For this episode of The Green Flame, Jennifer Murnan and Max Wilbert discuss extreme weather around the world. As the Arctic is experiencing catastrophic low ice formation, wildfires have swept western Turtle Island this summer and fall, and storms have pounded southeast Asia and the Caribbean. We include excerpts from a January podcast covering the megafires in Australia, discuss the rise of extreme weather under global warming, the basic science of why this occurs, and more.
From this episode:
Max Wilbert: It’s not too late. This can be a really heavy topic, but I want to emphasize for people that any change that we can make right now, any reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, is going to make the future less grim.
Any natural habitats that we can protect will be a reserve of biodiversity, will be a potential climate corridor, to help adaptation, to help the natural world, both non-humans and humans, to to to be more resilient in the face of what is coming.
I personally will not give up until every last living thing on this planet is dead, and that’s because I love this living world and it’s so important that we keep fighting no matter what.
Jennifer Murnan: Thank you, Max. I’d like to offer some insights too from from what I’ve observed. I can’t help but realize the immensity of what we are gifted by life. As you strip away the biological communities then you’re faced with the raw elements and one of the things that struck me is that the fires are creating their own weather.
That strikes me in a kind of poetic sense. Yes, you take away the mitigating forces of life and the balancing forces of life in this beautiful symphony of beings and what can be created, and you strip that away, and then you’re faced with the raw elements.
So what’s the reaction? I want to put all of my all of my belief all of my effort all of my energy all of my courage all of my fight into my fellow beings and into protecting and defending and loving the life that’s around me because i just got this massive lesson in what life is capable of. I’ve also read about mass extinctions that the planet has gone through before. I know that you can get through, and that life is part of getting through all of this. Much of the brilliance is in the smallest beings that are here. That’s where I find my courage and my strength right now, is from from life itself.
Max: I couldn’t agree more that life on this planet is so incredibly resilient and wants to live so badly. I’m always astounded at life’s capacity to hang on, whether it is plants growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk, or whether it’s in the Chernobyl irradiated zone where wildlife is flourishing despite some of the most toxic conditions on the planet, whether it is the salmon who are hanging on despite their streams having been dammed for 50, 60, 70 years, whether it is the trees who are ;osing their ability to reproduce in their home ranges but human beings are helping them migrate northwards to adapt to global warming. That’s already taking place. The natural world wants to live and is incredibly adaptive to varying natural conditions which are often pretty extreme throughout the Earth’s history. The world can survive a great deal. All we have to do is get industrial civilization out of the way, and help in that adaptation process.
Our music for this episode comes by the hand of DENNI.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Reporting from amidst fields of fracking wells in Colorado, Trinity La Fay writes about the conscious experience of being in relationship to the place she lives, and the disconnect between people and land needed to maintain the destruction.
On the Colorado Rising website, the maps of oil and gas rigs light up the area just above where I live, past my friend’s house halfway up the state, all the way up and out along the plain in a great sweep. Like some demented statistical X, the active wells appear in a sea of blue dots: the abandoned wells. Combined, they swarm completely around the jagged Rocky Mountains, a rising, desperate sea of exploitation.
I remember when the word fracking was used as a supplemental television curse. The way that they said it seemed perfect, as if they understood that it was a primary contributing source of the doom. The story was about a people who, ejected from a poisonous Earth, had colonized in space only to be pursued repeatedly by a predatory cybernetic race. A race they had created. I think stories are important. So does Joseph Campbell, but, as Mary Daly quotes him regarding child victims of sati (the Hindu practice of burning widows alive in the funeral pyres of their late husbands):
“In spite of these signs of suffering and even panic in the actual moment of the pain of suffocation, we should certainly not think the mental state and experience of these individuals after any model of our own more or less imaginable reactions to such a fate, for these sacrifices were not properly individuals at all.”
While I have visions of flickering relatives keening at the river’s edge, smell burning hair, feel the air being sucked from my lungs: he does not imagine their stories are relevant to his experiences.
So, harrumph.
Scrolling out on the Drilling Maps.com site, I see that we, at least, have the resistance of Mountain Range.
Texas; Oklahoma; Louisiana; Mississippi; Kansas; Michigan; the border between North Dakota and Montana. Just about every square inch from Cleveland, Ohio to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Charleston, West Virginia: like fire, the red dots blend. The names of places are all but erased behind them. I cannot see Arkansas written, but I know it is there. From Pennsylvania’s border with New York; all the way down California; all the way up from the Gulf of Mexico to the ice of the Beaufort Sea.
