received very little or no attention that I knew of.” [sic]
The Canyon uranium mine. Photo: Garet Bleir
Whether he was aware of it or not, Chalmers’ comment echoes back to a time when the legal doctrine of terra nullius became a popular tool to justify territorial conquest.
The doctrine, which eventually became international law, establishes that any land can be legally obtained if it is found to be unused or unoccupied. The doctrine has been used extensively by governments and companies seeking to take ownership of indigenous lands.
Chalmers’ comment also fails to acknowledge historical transgressions against the tribe. The Havasupai used to have easy access to Red Butte, but that changed when the Havasupai were forcibly removed to make way for the Grand Canyon National Park. Now, they must take a three-hour drive from their reservation to Red Butte…and that’s after a helicopter ride or 10-mile hike out of the canyon.
Regardless of outsider’s interpretations of their own cultural practices, the Havasupai maintain their spiritual connection to Red Butte.
“People complain that we have no documentation of being in the [area], and say such things like, ‘we have never seen them here,’ Uqualla observed. “But animals and plants are still a very profound part of the survival of the Havasupai people and we have been constantly utilizing these lands over generations.”
Due to the way that these collections take place, by one medicine man or woman and at various times of day or night, it is understandable why the rancher would not have noticed any Havasupai.
“Within our tradition and spirituality, these gatherings are not a show of being there to collect in grand ceremony,” Uqualla explained. “It is being there in those private moments to go in and have to communicate with Mother Earth to have permission to take, permission to use, permission to be able to bring in what it is meant for. The whole Grand Canyon rim is a giant apothecary of medicine and this is known by every spiritual group that is in the Colorado River Plateau region.”
The Havasupai still go into the Red Butte and Canyon Mine area too. “Individual medicine entities go out and collect what is needed at times when it is intimate for the Mother Earth and the harvester. This is done in such a subtle way that only an appropriate amount is taken. They wouldn’t see a whole field leveled or harvested,” Uqualla said.
The Canyon Mine could change everything. Even if contaminated water from the mine is somehow unable to make it into the deeper aquifer, several new studies have demonstrated that the mine can still have a negative ecological impact on local plant and animal life.
Medicine people have been in constant concern for the Mother Earth. They bring healing to her, which will bring healing to the people she watches over, Uqualla continued. But, according to many members of the tribe, these collections and practices are now in danger. “How can we get there? If we do get there, do we need special new ceremony? How can we be sure that our sacred spring water isn’t poisoned?”
Havasu Falls on the Havasupai Reservation. Areas such as these are fed by the aquifer directly beneath the Canyon Mine. Photo: Garet Bleir
Uqualla also told us that the Havasupai aren’t the only Native American tribe affected by the mine. The grounds in question are also sacred gathering lands for the Navajo Nation, the Hopi Nation, the Hualapai, and other tribes on the Colorado River Plateau.
He maintains that, in the future, medicine people will have to be even more discerning as to what is collected and when it is collected. They will also have to consider alternate preparations and other options to eradicate any negative effects the mine might have on medicine in the area.
Looking toward the future, Uqualla left us with this final thought:
“Everyone that is birthed on this mother earth has dark and light, good and bad, masculine and feminine. Learn how to bring that into a magnificent balance. The Mother Earth stated at the beginning, ‘I will give you what it is that you ask for. Not what you ask for from the language or the voice, but what you put forth in your actions.’
“Everything about Mother Earth speaks in symbolism. Learn how to pull from the information given by the surroundings. The medicines of wind, the medicines of the water, the medicines of fire, the medicines of rock. The Mother Earth knows how to take care of itself. And it will take care of itself. It’s going to be the greatest teacher for all of us so go out to her daily and allow for yourself that connection in whatever way you wish that is comfortable for you do so. Even if it is just a step out there. That one moment of total blankness will allow for that infusion of Mother Earth to come through. Allow for yourself to make a connection with the Mother Earth and have her be a constant watcher, healer, teacher, and leader for you.
“We are the children of the Mother Earth and every single one of them walk and trash and abuse the earth beneath them. It’s a surface that gives us the ability to walk, talk, breath, sing, dance. And that is important for us to understand. Without that where would we be? We would not be.”
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 8, 2013 Resistance Radio interview with Lierre Keith. You can read Part 1 here.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Jensen: Let’s just use an example of the local Tolowa Indians, who lived here for at least 12,500 years. Their lifestyle was based—their food, a lot of their caloric input, came from salmon. If they ate all the salmon, if they killed off the salmon somehow, then that means they would have to conquer someone else, or starve to death, right? Is that basically what you’re saying?
Keith: Yes. Or take the example of, it doesn’t even matter, any civilization. They’re generally going to be based on one of seven or eight crops—corn or wheat or barley or whatever. Every year there’s less and less of it because every year the soil is more and more degraded, there’s more salinization taking place, more salt, literally, in the soil. You will see this throughout history where both the archaeological record of things like the strata that they can just dig through, and then what’s actually in the cooking pots, and then if there are written records of history, you can see how one crop shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, so they try another one that’s more salt-hardy, and eventually that will collapse too. You even have written descriptions of how the surface of the land is glistening white with salt, and “What are we going to do?” They destroyed their land, doing agriculture.
You can pick your power center, but it’s always the same process. You’re using up what you’ve got, and in this process you’re also destroying the rivers and you’re pulling down more trees, and of course you need all those things to survive. Your population is too high to survive on what’s there.
That’s the problem with cities. Eight million people cannot live sustainably on the island called Manhattan. It just can’t be done. Resources have to come from somewhere else, the food, the water, the energy. And the problem is that nobody willingly gives up those things.
The people who live in the watershed next to you, they don’t want to give you what they need. Why would they willingly just die so you can have their trees, their water and their fish? They’re not going to do that. So you’re going to come into conflict. This is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do, always.
It doesn’t matter what beautiful, peaceful values those people might hold in their hearts. It doesn’t matter—their lovely art, their music, their paintings, their frescoes, what religion they might be—it doesn’t matter, materially speaking. They have used up their resources. They will starve to death without food. They’re going to have to go out and get it from somewhere else.
J: It’s a functional problem.
K: That’s why it always ends up militarized. That’s one big reason. Another reason is, as you mentioned, human slavery. This is backbreaking labor. Hunter-gatherers tend to work maybe 15 or 20 hours a week to provide for their basic resources, and the rest of the time they do spiritual activities, art, naps apparently are very important, and also gossip. So that’s what they love to do, and they’ve got a lot of free time to do it.
