I was asked to speak about the state of the planet, and to do it in under five minutes. I can do it in three.
The world is being murdered, flayed alive, poisoned, gutted, dismembered.
Every biological indicator is going the wrong direction.
And it’s getting worse by the day.
Two hundred species were driven extinct today, and they were my brothers and sisters. Two hundred will go extinct tomorrow. And the day after.
There are stolid scientists who are saying the oceans could be devoid of fish in less than 35 years.
Imagine that: the murder of the oceans on this water planet.
The problems are not new. This culture has been killing the planet for 6000 to 10000 years. When we think of Iraq, is the first thing we think of cedar forests so thick the sunlight never reached the ground? That’s how it was, prior to this culture. The first written myth of this culture is Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to make a great city. The Arabian peninsula was heavily forested. The forests of North Africa were cut to make the Egyptian and Phoenician navies. Greece was heavily forested.
Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.
And not every culture has destroyed their landbases. The Chumash lived here for at least 13000 years, and when the Europeans arrived here, the place was an ecological paradise. Likewise where I live the Tolowa lived there for at least 12500 years, and likewise when the Europeans arrived the place was a paradise. No longer.
A dear doctor friend of mine always says that the first step toward proper treatment is diagnosis. If we refuse to diagnose the problems our actions will never resolve them.
The problems are not soluble by tweaking processes. The problems are inherent in how we perceive the world, how we interact with the world, what we value, and they are functional and inherent to this culture’s economy. What is GNP? It’s a measure of how quickly the living planet is turned into dead products. Trees into two-by-fours, living rivers into kilowatts, schools of fish into fish sticks.
This is not cognitively challenging. We would all understand this if we weren’t from early childhood inculcated into believing that the economy is more important than life, if we weren’t taught that what humans create has meaning and what the world creates does not, that humans have sentience and meaningful lives, and nonhumans and natural communities do not.
But what if this is all wrong? What if life is not a game of monopoly or risk where the point is to run the board, but rather life is a symphony, where the point is to learn your proper role, and play it at the proper time? The point is not for violin players to kill the oboe players and convert them into cash, but rather to make beautiful music together.
The only measure by which we will be judged by those humans and nonhumans who come after presuming any remain will be the health of the earth. They’re going to care about whether the earth can support life.
At this point in the murder of the planet, there is I think really only one question worth asking: is the world a better place because you were born, and because of your life and because of what you do? That is very possible to do. Think about it: how did the world get to be so glorious and beautiful and fecund in the first place? By everyone living and dying. Salmon make forests better places by living and dying. So do redwood trees and lampreys and banana slugs. That’s how life works. So, the question that the world needs for us to live is: especially given that this culture is killing the planet, how do we individually and collectively make the world a better place by our lives and deaths. By our actions. The planet, not the culture. And that is as true for any organization or corporation as it is for any of us individually. How do we make the real, physical still fecund world that is our only home, better, for hammerhead sharks, for coho salmon, for giant anteaters, for Mekong catfish, Amani flatwings, cayman islands ghost orchids, and orangutans, and the larger communities they call home.
This spring, if all goes as planned, the Marines will kill hundreds of Desert Tortoises in southern California.. This is not the first such tortoise kill, but it could very well set a new record-high number.
This assault was originally scheduled for last spring, in 2016 (with the full approval of the Obama administration), and was put off for a year only because of a lawsuit filed by an environmentalist organization. Now, with all chances for legal appeal passed, it is set to commence in late March or April in the Mojave Desert.
So what’s the story?
In 2013, Congress voted to expand the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms, California—which was already the largest Marine base in the world—by annexing 88,000 acres (about 136 square miles) from the Bureau of Land Management’s Johnson Valley Off-Highway Vehicle Recreation Area, to the west of the base in the Mojave Desert.
This area is part of the ancestral home of the Desert Tortoise (Gopherus agassizii), a species that has lived there for many thousands of years, since the days when it was wetter. As the climate gradually dried out, the tortoise adapted by spending more time underground. In our contemporary age, they are in their burrows over 90% of the time! In the spring, when wildflowers brought by winter rains are flourishing, the tortoises emerge to eat and mate. They generally live 35-50 years, with reports of particular specimens reaching 80.
Though Desert Tortoises thrived at populations of up to 1000 individuals per square mile at the beginning of the 20th Century, their numbers have fallen drastically since then. Human activities are to blame including ranching, roads, agriculture, industry, military operations, off-highway recreation (“wreckreation”), urban encroachment, and in recent years, solar and wind projects. Also, with Global Warming, the climate is changing faster than the tortoise can adapt. In the last decade, the tortoise population has fallen by 50% in the western Mojave Desert, where the Twentynine Palms Marine base is located.
Desert Tortoises are listed as “threatened with extinction” by the federal government. Because of this status, it is illegal for anyone—even the military—to “harm” or “harass” them. The Marines plan to use the annex for training with tanks and live ammunition, which would certainly result in both harm and harassment, so they sought to move the tortoises somewhere else, although this too would cause harm and harassment. After a legal delay of one year forced upon them by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group based in Tucson, Arizona, the Marines now have the go-ahead to start “translocating” the animals, as soon as late March.
This is where the killing starts.
There is enough data from attempted tortoise translocations in the past to make estimates about how this latest effort will go. Though the rates of survival have varied from project to project, they are often no better than 50%. (See Desert Tortoise Recovery: Science and Politics Clash.) This particular translocation at the Twentynine Palms base will be the largest so far attempted, of over 1100 animals. So it would not be surprising if at least 500 deaths resulted, and perhaps far more.
This number includes about 900 adult animals (of 180mm in size or larger) who were tagged with radio-transmitters as they were found over the last three years. An additional 235 were too small for transmitters and were moved to the base where the Marines have been raising them. (So some tortoises have already been disturbed.)
