Editor’s note: This article, first published at Marx21, dives into the origin and epidemiology of the CoViD-19 virus with a socialist biologist. While it does not represent an official Deep Green Resistance perspective, it does include valuable factual information—including the essential analysis that CoViD is a “disease of civilization.” For further reading on this topic, see “Civilization Makes Us Sick” and “The Ecology of Disease.” Republished with permission.
The coronavirus is keeping the world in a state of shock. But instead of fighting the structural causes of the pandemic, the government is focusing on emergency measures. A talk with Rob Wallace (Evolutionary Biologist) about the dangers of CoViD-19, the responsibility of agribusiness and sustainable solutions to combat infectious diseases.
Rob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and phylogeographer for public health in the USA. He has been working for twenty-five years on various aspects of new pandemics and is the author of the book “Big Farms Make Big Flu”.
How dangerous is the new coronavirus?
Rob Wallace: It depends on where you are in the timing of your local outbreak of Covid-19: early, peak level, late? How good is your region’s public health response? What are your demographics? How old are you? Are you immunologically compromised? What is your underlying health? To ask an undiagnosable possibility, do your immuogenetics, the genetics underlying your immune response, line up with the virus or not?
So all this fuss about the virus is just scare tactics?
No, certainly not. At the population level, Covid-19 was clocking in at between 2 and 4% case fatality ratio or CFR at the start of the outbreak in Wuhan. Outside Wuhan, the CFR appears to drop off to more like 1% and even less, but also appears to spike in spots here and there, including in places in Italy and the United States.. Its range doesn’t seem much in comparison to, say, SARS at 10%, the influenza of1918 5-20%, »avian influenza« H5N1 60%, or at some points Ebola 90%. But it certainly exceeds seasonal influenza’s 0.1% CFR. The danger isn’t just a matter of the death rate, however. We have to grapple with what’s called penetrance or community attack rate: how much of the global population is penetrated by the outbreak.
Can you be more specific?
The global travel network is at record connectivity. With no vaccines or specific antivirals for coronaviruses, nor at this point any herd immunity to the virus, even a strain at only 1% mortality can present a considerable danger. With an incubation period of up to two weeks and increasing evidence of some transmission before sickness–before we know people are infected–few places would likely be free of infection. If, say, Covid-19 registers 1% fatality in the course of infecting four billion people, that’s 40 million dead. A small proportion of a large number can still be a large number.
These are frightening numbers for an ostensibly less than virulent pathogen…
Definitely and we are only at the beginning of the outbreak. It’s important to understand that many new infections change over the course of epidemics. Infectivity, virulence, or both may attenuate. On the other hand, other outbreaks ramp up in virulence. The first wave of the influenza pandemic in the spring of 1918 was a relatively mild infection. It was the second and third waves that winter and into 1919 that killed millions.
But pandemic skeptics argue that far fewer patients have been infected and killed by the coronavirus than by the typical seasonal flu. What do you think about that?
I would be the first to celebrate if this outbreak proves a dud. But these efforts to dismiss Covid-19 as a possible danger by citing other deadly diseases, especially influenza, is a rhetorical device to spin concern about the coronavirus as badly placed.
So the comparison with seasonal flu is limping …
It makes little sense to compare two pathogens on different parts of their epicurves. Yes, seasonal influenza infects many millions worldwide each other, killing, by WHO estimates, up to 650,000 people a year. Covid-19, however, is only starting its epidemiological journey. And unlike influenza, we have neither vaccine, nor herd immunity to slow infection and protect the most vulnerable populations.
Even if the comparison is misleading, both diseases belong to viruses, even to a specific group, the RNA viruses. Both can cause disease. Both affect the mouth and throat area and sometimes also the lungs. Both are quite contagious.
Those are superficial similarities that miss a critical part in comparing two pathogens. We know a lot about influenza’s dynamics. We know very little about Covid-19’s. They’re steeped in unknowns. Indeed, there is much about Covid-19 that is even unknowable until the outbreak plays out fully. At the same time, it is important to understand that it isn’t a matter of Covid-19 versus influenza. It’s Covid-19 and influenza. The emergence of multiple infections capable of going pandemic, attacking populations in combos, should be the front and center worry.