You can contrast that with farmers: it’s just neverending, from dawn to dusk. For anyone to have leisure time in an agricultural society, they have to have slaves. To put a real number on it, by the year 1800—a lot of people demarcate that as the beginning of the fossil fuel age—fully three-quarters of the human beings alive on this planet, three-quarters of them, were living in some form of slavery, indenture, or serfdom. That’s what it requires.
J: It was mainly agricultural, right?
K: Yes. We’ve forgotten how much work is involved because we’ve been using machines now to do that work. I can guarantee that when the fossil fuel runs out, we’re going to remember exactly what kind of work this is.
Once you have that number of the population living in slavery, you need someone to keep them there, and those people are called soldiers. When they go out into the hinterlands, into the colonies, to get those resources that everybody now needs, one of those resources is always going to be other human beings.
We talk about Athens, the great birthplace of modern democracy. Ninety percent of the population of Athens were slaves. That carries through until the year 1800. So that’s number two, slavery.
The other problem with agriculture is it creates a surplus. That’s how the whole thing keeps going. You have to make enough so that you have some surplus. Hunter-gatherers can just move on a little bit and there’s more food to eat, but with the agriculturalists, of course, starvation is always one season away, so there’s always this surplus. The thing is, if you can store it, you can steal it, so you always have to have somebody to guard the food stores. And again, those people are called soldiers.
J: In the first cities—I learned this from Lewis Mumford—the first cities did not have walls around the outside to protect them from so-called raiders. They actually had walls around the granary to make sure that the king was able to keep control of the food supplies because it was only through keeping control of the food supplies that he was able to keep control of the labor force.
K: Yes, so you see this makes a really vicious little circle. Another point to keep in mind is if you can picture one of those great big naval ships that the British Navy or whoever used to conquer various colonies, it can take 600 old-growth trees just to make one of those ships.
War is really resource-intensive. And it ends. A lot of things you might produce create value in this society, and the value can keep either building or at least transferring, but with things that revolve around war, it just dead-ends right there because it’s only got one purpose. And when it’s over, everybody’s dead and that’s sort of the end of it.
Those ships—entire forests of the world were pulled down to make ships just for war. And this is true everywhere. It’s not just the British Navy. It’s all of them. That’s what was required to build those great big fighting vessels.
So you’ve destroyed your forest to live in this energy-intensive way, and you’ve poured a whole bunch of resources particularly into your military, not in defeating people but into the military, and now around again in the vicious circle, you have to go out and conquer the people living in the region next to you so you can take their forest to make more ships to conquer more people.
This is the temporary advantage that agricultural societies have. Because they’re willing to destroy their forests, they can build these great big ships. They can do all this smelting of iron and make these incredible weapons, which are a lot harder than just wooden spears. So they’ve got this superior military force because it’s all draw-down.
Then you’re stuck in this position where you then have to conquer. You have to use that military to go out and get more resources because you’ve used up yours. But it gives you that temporary advantage over the people who aren’t willing to destroy their forests.
If you’re the people who aren’t willing, now you’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place. You either become militaristic and devote your forest to making an army—you kill your land—or you stand on principle and you’re killed and they take it. This is why war spreads. The gentle, peaceful matrilineal people that we all love to romanticize, and in our dreams that’s where we go, this is what happens. This is what they’re up against every time.
It’s a double bind. There’s not really any way out, and that’s why we’re in the state we’re in.
J: Since the problems are functional, as opposed to just something we can change by being nicer people, why are you telling us this? That’s one question. Another question is what do you want people to do with this information?
K: The reason I’m telling everybody is because I want to be hated. [Pause.] That’s supposed to be a joke.
The reason I’m telling everybody is because I feel like the people who care the most—and by that I mean radical environmentalists, radical feminists, people who are profoundly committed to the planet, to justice, to a better way—by and large do not understand the depth of the problem. And if we don’t address the actual problem, we’re never going to come up with solutions. That seems kind of obvious.
Even people who’ve dedicated their lives to these issues don’t understand that it all goes back to agriculture, that that’s the original activity that started us down this path of destruction. That’s the primary destruction. Eventually, global warming will outweigh that, but to date, it’s still the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet. Because that’s what it is. It’s not like agriculture on a bad day, agriculture done really badly. No, this is what it is. You pull down the forest. You rip up the prairie. You destroy those biotic communities, and you replace them with this monocrop for humans, for as long as it will last. That’s the problem.
Then once you start doing that, you’re stuck with this militaristic cycle because you’ve got to keep doing it again and again. When you’ve destroyed your own, you have to go out and get someone else’s. Militarism isn’t just, “Oh gosh, we happen to be warlike. We have a bad story in a book we consider holy. We’d better tell new stories.” I’m a writer. I’m all for new stories, but that’s not going to change this.
The problem is we have a way of life based on draw-down. Materially speaking, we’ve used it all up. And we need to face that. That’s why I’m trying to get people to understand this. It’s not because I actually want them to hate me although a lot of them end up hating me. I guess that’s just the way it goes when you go up against people’s beliefs.
We really have to get the basic wound that’s been done, the basic damage. This has got to be at the forefront of our consciousness as activists and environmentalists and feminists. We’re never going to be able to face it otherwise.
J: I want to comment on the whole hating you thing. What you’re saying is not actually new. Basically, every generation, there have been a number of people who say agriculture is destructive—can you just list a few of the people who have talked about this? There’s Jared Diamond and Richard Manning with Against the Grain, and how about Edward Hyams? Talk about a few of those precedents.
K: What you’re saying is absolutely right. Every generation there’s somebody who says the same thing, and you can go all the way back to ancient Greece to some of the earliest written texts that we have anywhere in the world, and you’ve got Plato, Socrates and Aristotle all mentioning the fact that the world was being destroyed, that the rivers were being flooded with this mud and silt, and so there were no more fish, and all the soil was washing down off the mountains.
In fact, some of the ports of the ancient Roman Empire had to be moved ten kilometers—ten kilometers—because so much silt ran off the mountains and clogged the harbors that they kept having to move, just literally move the cities, to a new spot where the ships could actually dock. This was all commented on. They knew what they were doing. It’s just that nobody knew how to stop it.