How are the tortoises found in the first place and what’s it look like to round them up? For an answer to this question, I contacted Laura Cunningham, a biologist who works with Basin & Range Watch and who has participated in tortoise translocation projects herself. She also detailed how other animals are affected when tortoises are removed. It is worth quoting her at length:
“Here is the basic mechanics of tortoise translocation: after placing tortoise exclusion fencing around a project, biologists do a ‘Clearance Survey’ which entails dozens of biologists walking in straight lines criss-crossing the project area, all carefully walking a certain length apart and following GPS coordinates. Any tortoise found above ground is radio-transmittered [if it hasn’t been already] and carefully moved into transport boxes and readied for translocation (which is going to be partly by helicopter for 29 Palms Marine Base). Each biologist carries a shovel. All burrows encountered are dug out to locate any tortoise underground. These tortoises are also carefully removed. Two or three sweeps are needed usually to find all the adults. Even then sometimes a few are missed and found later. Many of the tiny juvenile tortoises are missed, those the size of a silver dollar—they are crushed in machinery later or buried alive or impacted later during tank maneuvers.
“Digging out burrows of this keystone species, the tortoise, is difficult because it ripples across the desert ecosystem: so many other species depend on the digging abilities of the tortoise with its long front claws. Burrowing owls, rattlesnakes, lizards, tarantulas, and other species utilize the burrows. They must be dealt with as well. Rattlesnakes are left in the desert to fend for themselves. Burrowing owls are being given increasingly careful attention, if their sign is found at a burrow, the owls are watched to see when they fly out and the burrow is closed up so they cannot return. The idea is to try to get the owls to move away to another location outside the area. But I am not sure anyone has a good idea how many burrowing owls die when they are flushed from their burrow and become homeless. There are new agency guidelines to try to limit impacts to this species, which also may need federal listing under the ESA [Endangered Species Act] as it too is declining.
“Desert kit foxes dig their own burrows, but biologists must dig out those burrows to in case a tortoise is living there. So kit foxes are also displaced, and guidelines are followed to try to make this enforced homelessness have the least impacts as possible. But again, little studied. A canine distemper outbreak happened on the Genesis Solar Energy Project in the Chuckwalla Valley, killing some. Coyotes and badgers are also displaced. In parts of southern Nevada and eastern California deserts, rare Gila monsters are displaced from burrows as well.”
Additionally, the areas into which the tortoises are to be moved seem less than ideal as they already host tortoise populations that are in decline. According to Ileene https://sub.media/video/endciv-3/Anderson, a biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity whom I contacted for this story, the reasons for this decline are not entirely known but include elements that can be controlled such as grazing, off-road recreation and predation and others that are more difficult to control such as drought and disease. “Until the controllable ones are controlled,” Anderson said, “it does not bode well for the translocated or resident tortoises since they will now be competing for resources.”
Two animals that are commonly predators of tortoises are coyotes and ravens, who are both native to the Mojave Desert too. According to the Press Enterprise, the Marines have already announced that if coyotes are a problem, they will shoot them. According to the LA Times, some have already been “removed” by state wildlife authorities.
As I was finishing this story, I got word through Basin & Range Watch that the Marines at the Twentynine Palms base are hosting Coyote hunts on March 25th and 26th. The Marines’ announcement stated: “The purpose of the depredation program is to reduce the numbers of coyotes that are unnaturally inflated in the local area due to human subsidies. Elevated coyote numbers prove a safety risk to residents, and are a significant factor in the mortality of the desert tortoise.” The response to this news by Basin & Range Watch reads, in part: “The so-called mitigation of killing coyotes is a false action that will not help recover the tortoise, and will only disrupt desert ecosystems more. Coyotes are a native, natural species that belong to the Mojave Desert. Tanks, Humvees, bombing, live-fire exercises, and military maneuvers do not belong to the desert. The military has enough land to carry out tests and training, they do not need to keep expanding.”
The ravens might be luckier as they are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, though some have already been killed by “wildlife authorities.” The LA Times ran a story about how the Marines plan to use non-harmful lasers to scare the ravens away. The article also said that “the anti-raven arsenal” “includes ‘techno-tortoises’: highly realistic replicas of baby tortoises that, when pecked or bitten, emit irritants derived from grape juice concentrate, a chemical compound already used to keep birds from congregating on agricultural fields and commercial centers.” However, as John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington and expert on raven behavior who was quoted in the same Times article said: “My concerns are that we don’t really know how long these forms of aversion therapy will last among raven populations, which are very clever at responding to challenges.” And then what? More killing?
Not all of the tortoises will be subject to translocation. Some will be subject to staying, to face the tanks and live ammunition. Any tortoises that show signs of communicable disease will be left behind, so as not to infect healthy tortoises in the new area. Anderson estimates these would number 100 or less. She thinks that the Marines “might” monitor these animals to see if they survive.
Summing up the desert tortoise’s plight, Ileene Anderson said that “this species is continuing to decline throughout its range, and continually decreasing its habitat—whether that be through military expansions or other types of development—will only be detrimental to recovery efforts, because the tortoise needs habitat in order to survive, just like every other species on the planet.”
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Militarism is problematic, to say the very very least, for many many reasons. We might first mourn the human casualties, of course; those killed, maimed or made homeless or stateless. We might also think of the cities turned to rubble, with their art and history buried or burned. We might consider, too, the immense monetary cost of all of it, and how every bomb is, in a very real way, stealing food out of someone’s mouth or a roof from over their heads. But rarely do we consider the affected ecosystems and their inhabitants. (One exception is this excellent article by Joshua Frank: Afghanistan: Bombing the Land of the Snow Leopard.)
Unfortunately, the military is seeking to expand into other desert areas (such as in Nevada). In protesting or attempting to curtail these expansions, I would hope to see some collaboration between activists who oppose war and those who support animal rights.
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How the Media Whitewashes Stories Like This
An AP story about the planned translocation from Twentynine Palms ends with the sentence, “Critics say the move will devastate the threatened species.” Considering the facts, this way of putting it is pretty flip and really only just short of dismissive. Which is why I titled this piece, “Headlines should read, ‘Marines to Kill Tortoises’.” Because it’s a fact that they will and somebody ought to just say it.