You have been researching epidemics and their causes for several years. In your book »Big Farms Make Big Flu« you attempt to draw these connections between industrial farming practices, organic farming and viral epidemiology. What are your insights?
The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure –or better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary.
When the new outbreaks spring up, governments, the media, and even most of the medical establishment are so focused on each separate emergency that they dismiss the structural causes that are driving multiple marginalized pathogens into sudden global celebrity, one after the other.
Who is to blame?
I said industrial agriculture, but there’s a larger scope to it. Capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence. The functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities. In short, capital centers, places such as London, New York, and Hong Kong, should be considered our primary disease hotspots.
For which diseases is this the case?
There are no capital-free pathogens at this point. Even the most remote are affected, if distally. Ebola, Zika, the coronaviruses, yellow fever again, a variety of avian influenzas, and African swine fever in hog are among the many pathogens making their way out of the most remote hinterlands into peri-urban loops, regional capitals, and ultimately onto the global travel network. From fruit bats in the Congo to killing Miami sunbathers in a few weeks‘ time.
What is the role of multinational companies in this process?
Planet Earth is largely Planet Farm at this point, in both biomass and land used. Agribusiness is aiming to corner the food market. The near-entirety of the neoliberal project is organized around supporting efforts by companies based in the in the more advanced industrialised countries to steal the land and resources of weaker countries. As a result, many of those new pathogens previously held in check by long-evolved forest ecologies are being sprung free, threatening the whole world.
What effects do the production methods of agribusinesses have on this?
The capital-led agriculture that replaces more natural ecologies offers the exact means by which pathogens can evolve the most virulent and infectious phenotypes. You couldn’t design a better system to breed deadly diseases.
How so?
Growing genetic monocultures of domestic animals removes whatever immune firebreaks may be available to slow down transmission. Larger population sizes and densities facilitate greater rates of transmission. Such crowded conditions depress immune response. High throughput, a part of any industrial production, provides a continually renewed supply of susceptibles, the fuel for the evolution of virulence. In other words, agribusiness is so focused on profits that selecting for a virus that might kill a billion people is treated as a worthy risk.
What!?
These companies can just externalize the costs of their epidemiologically dangerous operations on everyone else. From the animals themselves to consumers, farmworkers, local environments, and governments across jurisdictions. The damages are so extensive that if we were to return those costs onto company balance sheets, agribusiness as we know it would be ended forever. No company could support the costs of the damage it imposes.
In many media it is claimed that the starting point of the coronavirus was an »exotic food market« in Wuhan. Is this description true?
Yes and no. There are spatial clues in favor of the notion. Contact tracing linked infections back to the Hunan Wholesale Sea Food Market in Wuhan, where wild animals were sold. Environmental sampling does appear to pinpoint the west end of the market where wild animals were held.
But how far back and how widely should we investigate? When exactly did the emergency really begin? The focus on the market misses the origins of wild agriculture out in the hinterlands and its increasing capitalization. Globally, and in China, wild food is becoming more formalized as an economic sector. But its relationship with industrial agriculture extends beyond merely sharing the same moneybags. As industrial production–hog, poultry, and the like–expand into primary forest, it places pressure on wild food operators to dredge further into the forest for source populations, increasing the interface with, and spillover of, new pathogens, including Covid-19.
Covid-19 is not the first virus to develop in China that the government tried to cover it up.
Yes, but this is no Chinese exceptionalism, however. The U.S. and Europe have served as ground zeros for new influenzas as well, recently H5N2 and H5Nx, and their multinationals and neocolonial proxies drove the emergence of Ebola in West Africa and Zika in Brazil. U.S. public health officials covered for agribusiness during the H1N1 (2009) and H5N2 outbreaks.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has now declared a »health emergency of international concern«. Is this step correct?
Yes. The danger of such a pathogen is that health authorities do not have a handle on the statistical risk distribution. We have no idea how the pathogen may respond. We went from an outbreak in a market to infections splattered across the world in a matter of weeks. The pathogen could just burn out. That would be great. But we don’t know. Better preparation would better the odds of undercutting the pathogen’s escape velocity.