Then you have people like George Hill in the nineteenth century, then Edward Hyams in 1930, 1940, and more recently, you have David Montgomery and his book Soil, which is absolutely fabulous. Jared Diamond basically won a Pulitzer Prize for saying more or less the same thing. Richard Manning has this great quote that I love. I’d like to read this. It’s just a few sentences:
“No biologist or anyone else for that matter could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a monoculture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies because there is no other way to sustain it.”
That’s it right there. It’s a war against the natural world.
No, I have nothing to say that’s particularly original. I think I put it together in my own way, but none of this is new information. It’s not getting to the people who care the most, and that’s why I feel impassioned about this.
J: So what do you want people to do on two levels, both the personal level and the social level?
K: I think that the social level is heads and shoulders, far and way above, way more important than anything that anybody can do in their personal lives. And I really want to emphasize that, because there are no personal solutions to political problems, and we should know that.
The problem is that a lot of the environmental movement—we’ve kind of been sold this idea that if we just make different consumer choices, we can somehow buy our way out of these massive, global political problems. We can’t. There’s no set of things you can buy that’s going to make a damn bit of difference on any of this. This is not a problem that you can address in your personal life and really have that make anything but a nano-difference. These are really just horrendous systems of power that we are going to have to challenge.
J: Can you say what you were going to say, but in addition can you give a three-minute liberal/radical distinction? Is that possible?
K: There are two main differences between liberals and radicals. The first is that liberals are idealist, and what that means is that liberals tend to think that social reality is an idea. It’s a mental event. And therefore, the way to make social change is education. You change people’s minds. And social change happens because people have some kind of consciousness transformation, or a personal epiphany, or even a spiritual revelation, but that’s how social change happens. It’s one by one and it’s through education or rational argument because it’s a rational problem, right? It’s just a mental event.
J: If we recognize that agriculture is destructive, then we’ll stop it.
K: Yes. Somehow if we just get the information to people, it will somehow just happen. It’s very different on the radical side because radicals think that material conditions are primary, that society is not made up of ideas, it’s made up of material conditions and material institutions that create those conditions. The way you change things is by taking power away from the powerful and redistributing that to the dispossessed. That involves struggle.
Down the line, you have to make decisions how you’re going to wage such struggle, whether it’s violent or nonviolent. All that is really important, and often very ethically grueling to come to grips with, but that’s a much later discussion.
The thing to recognize is this requires force. It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s not a mistake. The powerful aren’t there because the rest of us aren’t educated. They’re there because they have power, and they’re not going to give it up willingly.
You need to use some level of force, whether that’s nonviolent, whether it’s boycotts, whether it’s sit-ins—there are plenty of nonviolent ways that have worked, so it’s not about violence and nonviolence.
It’s simply to recognize that this is not a mistake or a misunderstanding because it’s not a mental event. It’s about material systems of power that have got to be changed, that have to be confronted and brought down. That’s idealism versus materialism.
The other big difference between liberals and radicals is the basic social unit. For liberals it’s always the individual. The individual is sacrosanct. It’s always the individual against society. And again, this leaves you with a strategy of sort of one on one. You’re going to change people one by one, and that’s how you change society.
For radicals, again, this is totally different. We understand that society is actually made of groups of people—so it’s always a class condition, whether it’s economic class, whether it’s a sex caste system of gender, whether it’s a racial caste system. These are groups of people, and some of those groups have power over other groups.
So it’s not about you as an individual. The bad things that happen to me aren’t because my name is Lierre and I have blue eyes and I like reading. The bad things that happen to me are because I’m a woman, because of the different class positions that I hold. Those are the things that happen to people who are in my position. Nothing to do with me as an individual.
Social change happens when the dispossessed come together and make common cause. The solution is really written into the problem. Groups of people have power, but the dispossessed can come together and fight for themselves to change that. There’s always hope in that condition.
That’s the difference between liberals and radicals, and the problem with a lot of the environmentalists of course is that they’ve completely taken up this liberalism. So it’s only going to change by education, and you’re only going to do it one on one. What has dropped out completely from of the conversation is that there are people in power, they’re making money, they control armies, and they’re in control of things like Exxon/Mobil. They are gutting the planet for their personal profit. They’ve got names and addresses, as Utah Phillips very famously said. We know where they live, and we can see how their power is organized.
Our job is to take that apart. It’s to take down those institutions in whatever way we can and redistribute the power so that we all have some say in the material conditions of our lives.
What do I want people to do? In really broad strokes I actually think that there’s still a lot of hope because the things that we need to do to solve these problems are actually things that we should be doing anyway if we care about justice. To get justice for people is also the only way we’re going to save this planet. It’s not human race vs. planet. I think it gets set up that way in people’s minds. It’s not. It’s actually quite the opposite.
So, to get down to brass tacks, the number one thing you can do to drop the birth rate is teach a girl to read. That’s a really profound statement. When women have even that much more power over their lives, it means they have a little more control over the uses to which men put our bodies, and that’s sexually, reproductively, economically. The number one thing that drops the birth rate across the globe is teaching a girl to read. And we should care about that because we care about girls.
As it turns out, it’s one of the main things we’re going to have to do to save the planet. Right now somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of all children that are born are either unplanned or unwanted. All we have to do is give women control over their bodies and the birth rate drops. That’s happened in 32 countries. We now have negative or zero population growth in 32 countries. This is not the human rights horrors of China or places like that where they’ve instituted these draconian and misogynist laws. This is simply giving women power over their lives. And that’s what happens when women have a little education and a little bit of power, over and over.
The number one thing that we have to do is empower girls, and that means confronting a system of power that’s called patriarchy. We’re all going to have to be feminists. Gosh, what a shame.
The other thing that drops the birth rate is when you increase people’s standard of living. People end up having lots of children when they’re very, very poor. So if you raise the standard of living, the birth rate drops, very quickly in fact. Often in a generation you can see this happen.
The reason that people are poor is not because they’re stupid. It’s because the rich are stealing from them. And that is a global system called capitalism. So we’re going to have to be against capitalism, and we’re going to have to do something about patriarchy. That is the only way that we’re going to save this planet.
Again, it’s not humans vs. planet earth. If you care about human rights, that is the only thing that’s really going to save this situation.
My goal is, over the next two or three generations, we could very easily, by simply caring about women and girls and giving them some rights over their lives, some decision-making power, we could drop the birth rate dramatically and then we could let the planet repair. We could be part of that repair. It’s actually not that hard, because the grasses and the forests want to come back. If we simply get out of the way, they will.