When we speak of the bias of the corporate media, we are referring to multiple aspects. In general, there is bias in favor of the wealthy, the conventional and the institutional and against the poor, unconventional and the individual. For example, anyone who has ever attended a boisterous protest and then watched the TV coverage of it afterwards will have noticed the corporate media bias against protesters and in favor of the police. If the police attacked the protesters, this will almost assuredly be described as, “protesters clashed with police.”
There is also a bias in the media in favor of stressing stated intent and brushing aside likely consequences when the consequences will be negative. This one is subtle but universal. As far as the media’s point of view is concerned, it’s not that tortoises are sure to die, it’s only that the Marines plan to move them, and, it is implied, move them safely. But it is sure that tortoises will die. Just as it is sure that civilians will be killed when cities are bombed, even if the intent is “humanitarian” and the targets “terrorists.”
“Collateral” is the word typically used by the media to describe the deaths of civilians in warfare, and it would be their style to apply it to tortoises killed by translocation. Wiktionary defines this sense of that adjective as “being aside from the main subject, target, or goal; tangential, subordinate, ancillary.” But if such death is inevitable, how can it be separated from the “main subject”? How can it be considered “tangential”?
There is a fundamental dishonesty in every news story that presents stories in this fashion. It’s called “white-washing.” Because all our information is spoon-fed to us in this same sanitized way, we first of all never think about it and secondly, have little collective knowledge (and hence concern) about what’s going on in the world, and how the US and its policies affect other people, living things, and the planet at large.
It is a measure of our misbegotten privilege that we can live in such a state of denial at all, in a bubble. And it is violence that empowers that privilege in the first place. It is upon the graves of Indians and the whipped backs of slaves that the US gained its power and it is through the military and economic subjugation of much of the world at large that it is now sustained. There’s nothing “collateral” about any of the suffering and damage that results from this system.
What do the poor tortoises have to do with any of it? Nothing, obviously, but this is the way of empire, that they must suffer too.
For nearly a decade, Panama’s Barro Blanco dam has met with strong opposition from indigenous Ngäbe communities. It has also generated violent suppression from government forces, and attracted criticism from international organizations.
An agreement on the dam’s completion, reached by the government and the community’s now-ousted leader, was voted down by the Ngäbe-Bugle General Congress in September 2016. The dam’s surprise deregistration from the UN Clean Development Mechanism in October 2016 did nothing to stop the project.
Now, the General Administrator of Panama’s National Authority for Public Services has declared that the Ngäbe-Bugle General Congress never presented a formal rejection document to the government, meaning dam operations can begin.
Panama’s Supreme Court has ruled against the last two legal actions by indigenous communities impacted by Barro Blanco. The Supreme Court decisions cannot be appealed, so the communities have now exhausted all legal avenues within the country, leaving only international processes.
The contentious Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam is set to begin operations within the next few weeks, defying both the relentless opposition by affected communities and the rejection last September by local indigenous authorities of a government proposed project completion agreement.
According to Roberto Meana, General Administrator of Panama’s National Authority for Public Services (ASEP), the 28-megawatt gravity dam in western Panama could begin operation within days once necessary tests are finalized. The reservoir’s waters have been rising since August of last year, gradually flooding Ngäbe communities and land.
“It can be in five days, or it can be two weeks, but the project is very close to entering its commercial operation,” Meana told Mongabay last Friday.
Controversy from the start
The hydroelectric project, partly funded by two European development banks, has been at the epicenter of a complex environmental and human rights battle that has raged on for nearly a decade between a handful of indigenous Ngäbe communities and successive Panamanian administrations.
In the last few months alone, the project was removed from the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (UNCDM), a positive result for the indigenous communities; but has also had two pending legal pleas rejected by Panama’s Supreme Court in favor of the government — potentially opening the door for the forceful expulsion of the affected indigenous people from their lands.
The structurally complete dam on the Tabasará River is set to create a 258-hectare (1 square mile) reservoir within the province of Chiriqui. It will flood 6.7 hectares (16.5 acres) belonging to the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca — a semi-autonomous region located a few miles upstream of the dam.
The Barro Blanco Dam in the Province of Chiriqui, western Panama. The dam is complete and will begin operation within weeks, according to the government. The Ngäbe-Bugle have been opposed to the project since its inception. Photo by Camilo Mejia Giraldo
The imminent operational status of the project now raises serious questions over the future of the local riverside Ngäbe communities, which have continuously called for the dam’s cancellation since it was given the go ahead in 2007.
“If the government is going to start generating [electricity], then they are confirming the violation of our rights as an affected community,” Weny Bagama, a Ngäbe-Bugle General Congress delegate and a leader of the outspoken M10 (Movimiento 10 de Abril) group opposing the dam, told Mongabay.
“They are doing this even though [the Ngäbe-Bugle General] Congress rejected the past agreement,” she said referring to a now defunct accord to allow the dam’s full operation which was reached by the government and the Cacica (negotiators) of the Ngäbe-Bugle community in August 2016. That deal was in turn rejected by the community in September when the Cacica negotiators were ousted by the Ngäbe-Buglé General Congress, the comarca’s key decision-making body.
“The [General] Congress’ decision is the internal decision of the comarca, and if they don’t respect that, then evidently the government just does what it likes and does not respect the jurisdiction established by comarca law,” Bagama said.
According to Meana, however, the Ngäbe-Buglé General Congress’ decision to reject the agreement was not followed by submission of the proper paperwork to the government — a formal document outlining the community’s decision and the reasons for the dam’s rejection.
“To date, there is no document in which this agreement is rejected. The [Ngäbe-Bugle] Congress sent it to be revised. If the Congress had rejected it, they wouldn’t have set up a commission to review it,” Meana said referring to a commission created by the indigenous General Congress to formally analyze the conflict.