The WHO’s declaration is also part of what I call pandemic theater. International organizations have died in the face of inaction. The League of Nations comes to mind. The UN group of organizations is always worried about its relevance, power, and funding. But such actionism can also converge on the actual preparation and prevention the world needs to disrupt Covid-19’s chains of transmission.
The neoliberal restructuring of the health care system has worsened both the research and the general care of patients, for example in hospitals. What difference could a better funded healthcare system make to fight the virus?
There’s the terrible but telling story of the Miami medical device company employee who upon returning from China with flu-like symptoms did the righteous thing by his family and community and demanded a local hospital test him for Covid-19. He worried that his minimal Obamacare option wouldn’t cover the tests. He was right. He was suddenly on the hook for US$3270. An American demand might be an emergency order be passed that stipulates that during a pandemic outbreak, all outstanding medical bills related to testing for infection and for treatment following a positive test would be paid for by the federal government. We want to encourage people to seek help, after all, rather than hide away—and infect others—because they can’t afford treatment. The obvious solution is a national health service—fully staffed and equipped to handle such community-wide emergencies—so that such a ridiculous problem as discouraging community cooperation would never arise.
As soon as the virus is discovered in one country, governments everywhere react with authoritarian and punitive measures, such as a compulsory quarantine of entire areas of land and cities. Are such drastic measures justified?
Using an outbreak to beta-test the latest in autocratic control post-outbreak is disaster capitalism gone off the rails. In terms of public health, I would err on the side of trust and compassion, which are important epidemiological variables. Without either, jurisdictions lose their populations‘ support. A sense of solidarity and common respect is a critical part of eliciting the cooperation we need to survive such threats together. Self-quarantines with the proper support–check-ins by trained neighborhood brigades, food supply trucks going door-to-door, work release and unemployment insurance–can elicit that kind of cooperation, that we are all in this together.
As you may know, in Germany with the AfD we have a de facto Nazi party with 94 seats in parliament. The hard Nazi Right and other groups in association with AfD politicians use the Corona-Crisis for their agitation. They spread (false) reports about the virus and demand more authoritarian measures from the government: Restrict flights and entry stops for migrants, border closures and forced quarantine …
Travel bans and border closures are demands with which the radical right wants to to racialize what are now global diseases. This is, of course, nonsense. At this point, given the virus is already on its way to spreading everywhere, the sensible thing to do is to work on developing the kind of public health resilience in which it doesn’t matter who shows up with an infection, we have the means to treat and cure them. Of course, stop stealing people’s land abroad and driving the exoduses in the first place, and we can keep the pathogens from emerging in the first place.
What would be sustainable changes?
In order to reduce the emergence of new virus outbreaks, food production has to change radically. Farmer autonomy and a strong public sector can curb environmental ratchets and runaway infections. Introduce varieties of stock and crops—and strategic rewilding—at both the farm and regional levels. Permit food animals to reproduce on-site to pass on tested immunities. Connect just production with just circulation. Subsidize price supports and consumer purchasing programs supporting agroecological production. Defend these experiments from both the compulsions that neoliberal economics impose upon individuals and communities alike and the threat of capital-led State repression.
What should socialists call for in the face of the increasing dynamics of disease outbreaks?
Agribusiness as a mode of social reproduction must be ended for good if only as a matter of public health. Highly capitalized production of food depends on practices that endanger the entirety of humanity, in this case helping unleash a new deadly pandemic. We should demand food systems be socialized in such a way that pathogens this dangerous are kept from emerging in the first place. That will require reintegrating food production into the needs of rural communities first. That will require agroecological practices that protect the environment and farmers as they grow our food. Big picture, we must heal the metabolic rifts separating our ecologies from our economies. In short, we have a planet to win.
Featured image: Flag of the San Patricios, or “Saint Patrick’s Battalion.”
I do not know if my blood took sides. I do not know if I descend from those brave enough to fight back. I do not know, but the memories come easily enough.
I search, so I may claim the unbroken chains, stretching far into the past, that bind us to resistance.