I’ll end with one final bit of information, and that’s really about grasslands. If we were to take 80 percent of the trashed out grasslands around the planet, which have been destroyed by agriculture and return them to the grasslands that they would like to be, within 15 years we could sequester all of the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the Industrial Age. We could stop global warming in its tracks.
Because it’s not us doing it. It’s the plants that are doing it. It’s those incredible grasses that would do it for us. Because life wants to live. And they will do that. The one thing they are really good at is building soil. That’s what prairies do. The basic component of soil is carbon, so they’ll suck it out of the air and they’ll store it once more in the ground, and that could be the end of global warming.
But we’ve got to stop being these monsters and destroyers. A lot of times people make this argument that this is human nature. My response is that it’s not. We were on this planet for over two million years and we didn’t destroy anything. In fact, you can look at the first art that we ever made, and to me it’s a celebration. You have the mega-fauna and the mega-females. Those were our first art projects, these giant animals and these giant women. To me that says that in our bodies, in our brains, in our bones, we have that awe and that thanksgiving, that we were trying to say thank you for our lives and for our homes, and so that was what we celebrated.
I don’t think it’s that far from us still. I think we could repair this planet and remember how to participate rather than dominate.
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 8, 2013 Resistance Radio interview with Lierre Keith.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Jensen: Today’s guest is Lierre Keith, the author of multiple books including The Vegetarian Myth and Deep Green Resistance.
Jared Diamond has said that agriculture is the biggest mistake that humans ever made, and Dick Manning had some things to say about it too. Can you talk about what’s wrong with agriculture?
Keith: Yes, and I would like to first explain why that’s important. The reason it’s important is because agriculture is the basis of civilization, and I think the whole point of this show is to make people understand that this is a living arrangement that had no future. So the end was written into the beginning.
And the reason is, primarily, because agriculture is an inherently destructive activity. So you have to understand what agriculture is.
In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it—and I mean down to the bacteria— then you plant it to human use. So it’s biotic cleansing. All those other millions of creatures who should be living there have nowhere to go. That’s a long way of saying mass extinction. Because that’s what agriculture is.
There are a few problems. The first is that it lets the human population grow to some rather large numbers because instead of sharing that land with all those other creatures, you’re only growing humans on it. So we had this catastrophic rise in human numbers which we’ve seen over the last 10,000 years.
The second problem is that you’re destroying the topsoil, and topsoil is the basis of terrestrial life. We owe our entire existence to six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains. Right now 80 percent of the food calories that are used to support the current human population come from those agricultural foods.
It’s only possible to support this number of people by taking over vast swaths of the planet from all these other creatures and then using it to support human beings.
So, except for the last 46 remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers, the human race has made itself dependent on this inherently destructive activity, on agriculture, and it’s killing the planet.
This is not a plan with a future. It’s draw-down. The end was written into the beginning. What you’re mostly drawing down is fossil soil. We’ve all heard of fossil fuel, probably fossil water, but fossil soil is another really basic concept that we should all be familiar with.
It takes many, many centuries to grow an inch of soil, and in a very brief period of time agriculture destroys that. In one season of planting your basic row crop—wheat or corn or soy or whatever—you can destroy 2000 years of soil.
And if you don’t believe me, you can go to Google Images and type in “Dust Bowl first day.” You can see pictures of these farms in South Dakota that literally lost all their topsoil, all of it, in a 12-hour period, on the first day of the Dust Bowl. That’s draw-down and it’s draw-down in a really big way.
J: How does agriculture actually actually work? How does it actually, first, commit the biotic cleansing? And second, how does it destroy the soil? What happens?
K: I want all the listeners to think about what’s outside their bedroom window or their back door or even their front door. Probably it’s a little piece of land, ten feet by ten feet. Maybe you live in the country, but if you live anywhere urban or suburban, you’re going to see a tiny little patch of land, and it’s mostly going to be grass, probably Kentucky blue grass or something like that, that was put there as a decoration.
If you want to grow a garden, you have to dig up that grass. You can’t just throw lettuce seeds on top of it and hope for the best. I can tell you what will happen, and it’s exactly nothing. There is no way that the annual seeds of those domesticated vegetables are ever going to out-compete that grass. Grass is fabulous stuff. It does not die; it’s pretty much invincible.
To remove it you have to apply a whole bunch of labor. Then, with the soil bared, you can plant whatever annual crop you were thinking of planting. To have a garden, it would be lettuce or tomatoes or squash or whatever. But those are annual crops. They only come once. They’re not going to be here again next year. That’s what an annual means, that they only grow for an annum, one year.
That’s in contrast to perennials, which grow many years. Trees are perennials, clearly. They can grow 2000 years out here in the redwoods. Grasses are perennials. There are annual grasses, but most grasses are perennials. Then there are lots of things in between that are also perennials, like shrubs and vines and whatnot. But then there’s another category of plants that are annuals, and they only grow for one year, or maybe two or three seasons, then they’re done.
These two different categories of plants have very different functions in nature. Everything of terrestrial life depends on those perennials being in place. They do a couple of really basic things, one of which is, because they live a long time, they have the capacity to have a really deep root system. Their roots go down really far, because they have many years to get there. Once they’re there, they can break up rock, the substrata that our planet is made from, and by breaking up that rock they make the minerals available to every other living creature on the planet. They are the ones who recirculate those minerals and keep them coming up to the surface, so that other plants and soil creatures and ultimately animals can eat them. Without those minerals we’re all dead.
J: Like iron.
K: Yes, like iron.
J: Calcium.
K: Like zinc, manganese, anything, you name it. Selenium. It’s the plants that do that, and they’re the only ones that can do that.
Annuals do not have deep root systems. This is really important for people to understand. They don’t live long enough to develop root systems. It’s not part of their genetic code to make deep root systems. They have one purpose, and that’s to create a giant seed head. That’s what annuals do. They have a really short period of time. They’re only going to live two or three seasons, and everything is about the continuation of the species. Their one shot at a future is to have a great big seed head. It’s to produce that baby and wrap it in as many nutrients and as many defenses as it can. And that gives you a great big seed. That’s why annual seeds tend to be way bigger than perennial seeds. It’s got to last. It’s got to make sure that that plant baby survives when the time comes.