These conclusions were strongly opposed by Bagama, who stated that although the congress had not filed a legal rejection document, the congress and the special commission had yet to finalize their response.
“The commission was not named to revise the document but to analyze the conflict in its entirety,” she said. “They didn’t give us a time limit or date to present the [legal rejection] document, but the decision of the Congress needs to be free of pressure or conditions, because the comarca has its own procedures and according to our law we have to follow certain procedures.”
The Ngäbe-Bugle General Congress meets on September 15, 2016 to debate the Barro Blanco agreement. Photo Courtesy of Weny Bagama
The vote by the indigenous body last September appeared to place a cloud of uncertainty over the project, as it was thought by both parties that they would renew negotiations to reach a final agreement.
But even before the indigenous Congress’ rejection, the government allowed the dam’s construction company Generadora del Istmo S.A. (GENISA) to begin test flooding the dam’s reservoir in August, 2016 — a move opposed by the Ngäbe communities that have since lost homes and some of their most fertile land to the rising waters.
“As a community we feel that we are prisoners within our own homes, we can’t move around as we used to, the water levels have dropped slightly [due to the dry season], but all the surrounding land has just turned into mud,” Bagama explained.
“We live in a situation of constant threat because of this reservoir, with what the government has been doing and their economic interests, which are above our livelihoods as indigenous people,” she added.
Last Tuesday, in the shadow of Yellowstone’s Electric Peak, I watched National Park Service employees herd, prod, shock, immobilize, poke, and corral bison that had only shortly before spent their lives roaming wild. That day, 45 animals were shipped for slaughter and 62 “processed” in preparation for being sent to death next week. So far this winter, almost 1,000 out of a total of roughly 5,500 bison have been sentenced to death by government agents or dispatched by hunters.
The killing of Yellowstone’s buffalo is far from over. The carnage is escalating as winter drags on and buffalo, desperate for food, leave Yellowstone Park for lower elevation grasslands north in Montana’s Gardiner basin. Hundreds more buffalo could be sent to slaughter by the time spring green-up occurs, when buffalo return to graze in the protected core of the Park. A total of 1,400 or more Yellowstone bison could be killed, not including the animals (possibly hundreds) that otherwise do not survive harsh late-winter conditions.
It is important to note that these are not just any bison, but members of the largest free-ranging bison herd in the country, and the most genetically pure of any left in the world. In most other places buffalo have been interbred with domestic cattle. Perhaps most importantly, Yellowstone has the only herd left that still serves something akin to the ecological role that it played when Europeans first arrived and 30-88 million bison thundered across the plains of what is now the western United States.
How is it that this harassment and torture of bison is happening inside a national park, which is presumably all about preservation?
The extent to which Park Service personnel work to keep their violence towards buffalo out of the public eye is perhaps emblematic of a conflicted conscience and cognizance that something is morally wrong. But a lawsuit brought last year by journalist Christopher Ketcham and Stephany Seay, Communications Director of the Buffalo Field Campaign, (BFC) requires the agency to now show the media what it is doing. I can say that witnessing the Park Service-administered treatment of buffalo is not for the faint of heart.
With the help of poles and electric cattle prods, bison after bison was forced from a small pen into a hydraulic squeeze chute, where it bucked and thrashed and bellowed, in a crazed panic. Each bison was squeezed so hard inside the metal cage that most finally stopped bucking, at which point a metal bar pinned its head up to the side of the chute. Through the slats in the chute, you could see their tongues hanging out, and their eyes bulging. Their hoarse breathing was audible, even from 20 yards away. Many had blood on their coats as a result of injuries from the horns of other distressed bison—a direct consequence of being stampeded, slammed up against each other, and pushed between pens along a maze of metal-reinforced alleys. Some of the younger bison literally tore their own horns off against the cages and bars. If there is a hell in the bison world, this must be it.
While pinned in the chute, Park technicians drew blood and checked teeth, weighed them, then released them into holding pens.
A few yearling calves escaped the ordeal because the chute was too big to effectively contain and immobilize them. These were waved through. Still, none of the bison we saw will likely escape slaughter.
The chute’s brand name, “The Silencer,” had been deliberately painted over with an inane reminder of the year, “2016-2017,” perhaps in case we journalists were to attempt substituting photos of atrocities perpetrated during previous years for the atrocities perpetrated while we were there.
From a catwalk above the pens, I could see a group of yearling calves, all with smears of blood on their bodies from rubbing up against one calf whose horn had been torn off. They looked up at me in terror and alarm. I was helpless to do anything except bear witness. I felt that these youngsters were owed a profound apology.
In a matter of days, these calves will be gutted, dressed and hung in White’s Meat Processing in Ronan, Montana. According to the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, the process entails literally sending animals to a gas chamber, after which they are “stunned, shackled, hoisted, thrown, cast, or cut.”
Bison Cowboys: Shipping Yellowstone Bison to Slaughter. Note Electric Cattle Prod
The meat will be distributed to Indian people, which is better than most alternatives, but hardly the point. These wild beings, the product of millions of years of evolution, uniquely adapted to the harsh conditions of Yellowstone, and members of a close-knit herd, will be killed for no reason except to placate tough-minded stockmen and their ideologue allies (read: Trump’s core supporters).
As in the case of grizzly bears and wolves, management of buffalo caters primarily to a minority of well-heeled and politically well-connected agriculture interests at the expense of the broader public, who flock to Yellowstone to see these rare and iconic animals in the flesh. More on this later.
There seems to be no regard for the fact that bison have been on this landscape since the Ice Age, or that they survived the worst that the forces of nature could throw at them – except Europeans and our guns. Their ancestors evolved with giant short-faced bears, sabre tooth cats, dire wolves, woolly mammoths and ice-age camels. All these animals are gone now, but a remnant of bison is still with us.