I find Pádraig Pearse dressing himself in the early morning hours of Monday, April 24, 1916.
I see him struggling with the buttons on his shirt as his fingers shake with nerves. I hear him anxiously muttering the opening to the speech he would give on the grey steps of the General Post Office in Dublin just a few hours later, “Irishmen and Irishwomen! In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood…”
I assume he probably knew that in a few days a firing squad would add his body, his brother Willie’s body, and the bodies of his compatriots to the heaps of dead generations that formed Ireland’s centuries-old resistance to colonization. His eyes might have paused for a moment on his left breast pocket wondering if they’d even bother to pin a target there for the riflemen in Kilmainham Jail.
I see young Tommy Woods, a 17 year-old boy, who left Dublin to volunteer with a contingent of Irish fighters known as the Connolly Column resisting Franco with Spanish Republicans. I am with Woods as he presses his hands over his wounds trying to hold his pumping blood in. I listen as the last sound he hears are the engines of Franco’s bombers overhead.
I wonder if that’s what Guernica sounded like.
I feel the sun rise hot and sticky over Chapultepec in September, 1847. I watch as 29 Irishmen, members of the Mexican Army’s St. Patrick’s Brigade, stand on gallows with hands tied behind their backs waiting for the Mexican flag to be taken from the top of Chapultepec Castle, so they can be hanged as deserters at the precise moment the American flag is raised.
I grimace as an army surgeon informs Colonel William Harney that the 30th member of St. Patrick’s Brigade to be hanged, Francis O’Connor, had his legs amputated the day before. I hear Harney scream, what he was later quoted as screaming, “Bring the damned son of a bitch out! My orders were to hang 30 and by God I’ll do it!”
Some of the men roll their heads against the scratchy hemp of the nooses rubbing on their ruddy, sunburnt necks. Some of the men hold rosary beads. Some of the men are telling jokes. One man has already pissed his pants.
All of the men cheer when Mexican cadet Juan Escutia rips the Mexican flag from it’s pole atop Chapultepec Castle and leaps to his death on the battlements below depriving the Yankees of capturing the Mexican flag for themselves.
I am Irish. I am white. I recall Cambridge historian Charles Kingsley’s letter to his wife in 1860 when he wrote of the people he encountered in Ireland, “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country…to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.”
Or, the statement from Queen Victoria’s economist, Nassau Senior, when he stated in 1848 at the height of the Great Famine, that existing policies, “will not kill more than one million Irish in 1848 and that will scarcely be enough to do much good.”
On the campus of the University of Notre Dame, where my father went to college, there is a statue depicting Father William Corby, one hand over his heart, one hand pointing at God, as he gives a sermon to the Union’s Irish Brigade of July 2, 1863. In the sermon, Father Corby warned troops that the Catholic Church forbade last rites and burial to soldiers who turned in the face of the slavers – enemy, Confederate soldiers – at Gettysburg. Father Corby, surviving the war, became the President of the University of Notre Dame.
Notre Dame students, forgetting Corby’s meaning and focused more on football, refer to the statue as “Faircatch Corby.”
A few years ago on St. Patrick’s Day, Subcomandante Marcos wrote, “When Mexico was fighting, in the last century, against the empire of the bars and crooked stars, there was a group of soldiers who fought on the side of the Mexicans and this group was called ‘St. Patrick’s Battalion’. And so I am writing you in the name of all of my companeros and companeras, because just as with the ‘Saint Patrick’s Battalion’, we now see clearly that there are foreigners who love Mexico more than some natives who are now in the government.”
I strive to remember the old alliances.
Edition of The Gaelic Journal published in 1882, part of the “Gaelic Revival.”
Author Bio
Will Falk is a writer, lawyer, and environmental activist. The natural world speaks and Will’s work is how he listens. He believes the ongoing destruction of the natural world is the most pressing issue confronting us today. For Will, writing is a tool to be used in resistance.
Will graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School and practiced as a public defender in Kenosha, WI. He left the public defender office to pursue frontline environmental activism. So far, activism has taken him to the Unist’ot’en Camp – an indigenous cultural center and pipeline blockade on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory in so-called British Columbia, Canada, to a construction blockade on Mauna Kea in Hawai’i, and to endangered pinyon-juniper forests in the Great Basin.