Not only do those perennial plants break up the rock and do the mineral thing, but also those really deep root systems are what let the water table recharge because every little tiny filament of root helps water. Every time it rains, the water can now enter the soil down through that channel of the root system. When the community needs that water again, later in the summer, say, when it’s dry, it’s like a great big sponge. Those perennial plants can pull on that water as they need it and keep the whole community alive. That’s what perennials do.
The third really important thing is they keep the soil covered at all times. If you think about a forest, or a prairie, you do not see bare soil. You’ll see duff in a forest, which is decaying plant matter. And of course in a real prairie, you’re not going to see any bare soil. You’re just going to see plants for as far as the eye can see. It will just be perennial grasses.
That’s really important because without being protected, the soil, just like the rest of us, it dies when it’s exposed. The sun bakes it, the wind blows it away, the rain compacts it, and you just end up with dust essentially instead of living matter. So that’s what perennials do.
There are opportunities in nature for annual plants. If there’s an emergency situation, some kind of disaster like a fire or a flood, an earthquake, a landslide when the ground might be bared for some reason—that’s an emergency in nature because that’s the basis of life now being degraded. So immediately the annuals spring to life. It’s because the perennials have been cleared away by this disaster.
You can picture the bank of a river that’s been wiped clean by a flood. It’s just mud. The first thing that happens is all those annual seeds, they’ve been waiting in the soil for their moment. There’s no competition now from the perennials and the perennial root systems, so now they can spring to life, . They will cover that bare soil for a year or two.
It’s like if you cut yourself, you would put a Band-Aid on it. That’s what those annuals do. They provide that Band-Aid. Eventually your skin is going to knit back together, and that’s the perennial grasses or the forest trees coming back in and and you don’t need the Band-Aid anymore. In the same way, the annuals—you won’t see them anymore in the landscape. And their seeds again lie buried until they’re needed for an emergency.
So it’s not like annuals are bad and perennials are good, it’s just that most of the plant matter, the cellulose matter on the planet is going to be perennials. But the annuals have their moment. And it’s when those emergencies happen.
The problem with agriculture is it’s that emergency over and over and over. In order to plant those giant seed heads, in order for them to have a chance, you’ve got to clear the land. You have to remove the grasses or pull down the forests and then you can plant those seeds—corn or wheat or whatever it’s going to be. That’s the only way that you can do it. You cannot simply sprinkle them in the grass and hope for the best or sprinkle them in a forest. Nothing will happen. We all know this as gardeners.
So just extend that across the planet. That’s where all of those annual monocrops come from, by destroying the grasslands of the world and ultimately pulling down a lot of forests as well. These are the demands of agriculture. You can’t just do it once. It has to be done over and over. It is a war against the living world. Because the world doesn’t want to be a monocrop. This is a living planet, and it wants to stay alive. That means protecting that topsoil. It also means that all those plants and animals really want their homes. So you’re going to be fighting a war against all those plants and animals that want to come back, all the perennial grasses, all the trees. Anybody who’s gardened knows that you’re forever fighting the grasses that want to be there.
If you let it go for a few years, what will eventually come back is of course is the succession of either the forest or the prairie, which in one way is ultimately the hope. If we just get out of the way, this planet will repair. That drive, that life wants to live, it’s such a profound impulse in every living creature, that they would take their homes back if we simply stopped fighting that war.
But that’s what agriculture is. A lot of people don’t understand this. I think it’s because we’ve been living in an agricultural society for really 10,000 years now. Ultimately this started way back in ancient Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, and all that, but it’s a direct line. Eventually it conquers Europe. Then the Europeans bring it to North and South America, and they do a bunch of conquering as well, and eventually this is what you end up with; the whole world is just covered with these annual monocrops, as much of it as could be.
We’ve reached the end. By 1950 the world was out of topsoil. Since that point we’ve actually been eating fossil fuel instead of soil. Because the soil’s gone. We’ve skinned the planet alive. So fossil fuel took over instead, which certainly brings with it another whole set of horrors, which are frankly worse.
J: I want to mention a book I recently read, which was pretty fabulous, and pretty heartbreaking. It was called A Country So Full of Gain. It was early European explorers’ accounts of Iowa.
I know for most of us that when we think of Iowa, we think of nothing but cornfields, but Iowa was one of the most wildlife-rich regions of the country, with the sort of interplay between the eastern forests and the Great Plains. When I think of Iowa, I don’t actually think of a place that’s rich in wildlife. That’s a great example of what agriculture does.
K: Yes, and of course another example is Indiana, which, again, we don’t think of as being a place filled with wetlands, but there was the Limberlost, which was a swamp essentially, just a great big wetland. It was made famous by a series of books. The Girl of the Limberlost was the first one of these novels that were written, in the 1930s and 40s. Many, many people still go there. There’s a state park that memorializes the place where these books took place. And everyone wants to see the Limberlost. It’s not there. So over and over these park rangers have to say, “It’s gone. It’s completely eradicated. It was drained and turned into a cornfield. You can’t see it because it’s not here anymore.”
The girl in that book—it’s a novel, but you can imagine that some of this might be true—is living in terrible poverty, with a really abusive situation with her family, but she’s very determined to get herself to school. She does this by being essentially a naturalist because she knows the place so well and loves, particularly, the butterflies and the moths. This is how she’s able to provide for her school fees.
In that way, they are amazing books, because the woman who wrote them, Jean Stratton Porter, really loved that swampy area, that wetland. It’s gone. It’s all been turned into corn.
J: I just read last night that this year has been a complete catastrophe for monarch butterflies, that even recently where they would still have a few we are seeing none. In this case it’s because of milkweed, because Roundup has been killing all the milkweed.
K: And that’s so we can all have soybeans, right? And there are descriptions not even from that long ago, a hundred years ago, of swarms of butterflies miles long. If you can imagine ― a cloud of butterflies miles long on the horizon. And this was just a regular sight that people would see everywhere across the Americas.
J: Can we talk for just a moment about the Fertile Crescent?
K: Everybody has seen pictures of the Iraq War at this point. It’s been going on for ten years or whatever. You picture that region, and you picture rock and sand. Nobody on the planet would call that place the Fertile Crescent, but it was once upon a time quite fertile. You can go to all the places where agriculture first started, in seven places around the globe, and pretty much all of them look like that now.
That is the inevitable endpoint. That’s what happens when you clear away the forests and the grasslands and you drain the wetlands. You remove the life that wants to be there.
You can keep that going for somewhere between 800 and 2000 years. That’s the length of every civilization. They last as long as their topsoil. When their topsoil is gone, they collapse.