Yellowstone bison are descendants of just 23 animals that had survived the slaughters of the 1800s. All this begs the question: why are we persecuting these animals again? And why is the Park Service, which helped bring them back from the brink, so intimately involved in their deaths?
Atrocities in Yellowstone Park
It baffles me that the National Park Service is leading current efforts to capture and send to slaughter buffalo that are simply poised to roam north into the Gardiner Basin – as bighorn sheep, elk, deer, pronghorn, wolves and bears do. This behavior is natural. Even though buffalo are well-equipped with huge heads for shoveling deep snow to uncover grass, roaming downhill to more clement climes is the path of least resistance when snow is deep, or when thick ice prevents bison from reaching the grass below.
With the Park Service’s help, the state of Montana will probably reach its goal of killing 1,400 Yellowstone’s buffalo. Although the Park Service estimates that forage in Yellowstone could support 5,000-7,000 buffalo, an outdated bison management plan uses an antiquated target of 3,000 animals. Further, a 2000 court-mediated settlement agreement of a lawsuit filed by Montana’s Department of Livestock against the Park Service gives the state and its powerful livestock industry inordinate influence over bison management, even it appears, inside a national park.
It was noteworthy that no one from Montana’s livestock industry or State Department of Livestock participated in the tour I was on. Why bother, when Park Service employees seemed more than happy to do their dirty work and field the tough questions from reporters — despite the fact that this work is antithetical to the Park Service’s mission of protecting natural resources.
Having worked as a wildlife advocate for over 30 years in the political pressure cooker that is Greater Yellowstone, I can only imagine the conversations among Park officials. “Maybe our willingness to kill so many will buy good will from the state in the revision of the bison plan.” Or: “our hands are tied, especially under the new Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke,” a former Montana Congressman with strong ties to industry. Or: “if we kill 1,400 bison this year, we might buy a reprieve of several years before a similar out-migration of bison would necessitate significant killing again.”
All humans share the unique ability to rationalize activities that feel inherently wrong. I doubt that many of the Park employees engaged in this debacle had imagined that their job description could include sending to death wildlife that they had been entrusted to protect.
Last year, Yellowstone Park proposed shipping some animals that would have been otherwise killed to a quarantine facility on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana. There is presently only one such facility authorized to take Yellowstone bison, located 30 miles north of Yellowstone near the hamlet of Corwin Springs. There, USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) kills 50% or so of the captive buffalo that test positive for the disease brucellosis—which is the putative cause for the entire capture, containment, and slaughter program. (More on this later).
Over time, the caged sub-population is “cleansed” of the disease, but there is no chance of returning home. Nor will this — or any other method proposed so far — purge the entire population of the disease.
Needless-to-say, the Park’s proposal to send bison to Fort Peck’s facility is stridently opposed by livestock organizations, but supported by some conservationists and Tribes. Two weeks ago, Republican state legislators killed a bill that would have authorized the shipping of Yellowstone buffalo to Fort Peck. There is no doubt that regressives in the livestock industry have the upper hand, and will not make even modest concessions to those who have more altruistic and public-minded values.
Buffalo Management: The Ruse of Cleansing the Land of Disease
You commonly hear that the killing and expensive quarantine of buffalo is to protect cattle from the disease brucellosis, which is carried by buffalo. (Paradoxically, bison originally contracted the disease from European cows). But this rationale turns out to be bogus. Although buffalo do carry brucellosis and could theoretically transmit the disease to cattle, they have never been known to do so in the wild. In fact, there are only a handful of cattle near where the buffalo migrate in winter – and none of these cows are on public lands.
By contrast, elk, which are 25 times more numerous than buffalo and interact with cattle far more often, have transmitted brucellosis to cows on at least 6 documented occasions, most recently in November, 2015 (link). Yet nothing is being done about the elk “problem”, in part because elk are sportmens’ darlings and generate at least $11 million annually in state hunting revenues in Montana. Something deeper, even pathologic, lies beneath disparities between how bison and elk are treated.
If brucellosis were a real problem, the livestock industry would be advocating more consistent policies and taking the elk disease threat seriously. But such is not the case, which suggests that the hype about brucellosis in bison is really cover for something else.
In fact, what we have is a cabal of stockmen, state veterinarians, legislators, and employees of the Board of Livestock using paranoia over “disease ridden” buffalo to perpetuate political control and an archaic, regressive mindset obsessed with dominating the natural world. These bad actors aim at nothing less than keeping the West under their thumb, perpetuating a regime that was instituted under the banner of Manifest Destiny. This despite the fact that the region’s economic and cultural health depends increasingly upon amenities rooted in wildlife and public lands.
Mary Meagher, longtime bison biologist in Yellowstone Park, put it this way: ”Brucellosis is a smoke screen. The real issue is that ranchers do not want bison out on the land.” (link)
In furtherance of their agenda, the livestock industry has adopted the bizarre and extreme position of tolerating “no risk” of brucellosis in the case of buffalo, no matter what the cost, which is borne mainly by taxpayers—a classic case of subsidies for a coddled special interest. Dare we call them welfare ranchers?
The Park Service’s Cowboy Culture?
In keeping with the narrative of bison as diseased livestock, it was interesting to see that most of the 12 involved Park Service employees (including only one woman) played the part of cowboy in this week’s bison “processing.” They could have passed as cowhands anywhere in the West, with their silk scarves and chaps. Four galloped their horses, all in a row, waving their right arms in unison as if on a movie set, to run bison from a larger holding area into smaller pens. It struck me they may have been watching too many Hollywood westerns.
But this is the National Park Service, not the Department of Livestock. Is it easier to distance yourself from the nasty business of sending wild buffalo to slaughter if done in the persona of a cowboy? Does the task somehow become more romantic, less brutal?