Sam Mitchell: It is an absolutely beautiful sunny winter day here in the great state of Texas, and the opening bell of the year 2020 and you have found your way to collapse chronicles.
My name is Sam Mitchell and what we do here obviously, as we chronicle the collapse of global industrial civilization and the planet. And guys, before I get into this I just want to give a little bit of a warning and a disclaimer. I have mentioned many times, because I bring a guest on to the show, it does not necessarily mean that I am advocating everything my guests are getting ready to say. I just want to make that clear to Homeland Security. Anyone else listening to this? I am not necessarily advocating what we’re getting ready to hear, but I do think it is a voice we need to hear. And who we’re going to be hearing is a recommendation I received from none other than Derrick Jensen. And this is this fellow named Max Wilbert, who is a buddy of Derrick’s.
And so for those of you not aware of Max, I have read out some of his stuff in the past here. From his Website:
Max Wilbert is a third-generation dissident who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He has been an organizer for more than 15 years. Max is a longtime member of Deep Green Resistance and serves on the board of a small, grassroots non-profit. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Communication and Advocacy from Huxley College. His first book, a collection of pro-feminist and environmental essays written over a six-year period, was released in 2018. He is co-author of the forthcoming book “Bright Green Lies,” which looks at the problems with mainstream so-called “solutions” to the climate crisis.
And here on his Website, Max says of himself, “I am part of a revolutionary movement rooted in ecology, anti-racism, feminism and human and nonhuman rights that aims to dismantle the global culture of empire — read industrial civilization — by any means necessary.“
Max Wilbert, come on and say hi to the folks, and we’re going to dive right into this rollicking conversation.
Max Wilbert: All right, Sam, thanks for having me on the show. It’s good to be here. And thanks for that intro.
Sam Mitchell: OK. So, guys, anyway, my first thought was I was going to build up to this quote I’m getting ready to read from Max, but I’ve said, what the hell? Let’s just dive right into it. We’re not going to read this. It’s the laundry list of everything that is wrong with the global industrial civilization and the ongoing collapse of a planet. We’re going to dive right into what we need to do about it. And this is what Max Wilbert wrote a while back, and we’re just going to pick up from here. So to kick off this conversation, here’s what Max had to say:
“We need to build legitimate movements to dismantle global capitalism. All work is useful towards this end. However, I see no way this goal will be achieved without force. The best methods I have come across for achieving this rely on a dedicated cadre forming small, highly mobile and trained strike forces. These forces should target key nodes of global industrial infrastructure, such as shipping, communication, finance, energy, etc. and destroy them with the goal of inciting cascading systems failure. The interconnected global economy is vulnerable to this type of attack because of how interdependent it is. If the right targets are chosen and effectively attacked, the entire thing could come crashing down.”
Max Wilbert, that was a mouthful. Amplify and clarify, which you have defined as Decisive Ecological Warfare.
Max Wilbert: Absolutely. Thanks for reading that quote out. That was from an interview I did with a French friend of mine a while ago. I tried to lay it out as straightforwardly as I could in that article. And, you know, it sounds pretty extreme to a lot of people. And it sounds like, I think, what the government would call ecoterrorism, and a lot of people would be very terrified by hearing what you just read. And I’m sure a lot of listeners are sitting back in their seats and thinking, what is this all about? This guy’s a nut job, you know. I guess I want to push back on that a little bit. You know, I don’t feel like an extremist. I don’t think that I am somebody who’s crazy. I think that I’m somebody who’s looking at the political realities and the ecological realities of the situation we find ourselves in as a species, and trying to come up with a reasonable response to that. And to me, that reasonable response, it’s not going to rely on the government. I think a lot of your readers probably are on the same pages as me with this. And I think you probably are as well. But look at the incompetence of governments around the world to address the climate crisis and all kinds of different issues. The idea that they’re going to solve these converging problems that we’re facing in an ecological sense is a pipe dream. It’s just not happening. There’s no evidence that it’s happening.