Look at ancient Rome, or at any of these giant power centers from history, and it’s the same pattern over and over. By the end, Rome was so desperate that Egypt, with the wonderful fertility of the Nile River, was a personal possession of the emperor of Rome. Anybody who interfered with the off-loading of grain into the Roman ports along the coastline—summary execution. Because that’s where they were getting all their food from at that point. If you did anything to interfere with the off-loading of that food, you would be killed on sight. Everybody got that this was the end.
So the whole thing collapses. Then it starts over somewhere else.
But that entire region around the Mediterranean was destroyed piece by piece by those successive empires—the Phoenicians and the Egyptians and then the Greeks and finally the Romans. Then it collapsed. And the only thing that saved Northern Europe from the Romans was the Alps, mountains that they simply couldn’t cross. Eventually, though, agriculture pushed its way up through there as well. There are only four freely flowing rivers left in Europe now. The rest have been dammed.
J: You’re talking about this not being sustainable. But I don’t know how you can say that it’s not sustainable when there are seven billion humans on the planet, and clearly humans are continuing to multiply, so doesn’t that mean that this way of living works? I’m thinking about a New York Times op-ed I just read about a week ago, that said that ecology doesn’t actually matter to humans because human survival is based on technology and innovation, as opposed to the world. The guy who wrote it is a scientist, so he must know.
K: [laughs] I would say that human survival depends on having a livable planet and recognizing its limits. If you don’t start there, you’re going to end where we ended. 98 percent of the forests are gone and 99 percent of the prairies, and we are looking at complete biotic collapse. It’s just insanity. To not recognize basic physical limits just seems so out of touch with reality.
J: But there’s still a lot of humans. There’s like seven billion humans on the planet, so obviously we’re doing really well.
K: Yeah, and counting. What we are doing, what we have been doing for 10,000 years, is what’s called draw-down. This is when some—we can call it a resource, but maybe there are better words—a living community, and that community is being dismantled piece by piece and used. While that dismantling is happening, while the soil is being destroyed, while the rivers are being drained, while all the fish are being killed, while the topsoil is sliding off the mountain, clogging the harbors around the Roman Empire—or take your pick of empires—and the trees are going, and everything is being pulled down, yes, there’s a temporary blip, where the population gets larger.
But of course you’re not letting the world replenish, you’re not taking from it in an actually sustainable way. That’s why it’s called draw-down, because you’re drawing down the capacity of the world to replenish itself. You’re taking the soil. You’re taking the trees, whatever. Eventually you hit zero, and that’s when the thing collapses.
I referenced fossil fuel. What’s been happening since 1950—that’s the beginning of what’s called the Green Revolution. Scientists figured out through the Haber-Bosch process how to take oil and gas and turn it into usable nitrogen.
Originally that was used for making bombs, for killing people. Scientists were well aware of the fact that we were going to run out of nitrogen and that was one of the basic things plants need. If you’re a gardener you know this. There wasn’t going to be enough nitrogen left on the planet to keep doing agriculture. So they thought they hit a bonanza when they figured out they could use this Haber-Bosch process. By 1950 they’d taken all these munitions plants and turned them into fertilizer factories for farming. Then all of a sudden . . .
J: Which is one reason you can end up with a fertilizer factory exploding in Texas.
K: Yes, it’s explosive. It’s exactly the same process, so it’s, very dense energy essentially. They also did a lot of plant breeding and made the plants shrink, so less plant energy has to go to things like stems and leaves, and more can go to that giant seed head to make it even bigger with less input. They’re very clever. They do these things. But of course the ultimate problem is that it’s still draw-down. Except we’ve moved on from soil, since that’s all gone, and now we’re drawing down fossil fuel.
Fertilizer plant explosion in the town of West, Texas.
As long as oil and gas are cheap enough, we can keep eating oil on a stalk, but again this is not a plan with a future. I think everybody listening probably knows that oil doesn’t reproduce. The little drops of oil don’t get a birds-and-bees talk from the big drops of oil. It’s not going to come again once those resources are gone, so it’s still draw-down, only it’s an even more destructive kind of draw-down because with fossil fuels, of course, you’ve got the oil spills, the global warming and all the rest of it.
So having blown through the topsoil of the planet, they’re now using what’s under the earth as well. There’s no happy ending here. The only way this can end is with total collapse. You can’t keep drawing down resources that are going to come to an end and think there’s any kind of future. This was not a way of life that was ever going to last.
J: A couple of other problems with agriculture are if you are drawing down your own land base, that’s going to lead you to militarism. It leads you to conquest because if you don’t conquer somebody else you’re going to starve. So basically once you’ve drawn down your own land base, then you have a choice. You can either collapse or you can expand. So can you talk about the relationship between agriculture and expansion, and also the fact that agriculture is really hard work, so agriculture and slavery?
K: That’s the pattern of civilization everywhere. There is no exception. There can’t be an exception, because once you’ve used up your own resources, you have to go out and get them somewhere else.
J: Let’s just use an example of the local Tolowa Indians, who lived here for at least 12,500 years. Their lifestyle was based—their food, a lot of their caloric input, came from salmon. If they ate all the salmon, if they killed off the salmon somehow, then that means they would have to conquer someone else, or starve to death, right? Is that basically what you’re saying?
K: Yes. Or take the example of, it doesn’t even matter, any civilization. They’re generally going to be based on one of seven or eight crops—corn or wheat or barley or whatever. Every year there’s less and less of it because every year the soil is more and more degraded, there’s more salinization taking place, more salt, literally, in the soil. You will see this throughout history where both the archaeological record of things like the strata that they can just dig through, and then what’s actually in the cooking pots, and then if there are written records of history, you can see how one crop shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, so they try another one that’s more salt-hardy, and eventually that will collapse too. You even have written descriptions of how the surface of the land is glistening white with salt, and “What are we going to do?” They destroyed their land, doing agriculture.
You can pick your power center, but it’s always the same process. You’re using up what you’ve got, and in this process you’re also destroying the rivers and you’re pulling down more trees, and of course you need all those things to survive. Your population is too high to survive on what’s there.
That’s the problem with cities. Eight million people cannot live sustainably on the island called Manhattan. It just can’t be done. Resources have to come from somewhere else, the food, the water, the energy. And the problem is that nobody willingly gives up those things.