From the Great Lakes down to the Rio Grande; like a ring of fire around the coast of South America, like accidents waiting to happen from the Gulf of Oman to the Barents Sea; like sinking islands from the Arabian Sea to the Yellow Sea to the Tasman Sea. From the North to the South Pacific: companies know no boundaries.
The beneficiaries of these companies, the responsible, I wonder if they learn these names.
I wonder if they are all unreachably psychopathic, or stupid, or if it matters. The dead squirrel on the road; the stoodup friend; the barren landscape full of ghosts: to their experience, it does not matter if it was cruelty or carelessness.
Besides making it possible to set aflame the now undrinkable water that results from such enterprise, whose footage abounds online, Elementa, Science of the Anthropocene, hosts a special collection forum of “Oil and Natural Gas Development: Air Quality, Climate Science and Policy” wherein an article by Chelsea R Thompson, Jacques Hueber and Detlev Helmig, entitled Influence of oil and gas emissions on ambient atmospheric non-methane hydrocarbons in residential areas of Northeastern Colorado discusses ozone levels and calls it abstract.
Like Paul R. EhrlichPaul R. Ehrlich and Carl Sagan in The Cold and The Dark: The World After Nuclear War, everyone agrees that this is not working. Unlike that pivotal conference, however, modern realizations are lost in a desperate sea of distractions. Here is what The Cold and The Dark said abstractly:
“- survivors would face starvation [as] global disruption of the biosphere could ensue. In any event, there would be severe consequences, even in the areas not affected directly, because of the interdependence of the world economy. In either case the extinction of a large fraction of the Earth’s animals, plants, and microorganisms seems possible. The population size of Homo sapiens conceivably could be reduced to prehistoric levels or below, and extinction of the human species itself cannot be excluded.”
Boundaries are underrated.
According to me. Lots of people like to travel; I’m not into it. I have fallen in love with every landscape I’ve seen, but then, I didn’t get to know them. I live in a hard place that I know very well. Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson have a wonderful conversation during which they speak about the necessity of listening to the Others that are places to care for and live with them, and also the joy of being of a place: the intimacy that comes from noticing what cannot be observed in passing. It can be argued that Amber is ancient light that has been stored and that Jet is ancient darkness. Like Saga, they keep our stories. Shale; Oil; Gas; Tar: these exhumed ancestors seem to bellow as they burn that we wake sleeping titans at our peril. Or, as the article put it:
“The findings presented here suggest that oil and gas emissions have a large-scale regional impact on ambient [non methane hydrocarbons] levels, thereby impacting a large population of [-] residents, and representing a large area source of ozone precursors. The short-chain alkanes exhibit strong correlations with propane in Erie/Longmont, Platteville, and within Denver, supporting the conclusion of widespread impact of [oil and natural gas] emissions.”
They recommend further monitoring.
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
Ehrlich, Paul & Harte, John & Harwell, Mark & Raven, P & Sagan, C & Woodwell, George & Berry, Joseph & Ayensu, E & Ehrlich, A & Eisner, T. (1984).Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War. Science (New York, N.Y.). 222. 1293. 10.1126/science.6658451.
This writing is a message from over 10 Indigenous leaders and organizations who aim to explain that regenerative agriculture and permaculture offer narrow solutions to the climate crisis. This collaborative work has been shared freely. To access the original version, along with credits: see below.
Regenerative agriculture and permaculture claim to be the solutions to our ecological crises.
While they both borrow practices from Indigenous cultures, critically, they leave out our worldviews and continue the pattern of erasing our history and contributions to the modern world.
While the practices ‘sustainable farming’ promote are important, they do not encompass the deep cultural and relational changes needed to realize our collective healing.
Where is ‘Nature’?
Regen Ag & Permaculture often talk about what’s happening ‘in nature’: “In nature, soil is always covered.” “In nature, there are no monocultures.” Nature is viewed as separate, outside, ideal, perfect. Human beings must practice “biomimicry” (the mimicking of life) because we exist outside of the life of Nature.
Indigenous peoples speak of our role AS Nature. (Actually, Indigenous languages often don’t have a word for Nature, only a name for Earth and our Universe.) As cells and organs of Earth, we strive to fulfill our roles as her caregivers and caretakers. We often describe ourselves as “weavers”, strengthening the bonds between all beings.