Everything is getting worse day after day after day. And, you know, emissions continue to rise, year after year. So, if government isn’t going to solve it, then people will need to solve it, right? And what does that look like, given the constraints that we have on our time, given the situation that we find ourselves in? I’ve had sort of some revolutionary leanings in my politics for a long time. You talked in my intro about how I grew up in Seattle in the post WTO, and there was this understanding in the communities that I came of age, and politically looking at, for example, the Zapatistas and all kinds of different revolutionary and people’s movements around the world. Sometimes the movements have to be forceful, sometimes they have to use violence, or what people would term as violence. I don’t consider economic sabotage to necessarily be violence, although, of course, look at economic sanctions against Iraq, for example, which killed a million civilians, that’s more devastating than than any war can be. But I think that we need to be clear eyed about these things.
I say this as somebody whose grandfather was a conscientious objector who refused to fight in World War II. So many people look at World War II and talk about it as being that just war, and the Americans fighting the Nazis and the Italian fascists and the Japanese fascist state. The reality, I think as a lot of people know, anyone who’s read, for example, “A People’s History of the United States” knows that the US government didn’t go into the Second World War with altruistic motivations. The motivations were imperialist, they were economic. And many people in the government and prominent members of our society supported the Nazi regime from the very beginning. One of the biggest examples being Henry Ford. IBM, of course, worked closely with the Nazis. We all know that. This is sort of beside the point. But I say this as somebody, again, whose grandfather was a conscientious objector. I came of age politically in the anti-war movement, trying to stop the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. So I’m not somebody who loves violence. I’m not somebody who wants to go out and cause destruction and impose my will on other people. That’s not my ideology. I’m somebody who values peace and basically wants to just have a good quiet life, live it in a good way and have good relationships with the people around me. And I would be very content if I could just go live in the woods for the rest of my life with my loved ones and not have very much happen. That sounds great to me. But unfortunately, we’re living in this global crisis and we need to come up with some sort of response to it. And all of the things that I look at, the government’s solutions, the corporate solutions, the greenwashing, all this stuff around alternative energy and green technology, the Green New Deal, all of these things. I look at them and they seem vastly disproportionate to the scale of the problems that we face. We need fundamental economic and political change across the whole planet. I don’t think that that is going to happen simply or easily. And frankly, I don’t think that’s going to happen willingly. I don’t think people are willingly going to give up this life.
You know, my nephew, who’s two and a half years old, and I’m hanging out with him recently and reading books and so on, and like most kids, he’s really into trucks, he’s really into the garbage trucks and the cranes and construction sites. It’s fascinating to him. It was fascinating to me when I was his age. And I was writing last night about the sadness, the tragedy that this kid, growing up in an urban area, is not going to be exposed to grizzly bears, to orca whales, to wolf packs. You know, the megafauna of the past have been replaced by what I’m calling in this article I’m working on a mechafauna. Large machines have replaced large animals. And instead of navigating through a landscape of raging rivers and towering mountains and glaciers, we’re navigating through a landscape of towering skyscrapers and freeways and businesses. So, most people are profoundly disconnected from the natural world. And I think because of that, we have all been inculcated into this ideology that looks at civilization and this way of life as… It’s even beyond a good thing, it’s something that’s so fundamental that it cannot be questioned.
Most people literally cannot imagine living a different way of life than the modern industrial, high energy way of life. Most people, at least in the United States where I live, can’t imagine that. Some can, some people obviously have more experience living off the land or living in communities and in more intentional ways and can really imagine a much lower energy, a smaller scale, more localized way of life, which is the only sustainable path for the future. But politically, if we think that that way of life, moving everyone on the planet away from high energy ways of life and dismantling those high energy systems, that’s the only path towards survival we have as a species. And that’s the only way to stop the mass destruction that the dominant culture is perpetuating. And I don’t see that happening willingly. There’s just no signs that that’s going to happen, at least on a large enough scale, on a fast enough timeline.