The people who live in the watershed next to you, they don’t want to give you what they need. Why would they willingly just die so you can have their trees, their water and their fish? They’re not going to do that. So you’re going to come into conflict. This is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do, always.
It doesn’t matter what beautiful, peaceful values those people might hold in their hearts. It doesn’t matter—their lovely art, their music, their paintings, their frescoes, what religion they might be—it doesn’t matter, materially speaking. They have used up their resources. They will starve to death without food. They’re going to have to go out and get it from somewhere else.
Editor’s note: The following is the testimony of Dr. Dominick A. DellaSala, Chief Scientist of Geos Institute, Ashland, Oregon, before the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, “Exploring Solutions to Reduce Risks of Catastrophic Wildfire and Improve Resilience of National Forests,” on September 27, 2017.
Chairman Westerman, Ranking member Hanabusa, and subcommittee members, thank you for the opportunity to discuss wildfires on national forests. I am the Chief Scientist of the nonprofit organization, Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon. Geos Institute works with agencies, landowners, and decision makers in applying the best science to climate change planning and forest management. As a scientist, I have published in peer-reviewed journals on fire ecology and climate change, I am on the editorial board of several leading journals and encyclopedias, and I have been on the faculty of Oregon State University and Southern Oregon University. A recent book I co-authored with 28 other scientists outlined the ecological importance of mixed-severity fires in maintaining fire-resilient ecosystems, including ways to coexist with wildfire (DellaSala and Hanson 2015).
Wildfires are necessary natural disturbance processes that forests need to rejuvenate. Most wildfires in pine and mixed-conifer forests of the West burn in mixed fire intensities at the landscape scale that produce large and small patches of low to high tree mortality. This tapestry of burned patches is associated with extraordinary plant and wildlife diversity, including habitat for many big game and bird species that thrive in the newly established forests. From an ecosystem perspective, natural disturbances like wildfires are not an ecological catastrophe. However, given there are now 46 million homes in naturally fire-prone areas (Rasker 2015), and no end in sight for new development, we must find ways to coexist with natural disturbance processes as they are increasing in places due to climate change.
In my testimony today, I will discuss how proposals that call for increased logging and decreased environmental review in response to wildfires and insect outbreaks are not science driven, in many cases may make problems worse, and will not stem rising wildfire suppression costs. I will also discuss what we know about forest fires and beetle outbreaks in relation to climate change, limitations of thinning and other forms of logging in relation to wildfire and insect management, and I will conclude with recommendations for moving forward based on best available science.
I. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT RECENT FOREST FIRE INCREASES
Recent increases in acres burned of forests are mainly due to a changing climate – Scientists have known for sometime that fire activity tracks regional weather patterns, which in turn, are governed by global climatic forces such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO – a recurring long-lived El Niño-like pattern of Pacific climate variability– see chart 1). For instance, the very active fire seasons of the 1910-1930s, occurred during prolonged drought cycles determined by the PDO that resulted in much larger areas burning historically than today (Powell et al. 1994; Interagency Federal Wildland Fire Policy Review Working Group 2001; Egan 2010) (chart 1). In fact, compared to the historic warm PDO phase of the early 1900s, most of the West is actually experiencing a fire deficit (Littell et al. 2009, Parks et al. 2012). However, with warming temperatures, early spring snowmelt, and longer fire seasons over the past few decades more acres are burning each year (Westerling et al. 2006; Littell et al. 2009) (chart 1).
For instance, wildfire season in the West has lengthened from an average of five to seven months, and the number of large wildfires (>1,000 acres) has increased since the 1980s (Dennison et al. 2014) from 140 to 250 per year (UCS 2017). This is occurring as average annual temperature in the West has risen by nearly 2 degrees F since 1970s and winter snow pack has declined (UCS 2017). If measures are not taken to stem greenhouse gas emissions, wildfire acres are projected to increase further in dry areas as annual temperatures are expected to rise another 2.5 to 6.5 degrees F by mid century (UCS 2017). Some researchers estimate more than half of the increase in acres burned over the past several decades is related to climate change (Abatzoglou and Williams 2016). This increase is expected to continue with additional warming leading to even greater suppression costs if the agencies continue to suppress fires across the landscape (Schoennagel et al. 2017).
Increasing Human Development is Lengthening Wildfire Seasons and Adding to Fire Ignitions – The direct role of human-access via roads and development in the Wildlands Urban Interface (WUI) is increasing wildfire activity. Scientists recently evaluated over 1.5 million government records of wildfires nationwide from 1992 to 2012 (Balch et al. 2015). During that time, human-caused fire ignitions have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal occurrence of fire, accounting for 84 percent of all wildfire starts and 44 percent of the total area burned nationally. We now have the phenomenon of a human-caused fire season, which was three times longer than the lightning-caused fire season and added an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the US over this 20-year period of time. Ignitions caused by people – whether accidental or arson – have substantial economic costs. This will only worsen with continued development of the WUI adding to the 46 million homes (Rasker 2015) already in these fire-prone areas.
Thus, given expansion of homes in the WUI, the best way to limit damage to homes is to reduce fire risks by working from the home-outward instead of the wildlands-inward (Syphard et al. 2013). For instance, if a fire-brand travels miles ahead and lands on a flammable roof that home is very likely to burn compared to a home that has a fire resistant roof and cleared vegetation within a narrow defensible space of 100-200 feet immediately surrounding the home (Cohen 2000). Logging outside of this narrow zone does not change home ignition factors.
II. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT FIRE AND FOREST MANAGEMENT
Wilderness and other protected areas are not especially prone to forest fires – proposals to remove environmental protections to increase logging for wildfire concerns based on the assumption that unmanaged – or protected areas – burn more intensely are misplaced. For instance, scientists (Bradley et al. 2016 of which I was a co-author) recently examined the intensity of 1,500 forest fires affecting over 23 million acres during the past four decades in 11 western states. We tested the common perception that forest fires burn hottest (most intensely) in wilderness and national parks while burning cooler (less intensely) or not at all in areas where logging had occurred. What we found was the opposite – fires burned most intense in previously logged areas, while they burned in natural fire mosaic patterns in wilderness, parks, and roadless areas, thereby, maintaining resilient forests (see chart 2). Consequently, there is no reason for reducing environmental protections.