Only the head of the operation, Brian Helm, who bore the military-style title of “Incident Commander,” seemed to be truly enjoying himself. Of all the techs, Brian was most cowboy in his dress and demeanor. His chaps had fancy leather fringe. He stood on top of the catwalk above “the Silencer” and gestured dramatically with white-gloved hands, signaling to the other techs how much tighter the neck bar needed to be; whether it was time to draw blood, check teeth, or lift the animal to get a weight; what gender the animal was and in which pen they should be herded. He seemed the conductor of an orchestra that played a sort of buffalo requiem.
Brian Helm of NPS on the catwalk
Every operation has one who seems to relish the job of its commander, even if the work is brutal and cruel. In the course of human history, we have demonstrated time and again, how easy it is for humans to normalize the unthinkable—especially if you include a fancy-dress outfit.
The Killing Fields: No End In Sight
The current killing program is authorized by the 2000 Interagency Bison Management Plan. Although outdated, government agencies are far from revising the plan. Yellowstone Park’s bison biologist Rick Wallen reported that the agencies cannot agree on objectives, let alone a range of alternatives for analysis. A planning process started in 2015 appears, for now, dead in the water. Wallen thinks the plan might take 10 years or so to complete. This means that the Park Service would need to strive in the meantime to maintain the current population target of 3,000 bison and to continue the cycle of killing.
Of all the intractable wildlife debates in Yellowstone, including wolves and grizzlies, perhaps the most stuck and regressive surrounds buffalo. Yes, things may be incrementally improving, as we were told, since the days when bison numbers hovered near zero. But this is the 21st century, and Yellowstone’s buffalo deserve better.
Fortunately, there are a few examples of where buffalo are being better treated when they step outside the Park into Montana’s non-park lands.
Progress at Horse Butte
As of last year, wild bison are being accommodated to the west of the Park on Horse Butte, a peninsula in Hebgen Lake. Bison can now roam on Horse Butte year round, and have their babies in peace.
Here a majority of landowners made it clear to Montana Governor Steve Bullock that they wanted wild bison to be able to roam on their private land. They expressly opposed armed Department of Livestock thugs on horseback trespassing and harassing animals on land they own. Moreover, there are no cows there after a grazing allotment had been retired.
This is a shining example of what can be done to co-exist with bison elsewhere in Greater Yellowstone. There are a number of residents of the Gardiner and the Taylor Fork area, who also embrace a kinder, gentler approach to managing bison, and would welcome them on their land.
The good folks at the Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC) need to be credited with much of the hard work reaching out to and helping organize landowners on Horse Butte.
Buffalo Field Campaign: Defending Buffalo 24-7
My friends at BFC (link) have been on the ground fighting for buffalo and documenting the mistreatment of these animals since 1997. BFC Founder and film-maker extraordinaire, Mike Mease, has shot more footage of buffalo in all seasons and conditions, happy and tragic, than anyone alive. Co-founder Dan Brister has written a scholarly book on buffalo. Darrell Geist is a walking encyclopedia of bison management.
BFC’s strategies and tactics are extraordinary — certainly different than any other environmental organization in the region. First, they work closely with Native Americans who also see buffalo as sacred yet maligned creatures.
Second, they rely heavily on volunteers who are out on the ground every day observing buffalo and the activities of hunters and managers. Over 5,000 volunteers have cut their teeth in conservation working with BFC. Numerous of these campaigners have moved on to positions of leadership in other conservation groups.
Third, BFC is one of the few groups that signs on young people, who are critical to shaping the future of wildlife and wildlands conservation, which is rapidly greying. By contrast, most other organizations tend to rely almost exclusively on professional staff. These staff tend to cycle between groups, which perpetuates a kind of “group think.”
Few other groups share BFC’s commitment to documenting what is happening in the field. Over the years, I have seen a sad trend in conservation that increasingly emphasizes a kind of “professionalism” that prioritizes political cleverness and certain in-office technical skills over observation and deep immersion in the natural world.
I honestly cannot imagine how the hardy warriors who volunteer with BFC survive bearing witness to the atrocities perpetrated on buffalo, and counting the dead – over 8,000 since the group was founded. The BFC community lives communally and frugally in cabins near West Yellowstone and Gardiner, where they keep an eye on the buffalo every day, no matter how bitter the cold. Maybe they do so well because they are a bit like buffalo themselves: tough and stubborn.
On the day of the tour, Stephany Seay, a BFC stalwart, seemed to mirror the turmoil of the buffalo. (Listen to a great interview on Grizzly Times with Stephany here). Uncharacteristically quiet, her weathered face showed pain, grief, outrage. She had seen so many more buffalo dead, or dispatched to death, than I ever will – or hope to. Even as she snapped photos, part of her seemed to be dying with the buffalo.
Up on the catwalk, above the din of a buffalo heaving herself against the metallic cage, Brian Helm with white gloves flashing, stands as Stephany’s opposite. As Mike Wright wrote in the Bozeman Chronicle story on the tour, “it was just another day in the Park at the Stephens Creek Capture Facility,” (link) implying that the “processing” of the buffalo had become routine.
But routinizing brutal behavior desensitizes people to the import of their actions. Have those involved in processing bison for the Park Service become inured to the practice of killing? How can the broader public hope for kinder treatment of buffalo if agency personnel see killing as an acceptable solution to “the problem,” as defined by the livestock organizations that do not want “diseased” buffalo to leave the Park?
Copyright 2017 by Louisa Wilcox. Republished with permission.
WASHINGTON— The highly secretive arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture known as Wildlife Services killed more than 2.7 million animals during 2016, according to new data from the agency.
The multimillion-dollar federal program targets wolves, cougars, birds and other wild animals for destruction — primarily to benefit the agriculture industry. Of the 2.7 million animals killed last year, nearly 1.6 million were native wildlife species.
According to the latest kill report, the program last year destroyed 415 gray wolves; 76,963 adult coyotes, plus an unknown number of coyote pups in 430 destroyed dens; 407 black bears; 334 mountain lions; 997 bobcats; 535 river otters, including 415 killed “unintentionally”; 3,791 foxes, plus an unknown number of fox pups in 128 dens; and 21,184 beavers.