Sam Mitchell: What was your phrase you mentioned five minutes ago? The disproportionate scale of the response to the level of the crisis. The problem, the predicament. And again, I’m just going to play devil’s advocate here. So, assuming that I agree with everything you say, that what we need to do is target key nodes of global industrial infrastructure, such as shipping, communication, finance, energy, and destroy them with a goal of inciting cascading systems failure. The problem that I would have with that, on the assumption that I agree that was a noble goal, and I’m not saying whether I do or not, my problem, Max, would be the same problem I have with all of the other responses you mentioned, that there is no way in hell that we’re going to marshal the forces necessary. It’s not it’s not even David versus Goliath at this point. Rather, it’s a goldfish vs. a blue whale. What would you say to get me on your team? Assuming as that I agree I’m going to join your team, but this is the reason I’m reluctant to. What would be your response to me?
Max Wilbert: Well, the first thing I would say is if we don’t try, then we’ll never know whether it was possible. I mean, people have achieved plenty of incredible things throughout the history of the world, both for good and bad, that seemed incredibly unlikely in the beginning. And there’s one quote that I like to spread around, it was from Michael McFaul I believe, who is on the National Security Council. And he said “every revolution seems impossible beforehand and inevitable afterwards”. So I don’t think what you just said is a unique feeling. I think, millions of people have felt that way throughout history in all kinds of different difficult and dangerous political situations. And yet people still choose to fight. People still choose to organize. And of course, not everyone does. I don’t expect everyone to join a movement like what I’m talking about. But, we need to find those people who are willing to join, are willing to fight. And, that not only means people doing that work, fighting for that cascading system’s failure, going underground and taking serious action. I think it also means people who are just willing to speak up and talk about this openly, because I don’t think this is anything to be ashamed of, or anything that needs to be discussed in the shadows. You know, I’m willing to go on national television and talk about this. I don’t care because we’re in a desperate situation. And this to me is not any less mainstream. I mean, look at the politicians that you see on TV and these debates around the U.S. presidential election and so on. The stuff they’re talking about is completely out of touch, in most cases, with the realities of what we’re facing. And I look at those people as the extremists. I look at those people as the the people who are insane and out of touch with what’s actually happening in the world. So, I think we need people involved in all kinds of different levels.
And people hear what I’m saying and get scared. You know, this is serious stuff. Obviously I’m talking about revolutionary politics really in a sense, and that is a dangerous thing. It’s dangerous now and it has always been dangerous. And I think one thing that people neglect is the fact that revolutionary movements involve people at all kinds of different levels. I mean, there are people who are part of deep green resistance, the group that I’m in, who are parents of young children, who don’t have any time, who don’t have the ability to be a public face for the movement. People find ways to contribute. You know, people volunteer in all kinds of different ways. People translate articles. People donate. People do all kinds of different things to build a culture of resistance to support these ideas and build them up into a political force, a political movement that can actually influence the course of events. So that’s what we’re trying to do.
And I understand people’s feelings of disempowerment. You look at mass media, you look at the culture that we live in, and that’s one of the main goals of this system, to keep everyone in a position of feeling disempowered, of feeling a sense of total alienation, of feeling disconnection. And one of my experiences in political organizing and doing this work is that not only do I feel like I’m doing the right thing, but, I find this work to be incredibly fulfilling, personally. I find myself with a sense of purpose that didn’t exist before I found these ideas. When I was younger, I felt very swept along in global events. And now I feel like I’m part of an organized force that’s working to change things. And the fact that we are outnumbered and outgunned and have no money and so on, all of these things are realities that many other people throughout history have faced. So, I look at myself and other people in this movement as part of a multi generational struggle, that has frankly been going on for thousands of years against the culture of empire. We need to step up and step into that role. And I think it takes a lot of wisdom and it takes a lot of commitment and it takes a lot of self work to confront those fears, to have real conversations with yourself and your loved ones about what this could mean. And it takes courage. I would rather do this work than sit on a couch and watch Netflix for the rest of my life. So it does that make me crazy? Maybe in the minds of some people in this culture, but I would rather be crazy than working 40 hours a week, slaving away at some job I hate, getting ready to retire into a climate nightmare and leaving nothing, leaving nothing for future generations.