Death Doesn’t Mean Dead
Regen Ag & Permaculture often maintain the “dead” worldview of Western culture and science: Rocks, mountains, soil, water, wind, and light all start as “dead”. (E.g., “Let’s bring life back to the soil!” — implying soil, without microbes, is dead.) This worldview believes that life only happens when these elements are brought together in some specific and special way.
Indigenous cultures view the Earth as a communion of beings and not objects: All matter and energy is alive and conscious. Mountains, stones, water, and air are relatives and ancestors. Earth is a living being whose body we are all a part of. Life does not only occur when these elements are brought together; Life always is. No “thing” is ever dead; Life forms and transforms.
From Judgemental to Relational
Regen Ag & Permaculture maintain overly simplistic binaries through subscribing to good and bad. Tilling is bad; not tilling is good. Mulch is good; not mulching is bad. We must do only the ‘good’ things to reach the idealized, 99.9% biomimicked farm/garden, though we will never be as pure or good “as Nature”, because we are separate from her.
Indigenous cultures often share the view that there is no good, bad, or ideal—it is not our role to judge. Our role is to tend, care, and weave to maintain relationships of balance. We give ourselves to the land: Our breath and hands uplift her gardens, binding our life force together. No one is tainted by our touch, and we have the ability to heal as much as any other lifeform.
Our Words Shape Us
Regen Ag & Permaculture use English as their preferred language no matter the geography or culture: You must first learn English to learn from the godFATHERS of this movement. The English language judges and objectifies, including words most Indigenous languages do not: ‘natural, criminal, waste, dead, wild, pure…’ English also utilizes language like “things” and “its” when referring to “non-living, subhuman entities”.
Among Indigenous cultures, every language emerges from and is therefore intricately tied to place. Inuit people have dozens of words for snow and her movement; Polynesian languages have dozens of words for water’s ripples. To know a place, you must speak her language. There is no one-size-fits-all, and no words for non-living or sub-human beings, because all life has equal value.
People are land. Holistic includes History.
Regen Ag and Permaculture claim to be holistic in approach. When regenerating a landscape, ‘everything’ is considered: soil health, water cycles, local ‘wildlife’, income & profit. ‘Everything’, however, tends to EXCLUDE history: Why were Indigenous homelands steal-able and why were our peoples & lands rape-able? Why were our cultures erased? Why does our knowledge need to be validated by ‘Science’? Why are we still excluded from your ‘healing’ of our land?
Among Indigenous cultures, people belong to land rather than land belonging to people. Healing of land MUST include healing of people and vice versa. Recognizing and processing the emotional traumas held in our bodies as descendants of assaulted, enslaved, and displaced peoples is necessary to the healing of land. Returning our rights to care for, harvest from, and relate to the land that birthed us is part of this recognition.
Composting
Regen Ag & Permaculture often share the environmentalist message that the world is dying and we must “save” it. Humans are toxic, but if we try, we can create a “new Nature” of harmony, though one that is not as harmonious as the “old Nature” that existed before humanity. Towards this mission, we must put Nature first and sacrifice ourselves for “the cause”.
Indigenous cultures often see Earth as going through cycles of continuous transition. We currently find ourselves in a cycle of great decomposition. Like in any process of composting there is discomfort and a knowing that death always brings us into rebirth. Within this great cycle, we all have a role to play. Recognizing and healing all of our own traumas IS healing Earth’s traumas, because we are ONE.
Where to go from here?
Making up only 6.2% of our global population, Indigenous peoples steward 80% of Earth’s biodiversity while managing over 25% of her land. Indigenous worldviews are the bedrocks that our agricultural practices & lifeways arise from. We invite you to ground your daily practices in these ancestral ways, as we jointly work towards collective healing.
Learn whose lands you live on (native-land.ca), their history, and how you can support their causes and cultural revitalization.
Watch @gatherfilm and Aluna documentary.
Amplify the voices and stories of Indigenous peoples and organizations.
Follow, support, donate to, and learn from the contributors to this post.
If you’ve gotten this far in this book—or if you’re simply anything other than entirely insensate—we probably agree that civilization is going to crash, whether or not we help bring this about. If you don’t agree with this, we probably have nothing to say to each other (How ‘bout them Cubbies!). We probably also agree that this crash will be messy. We agree further that since industrial civilization is systematically dismantling the ecological infrastructure of the planet, the sooner civilization comes down (whether or not we help it crash) the more life will remain afterwards to support both humans and nonhumans.