The program also killed 14,654 prairie dogs outright, as well as an unknown number killed in more than 68,000 burrows that were destroyed or fumigated. These figures almost certainly underestimate the actual number of animals killed, as program insiders have revealed that Wildlife Services kills many more animals than it reports.
“Despite mounting public outcry to reform these barbaric, outdated tactics, Wildlife Services continues its taxpayer-funded slaughter of America’s wildlife,” said Collette Adkins, a biologist and attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s simply no scientific basis for continuing to shoot, poison and strangle millions of animals every year. These cruel practices not only fail to effectively manage targeted wildlife but also pose ongoing threats to other animals, including endangered species and pets.”
According to the new data, the wildlife-killing program unintentionally killed 2,790 animals last year, including badgers, bears, bobcats, foxes, muskrats, otters, porcupines, raccoons, skunks, turtles and more. Such data reveals the indiscriminate nature of painful leg-hold traps, strangulation snares, poisons and other methods used by federal agents.
Earlier this month a young, endangered male wolf known as OR-48, died an agonizing death in northeast Oregon after taking the scented bait from a cyanide trap put out by the federal wildlife killers. The program’s brutality has fueled growing public outcry and calls for reform by scientists, elected officials and nongovernmental organizations.
“The Department of Agriculture needs to get out of the wildlife-slaughter business,” said Adkins. “Wolves, bears and other carnivores help keep the natural balance of their ecosystems. Our government kills off the predators, such as coyotes, and then kills off their prey — like prairie dogs — in an absurd, pointless cycle of violence.”
The road to my land is one lane. It is gravel coated and there are no street lights, so in the late evening when I am driving home from a day in town, I cruise slowly, casually avoiding the potholes that have opened up with this winter’s heavy rains. In the darkness the world before me is a vignette painted by the dull yellow glow of my headlights. Beyond the borders of this halo stands of trees surround me on either side until I come to pass a neighbor’s house. Though it is not illuminated, I know that her lawn is to my right and her pond is to my left, but before me is just the thin gray road of crumbled limestone, and standing in the center of it, is a raven.
I slow down to a crawl, giving the bird time to move. He hops a bit, not off of the road to either side, but merely a few paces away from my Jeep. Creeping forward a few feet more, the raven repeats this, hopping on one leg but not leaving the road. He is hurt, I guess, and I momentarily wonder if I shouldn’t get out and try to pick him up, to help him in some way, before I realize that I would have no idea how to do so in any meaningful capacity.
We repeat our dance, me lurching forward a few feet in my car, the raven bounding back. He has plenty of space to leave the road if he would just hop into the grass on one side or the other. He has options. But he only moves forward in his path, and in mine.
Why doesn’t he just get out of the way?
—
As one day of abnormally warm February weather turned into two, then into a week, then into several weeks, I found myself outside more and more. On a Sunday we mucked our chicken and duck coops. Midweek I was repairing a fence line and laying wood chips on the paths in our garden. Today I spread grass seed in our orchard and planted flowers and bulbs with my daughter. We are not wearing jackets. I sweat in a T-shirt as frogs croak down by the pond and songbirds sing in the branches all around us. Walking by a raspberry cane I look down and notice the green buds sprouting up its entire length.
Of course, weather has variance. Growing up outside of Chicago I remember that we would have an odd winter day here and there where the temperature would spike into the fifties or sixties. Snow would vanish before our eyes and all of the neighborhood kids would be out on their bicycles and playing basketball in their driveways. When two days later the temperature had plummeted to a seasonally rational twenty degrees, we would despair the fact that winter had months left with which to pummel us with gray skies, ice, and the boredom of being trapped in our houses.
I acknowledge that such variance is normal. Walking around my land, absorbing the signals of spring six weeks before their time, I know that this is not normal. These are signs of change. Where the change takes us, how it will unfold over the coming seasons, and years, and decades, I cannot know. So I take notes with silent eyes, filing away the date of the first daffodil flowers and fruit blossoms. I hope to adapt, and I hope that enough of our fellow Earthlings across the taxonomic kingdoms can do the same.
—
Paul Kingsnorth asks us, “What if it is not a war?” in his recent essay on the Dark Mountain blog, where he explores how social movements and our general response to the predicaments of our age adopt war metaphors and terminology. Kingsnorth writes:
“War metaphors and enemy narratives are the first thing we turn to when we identify a problem, because they eliminate complexity and nuance, they allow us to be heroes in our own story, and they frame our personal aggression and anger in noble terms. The alternative is much harder: to accept our own complicity.”
Kingsnorth’s exploration is well worth the read and offers many good points for consideration. He culminates with the idea that perhaps, as poet Gary Snyder suggests, we are not in a war but a trial, a perhaps five-thousand year journey towards living well with ourselves and the planet. Such thought experiments can be helpful, as our language clearly shapes our perceptions and then guides our behavior. To be sure, consciously crafting our worldview allows for controlled and meaningful responses to the circumstances of our age. Kingsnorth proposes a worthwhile exercise when he invites us to think of the personal qualities that we would need to possess for an extended trial as opposed to a war.
But what if there is a war, and it is not one of our choosing? What if civilization itself is a war against the living planet, and no amount of ignoring it will make it stop? What if we were born into a war and it was so normalized by our culture, so entirely sewn into the fabric of our being that we could hardly see it, and when we did, everyone around us justified it and made it righteous?
Agriculture is destroying topsoil. The skin of the planet, home to a nearly unfathomable quantity of life, is being rendered sterile, sometimes toxic, before it is finally tilled into oblivion to blow away on the wind or drift off downstream. This is how civilization feeds itself a diet of an increasingly lower nutritive value. Forests, prairies, and wetlands are razed to continue this onslaught, species are wiped out, aquifers are drained, fossil fuels burned in massive quantities, and endocrine disrupting poisons are carelessly distributed into the ecosystem.