State lands are not at lower wildfire risks compared to federal lands – there is much discussion about whether state lands are being managed in a way that reduces fire occurrence and intensity. However, in a recent report of wildfire risk (that included acres likely to burn), scientists (Zimmerman and Livesay 2017) used the West Wide Wildfire Risk Assessment model, an important assessment tool of the Council of Western State Foresters and Western Forestry Leadership Coalition. They evaluated risk for western states based on historical fire data, topography, vegetation, tree cover, climate, and other factors. According to the Center for Western Priorities analysis, state (22%) and federal (23%) lands have approximately equivalent levels of fire risks in the West, and for some states, risks were higher than federal lands. Notably, allegations of higher fire risk based solely on the number of federal acres burned in a fire season are misleading as there are over 7 times as many federal lands (362 million acres) in 11 Western states as compared to state-owned lands (49 million acres) (Zimmerman and Livesay 2017).
Thinning is Ineffective in Extreme Fire Weather – thinning/logging is most often proposed to reduce fire risk and lower fire intensity. Thinning-from-below of small diameter trees followed by prescribed fire in certain forest types can reduce fire severity (Brown et al. 2004, Kalies and Kent 2016) but only when there is not extreme fire weather (Moritz et al. 2014, Schoennagel et al. 2017). Fires occurring during extreme fire-weather (high winds, high temperatures, low humidity, low fuel moisture) will burn over large landscapes, regardless of thinning, and in some cases can burn hundreds or thousands of acres in just a few days (Stephens et al. 2015, Schoennagel et al. 2017). Fires driven by fire weather are unstoppable and are unsafe for fire fighters to attempt putting them out, and, as discussed, are more likely under a changing climate.
Further, there is a very low probability of a thinned site actually encountering a fire during the narrow window when tree density is lowest. For example, the probability of a fire hitting an area that has been thinned is about 3-8% on average, and thinning would need to be repeated every 10-15 years (depending on site productivity) to keep fuels at a minimum (Rhodes and Baker 2008).
Thinning too much of the overstory trees in a stand, especially removal of large fire-resistant trees, can increase the rate of fire spread by opening tree canopies and letting in more wind, can damage soils, introduce invasive species that increase flammable understory fuels, and impact wildlife habitat (Brown et al. 2004). Thinning also requires an extensive and expensive roads network that can degrade water quality by altering hydrological functions, including chronic sediment loads.
Post-disturbance salvage logging reduces forest resilience and can raise fire hazards –commonly practiced after natural disturbances like fires or insect outbreaks, post-disturbance logging hinders forest resilience by compacting soils, killing natural regeneration of conifer seedlings and shrubs associated with forest renewal, increasing fine fuels from slash left on the ground that aids the spread of fire, removing the most fire-resistant large live and dead trees, and degrading fish and wildlife habitat. Further roads that increase sediment flow to streams triggering widespread water quality problems (Lindenmayer et al. 2008).
III. WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT BEETLE-KILLED FORESTS AND FOREST MANAGEMENT
Beetle Killed Forests are Not More Susceptible to Forest Fires – forests in the West are being affected by the largest outbreaks of bark beetles in decades, which has caused concern about forest resilience and wildfire risk and led to proposals for widespread tree removals. Such proposals stem in part from the rationale that bark beetle outbreaks increase wildfire risks due to dead trees and that logging in beetle-affected forests would therefore lower such risks. However, beetle-killed forests are not more susceptible to forest fires (Bond et al. 2009, Hart et al. 2015, Meigs et al. 2016). This is mainly because when conifers die due to drought or native bark beetles, the combustible oils in the needles quickly begin to dissipate, needles and small twigs begin to fall to the ground. Without the fine fuels that facilitate fire spread, potential crown fires are actually lowered in forests with beetle mortality (Donato et al. 2013). The beetle-killed standing dead trees (snags) are the least flammable part of the forest and act more like a large log in a campfire, rather than kindling which is what causes fire spread.
In fact, studies of beetle-killed forests in the West found that when fires occurred during or immediately after the pulse of snag recruitment from beetle kill, fire severity consistently declined in the stands with high snag densities in the following decades (Meigs et al. 2016). In pine and mixed-conifer forests of the San Bernardino National Forest (CA), fires occurred immediately after a large pulse of snag recruitment from drought and beetles. However, scientists (Bond et al. 2009) found “no evidence that pre-fire tree mortality influenced fire severity.” In studies of beetles and wildfires across the western U.S., scientists (Hart et al. 2015) stated “contrary to the expectation of increased wildfire activity in recently infested red-stage stands, we found no difference between observed area and expected area burned in red-stage or subsequent gray-stage stands during three peak years of wildfire activity, which account for 46 percent of area burned during the 2002–2013 period.” And finally, in a comprehensive review of fire-beetle relations in mixed-conifer and ponderosa pine forests of the Pacific Northwest, scientists (Meigs et al. 2016) found: “in contrast to common assumptions of positive feedbacks, we find that insects generally reduce the severity of subsequent wildfires. Specific effects vary with insect type and timing, but insects decrease the abundance of live vegetation susceptible to wildfire at multiple time lags. By dampening subsequent burn severity, native insects could buffer rather than exacerbate fire regime changes expected due to land use and climate change.”
Most importantly, climate change is allowing more insects to survive the winter, triggering the rash of recent outbreaks (Meigs et al. 2016).
Thinning cannot limit or contain beetle outbreaks – once beetle populations reach widespread epidemic levels, thinning treatments aimed at stopping them do not reduce outbreak susceptibility as beetles over run natural forest defenses with or without thinning (Black et al. 2013).
IV. CLOSING REMARKS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
In sum,
Recent increases in wildfires and insect outbreaks are a result of a changing climate coupled with human-activities including expansion of homes and roads into the WUI that will only continue to drive up fire suppression costs.
Policies should be examined that discourage continued growth in the WUI; any new development must include defensible space and construction from non-flammable materials.
The most effective way to protect homes is to create defensible space in the immediate 100 feet of a structure and use of non-flammable materials. Wildland fire policy should fund defensible space, not more logging and thinning miles away from communities.
No amount of logging can stop insect outbreaks or large fires under extreme fire weather. Logging may, in fact, increase the amount of unnatural disturbances by homogenizing landscapes with more even aged trees, residual slash left on the ground, and compounding cumulative impacts to ecosystems.
Thinning of small trees in certain forest types, maintaining canopy closure and in combination with prescribed fire can reduce fire intensity but treatment efficacy is limited in extreme fire weather, and by the small chance that a thinned site will encounter a fire during a very narrow window when fuels are lowest.
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