If you agree with all this, and if you don’t want to dirty your spirituality and conscience with the physical work of helping to bring down civilization, and if your primary concern really is for the well-being of those (humans) who will be alive during and immediately after the crash (as opposed to simply raising this issue because you’re too scared to talk about the crash or to allow anyone else to do so either), then, given, and I repeat this point to emphasize it, that civilization is going to come down anyway, you need to start preparing people for the crash.
Instead of attacking me for stating the obvious, go rip up asphalt in vacant parking lots to convert them to neighborhood gardens, go teach people how to identify local edible plants, even in the city (especially in the city) so these people won’t starve when the proverbial shit hits the fan and they can no longer head off to Albertson’s for groceries. Set up committees to eliminate or if appropriate channel the (additional) violence that might break out.
We need it all.
We need people to take out dams, and we need people to knock out electrical infrastructures. We need people to protest and to chain themselves to trees. We also need people working to ensure that as many people as possible are equipped to deal with the fall-out when the collapse comes. We need people working to teach others what wild plants to eat, what plants are natural antibiotics. We need people teaching others how to purify water, how to build shelters. All of this can look like supporting traditional, local knowledge, it can look like starting roof-top gardens, it can look like planting local varieties of medicinal herbs, and it can look like teaching people how to sing.
The truth is that although I do not believe that designing groovy eco-villages will help bring down civilization, when the crash comes, I’m sure to be first in line knocking on their doors asking for food.
People taking out dams do not have a responsibility to ensure that people in homes previously powered by hydro know how to cook over a fire. They do however have a responsibility to support the people doing that work.
Similarly, those people growing medicinal plants (in preparation for the end of civilization) do not have a responsibility to take out dams. They do however have a responsibility at the very least to not condemn those people who have chosen that work. In fact they have a responsibility to support them. They especially have a responsibility to not report them to the cops.
It’s the same old story:
the good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done. Do what you love. Do what you can. Do what best serves your landbase. We need it all. This doesn’t mean that everyone taking out dams and everyone working to cultivate medicinal plants are working toward the same goals. It does mean that if they are, each should see the importance of the other’s work.
Further, resistance needs to be global. Acts of resistance are more effective when they’re large-scale and coordinated. The infrastructure is monolithic and centralized, so common tools and techniques can be used to dismantle it in many different places, simultaneously if possible.
By contrast, the work of renewal must be local.
To be truly effective (and to avoid reproducing the industrial infrastructure) acts of survival and livelihood need to grow from particular landbases where they will thrive. People need to enter into conversation with each piece of earth and all its (human and nonhuman) inhabitants. This doesn’t mean of course that we can’t share ideas, or that one water purification technique won’t be useful in many different locations. It does mean that people in those places need to decide for themselves what will work.
Most important of all, the water in each place needs to be asked and allowed to decide for itself. I’ve been thinking a lot again about the cell phone tower behind Safeway, and I see now how these different approaches manifest in this one small place. The cell phone tower needs to come down. It is contiguous on two sides with abandoned parking lots. Those lots need to come up.
This article written by Cypress Hansen describes the harm caused to large mammals due to pollutants and toxic chemicals entering our seas and oceans. Cypress suggests these beings offer a significant indicator of the health of earth’s waters.
Dozens of whales and dolphins that beached themselves on the U.S. Atlantic Coast contained high levels of pollutants and heavy metals in their blubber and liver tissues, a new study shows.
For the first time, scientists detected the widely used antibiotic Triclosan and the popular herbicide Atrazine in rare species that spend their lives hundreds of kilometers offshore.
While the findings suggest these toxins may contribute to the demise of marine mammals, more research is needed to determine direct cause and effect.
Marine mammals stranded on beaches in the southeastern United States died with high levels of pollutants stored in their organs and blubber, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Marine Science.
“Marine mammals are like a litmus test for the ecosystem,”
said lead author Annie Page-Karjian, clinical veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Florida Atlantic University. “Looking at them and the toxins they’re exposed to gives us a snapshot of what is happening in the marine environment.”
Thousands of chemicals from households, farms and factories quietly enter the ocean every day. Some readily absorb onto bits of another common pollutant: plastic. When mistaken for food by small animals like plankton and anchovies, plastic enters the food chain—along with the chemicals it soaked up.