If I went to someone’s home and engaged in all of the above activities on their land, how would they describe it? If I abandon the language of assault, I am left with little else to lean on. There is killing upon killing upon killing. Nowhere in this activity that is central to civilization can we find a relationship that isn’t one-sided domination. It is not an eagerness to slander that with which I do not agree with that drives me to describe civilization and its process as an assault on life, but rather a complete lack of any other accurate language with which to speak on it. If civilization is not at war with life, is it at peace with life? Is there a truce between civilized man and the forests, oceans, and waterways? When we look around do we see the wild on the rebound? Do we see civilized man reducing the amount of destruction he metes upon the ecology of the world? Is the general course of civilized decision making to prioritize the ecological system over the economic system? Of course not.
Zyklon B was invented as a pesticide. The Haber-Bosch process was developed to supply nitrogen for munitions. If it is not war that civilization is waging, then what is it? And if civilization is at war with the living planet, then why does it make sense to pretend that it isn’t?
—
“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the Judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of a stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
– Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Kingsnorth says that we love war, though many of us pretend not to. Maybe he is right. For the westerner, it is so easy to avoid the overt wars of our culture, because they are fought far away by paid grunts, and their victims are demonized. We are happy that the media obliges the lies we tell ourselves by not running an endless stream of images showing the dead civilians in third world nations around the globe. Even better, they make it so easy for us to not see the less obvious war, to not know just how much killing and slave-making civilization engages in every day to keep the oil, and the food, and the consumer products flowing into the stores (and the trash flowing away from the neighborhoods.) Again, most people just call this “business” or “capitalism,” and they see in it nothing but the mundane transactions of commerce, but when it all can trace back to one group of people pointing guns, and tanks, and warplanes at another, are we not lying to ourselves if we say it is not war? What if it all traces back to dead primates, dead rivers, dead oceans, dead people?
Maybe we should embrace war, instead of hiding from it. Perhaps if we would stop pretending that there is no war, we could finally fight back in some meaningful way. Honestly, the fact that it is so difficult to know just how we could go about such a daunting task is likely why we never speak of it. To fight back against civilization is to risk the livelihoods of everyone we know, and everyone we don’t. There is not one cabal of people who if brought before tribunal or lined up against a wall and shot would unmake the machinations and complex systems, hundreds if not thousands of years in the making, that comprise the belts and pistons of civilization. If we were to try to stop this system from destroying our planet and our future by rising up against it, we would first have to have some inkling as to how that could be accomplished, and all the while we would know that the odds of success were infinitesimally small. Also, we would be risking everything we have while simultaneously inviting the scorn of almost all of humanity upon ourselves.
Put in such a way, I can see why most people work so hard to unsee the war that is civilization.
Ultimately, Kingsnorth is right about the fact that the language of war is a tool for the destruction of nuance, of gray tones, and uncertainty. This conundrum has existed throughout human history, as people of good heart and conscience always question the righteousness of their motives and actions, a process that often slows their reaction and mutes their response to forces of nihilism and destruction. Albert Camus laments as much in his essays, “Letters to a German Friend,” when he writes about the confused French response to Nazi invasion. Alternatively, civilization is not in possession of a conscience, the systems that are its make up having been so atomized and bureaucratized, splintered into an untold number of moving parts that no one actor can be held accountable for the actions of the whole. This is the great and dark promise of civilization; it will provide a bounty of material access while diluting and thus absolving every recipient of their guilt.
The good and decent bind themselves and blunt their effectiveness with questions of conscience, while those bent on conquest and power never do. Resistance fails to get its shoes on while civilization fells another forest, removes another mountain top, extirpates another species.
It is not my aim here to reduce the complexity and nuance of our situation into a simplified binary. In fact, if anything I would suggest that our times call for an almost contradictory way of thinking, embracing that in any given context we are both complicit in and victim to the war that civilization makes upon our planet. At different times and in different places we must make both peace and war. Humbly, I offer that when we sit in thought about how we are to respond to the great challenge of our time, that we try not to be only one thing, neither solely a warrior nor a monk, but at various times we are each. Language of war falls short of describing the healing that we must engage in as individuals and communities, whereas language of trial and endurance falls short of describing the fight that we are called to make upon the systems, infrastructure, and yes, individuals whose daily work threatens to drastically shorten the time we may have available to trial and endure.
The heart of Kingsnorth’s point seems to be that when we convince ourselves that we are at war, we break our world into allies and enemies, demanding conformity of the former and diminishing the humanity of the latter. Throughout history such reductionism has often had tragic results. If the war of civilization against the living world has us each playing enemy and ally at different times and in different contexts, we would be wise to caution ourselves against lining up behind eager executioners. However, we would be foolish to continually forgive and appease the people who use their social, political, and economic power to not only blind the public to the horrors of civilization, but to actively increase the breadth and scale of those horrors.
Language of war can, if we allow it, claim nuance as its first casualty. So can the language of peace, or trial, as it were. But let us ask ourselves, to whom do we do service when we refuse to speak of war? Are we doing service to our children and their chance of survival? Are we doing service to the ecosystems under threat of eradication? Or are we doing service to the bulldozer, the pipeline, the feedlot, the open-pit mine?
Accepting that civilization is a war and using the language of war to understand the gravity of its processes does not necessarily mean that we must assume a conventional posture of warfare in order to stand in opposition or to react in a meaningful way. This is to say, not all fights are won with open combat alone. To be always at war with the world is exhausting, especially when defeat looms. I understand the fear of losing everything, before we lose everything. The first challenge to overcome is to understand the existential nature of this war, that it is not necessarily individuals or groups who we must oppose, but the space between us, the relations and duties and notions and systems to which we all find ourselves often unwillingly subservient.
If we honestly want to observe and honor the complexity of this time and our circumstances, maybe it is not one side of the road or the other to which we must hop to avoid being run over. Maybe the clarity we seek will never come as the strands of all of our relations stretch and snap, context ever fluxing, all of us reacting, reacting, wounded and hobbled in the dark.