While the amount of toxins eaten by one anchovy is minuscule, most marine mammals are apex predators, eating hundreds of fish, squid or krill each day. Through a process called bioaccumulation, small amounts of ingested toxins concentrate in carnivores over time, compromising their immune systems and bodily functions.
The researchers collected autopsy data from 83 toothed whales and dolphins that washed up in Florida and North Carolina between 2012 and 2018. They examined 46 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), 21 pygmy sperm whales (Kogia breviceps), and small numbers of animals from nine other species.
The team screened liver and blubber samples for heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic. They also checked for Triclosan, an antibiotic used in dozens of household products; Atrazine, an herbicide used on corn and sugarcane fields; and a handful of plasticizing chemicals such as BPA and NPE, found in countless products from food containers to clothing.
“We found some of the highest mercury concentrations that have ever been reported in any living thing anywhere, ever,”
Page-Karjian told Mongabay. Two bottlenose dolphins found stranded in Waves, North Carolina, and North Palm Beach, Florida, had more than 1,400 micrograms of mercury per gram of tissue (1,400 parts per million) in their livers. Just 10 parts per million of mercury can cause neurological damage in human fetuses.
Besides toxins in their tissues, every animal had a number of physical maladies including kidney deterioration, thyroid tumors and chronic liver disease. . .
This article was written by Cypress Hansen and published on 24 November 2020 in Mongabay. You can read the full, original article here:
Stop Thinning Forests is a community compilation, sponsored by Deep Green Resistance, of research and voices that speak in defense of our forests against the atrocities that are being committed on those communities in the name of “fire mitigation” and “forest health.”
The Forest Service, in partnership with the timber industry, uses propaganda to promote the idea that thinning helps lessen fire severity while improving forest health. The research on the benefits of forest thinning is financially backed by the timber industry, and congressional passing of bills that promote thinning are backed by the lobbying efforts of the industry. The main goal for thinning forests is to increase revenue by allowing the timber industry to get into forests that were previously protected by environmental laws. Recent legislation has allowed the industry to bypass those laws and profit from forest products in the name of “forest health and restoration.” The Forest Service has consistently worked with the timber industry as a result of financial incentives and has been responsible for creating the infrastructure through use of federal tax dollars in the form of subsidies that enable the industry to “get the cut out.”
Individual land owners have recently been encouraged by the Forest Service to thin their lands with available grant monies under the guise of protecting their homes from fire and to improve the health of the forests. The available grant money filters down to the Forest Service from federal legislation that allows industry to get into our treasured, and last remaining, intact forests. Thinning private lands is offered as another incentive that generates money for the Forest Service while creating the appearance that the Forest Service is promoting a policy of “fire mitigation” and “forest restoration,” extending to the wildland/urban interface. Private land owners have the power to become informed and make rational decisions to protect their homes from fire that will not devastate the forest community. It is essential that individuals making these decisions become informed about federal forest policies and the history of the Forest Service before making decisions that will disrupt and harm the forest communities where we live.
Here is a recent on-the-ground report back from Deanna Meyer, a Deep Green Resistance organizer in Colorado:
I went up to check on my neighboring forest who is being destroyed as I write with heavy equipment. These photos show some of the results. Pictures could never show the true devastation, and this place, which is very important to me, is now unrecognizable.
This is at a church in Sedalia, Colorado and this tax exempt church accepted hundreds of thousands of tax payers’ dollars to destroy this forest. All of this is in the name of “fire prevention.” Research analyzing millions of acres throughout the West where fires have occurred shows otherwise.
Here in Colorado, all we need to do is look at the 3 largest fires in our history, all occurring this year, and pay attention to all of the acres that were “thinned” just like this. They did NOT fare any better than the untouched forests and in many areas they burnt even faster and hotter because of wind breaks and dried out soil.
All of this is horrific and heartbreaking, but the soil stands out the most to me. It takes thousands of years to create healthy soil and mycelial networks. This land now is a barren dustbowl with some wood chips thrown on top. The mycelium, grasses, sedges, forbs, and trees who were there and holding the soil together are now completely obliterated from the heavy equipment, mulching and utter destruction of at least a foot of soil who used to be sinking carbon and healing the land.
Every time our forests start to heal themselves from the decades of colonizing destruction, the Forest DISservice and private land owners come in and log it again. When you look at the forests that have not been touched for decades, they are healing and thinning themselves out. Just because they look “messy” to colonizers who can’t stand the idea of not having control over every living biome that exists does not alter the fact that the forests know best what to do with themselves and our meddling with them is biocide.
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