Sam Mitchell: OK, well, there are so many things I was trying to grab hold of out of that response. One word stands out to me and that response, it was outgunned. Max has a fine YouTube channel himself. You can find Max’s YouTube channel, and I’ve noticed that the other YouTube bots have not shut you down. I’m a little bit surprised that you are openly advocating on your YouTube channel to start picking up guns. Talk about that, where literally does arming ourselves fit into your program? I mean, guns have bullets. Where are you talking about those bullets ending up?
Max Wilbert: Well, to be clear: The strategy that you talked about, the Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy, is explicitly designed to minimize civilian casualties. That’s something that has been a part of our ethic from the beginning. We’re not talking about waging open warfare on governments or the industrial system. We’re talking about sabotage. We’re talking about coordinated economic sabotage. Now, I’m not naive enough to say that that may not involve some violence against people, but that’s not a call for me to make because I’m not directly involved in that process.
We talk very clearly about the need for a firewall between people who are above ground and advocating these things, like myself, and people who go underground to actually take those type of actions.
So I can’t actually tell those people what to do, and I don’t know what they will do or what they are doing if they exist. So, in some ways the point is moot. You talked about my YouTube channel and I’ve made some videos, like you said, talking about weapons. And I see two main reasons for this.
The first is self-defense. I think that we’re entering a world that’s getting increasingly chaotic. And people like myself, who advocate for what is seen as radical politics in this culture are at risk, compared to a lot of other people. I receive death threats regularly, I receive all kinds of hateful messages from all kinds of different people. I’ve been doing this for a while, and that has been happening consistently. And it’s only speeding up. We’re seeing increased polarization all around the world. We’re seeing the increased rise of of right wing, ultra nationalist and proto-fascist movement.
And that’s something to be concerned about. That’s a real concern. And I don’t think the police or the state are ever going to protect people like me, or even people who aren’t revolutionaries. Just look at the black community in the United States and all the violence that they have been facing for so long, at the hands of the police and racist vigilantes. I think we need to learn to defend ourselves, and that doesn’t mean we love guns or we build a stupid gun worshiping culture like the NRA.
I think that means that we be adults, and we make reasonable decisions to preserve the safety of ourselves and our communities. And I think as climate crisis intensifies, we’re going to see more and more instability and the potential for violence.
So I want to see communities of resistance, and especially communities that are engaging in on the ground work, defending the land, and building alternative communities, building alternative economies and ways to survive. I want to see those communities making serious decisions about what they’re gonna do, because if you have a great, wonderful, groovy eco village, and some sort of climate disaster knocks out the local government, then you may have to be prepared for a bad situation.
One of my friends is from Pakistan, and she talks about that we should look towards Pakistan as an example of what the U.S. and other more “wealthy” first world nations are moving towards in the future. You’re seeing a lot of conflict, you’re seeing a lot of sectarianism, violence, blackouts and rolling brownouts. Power is only available for certain periods of the day. A lot of desertification, a lot of extreme poverty contrasted with extreme wealth. And I think that’s the future we’re in for. Rebecca Solnit wrote a book about natural disasters, and about how people have this idea that when disaster strikes, everyone becomes rapists and looters and things get really nasty and really bad really quickly. And she writes that’s actually not what happens. That’s much more the exception than the rule. In general, when disaster strikes, people tend to come together and work together and cooperate and help one another. I’m not somebody who looks at human beings as inherently evil and nasty, and it’s gonna get really bad and brutish. But for political organizers, for people who are specifically resisting civilization, capitalism, white supremacy and so on, I think it makes sense to reasonably know how to use and own firearms legally.
The second reason that I talk about is almost, in a sense, more philosophical. In the Second Amendment of the US Constitution was written specifically: In a situation where people rose up to fight against a government, and they use the weapons that they own to do that. And then they wrote into the Constitution protections for people owning weapons. Obviously, the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It was a high class revolution, a ruling class revolution. It was not a grassroots people’s movement, it was not a movement for freedom or progressive ideals. But nonetheless, I think it’s true that preserving independence from the state is incredibly important. And I find it very hypocritical that many people on the left, for example, will critique the administration for building concentration camps and for police brutality and violence, and then will turn around and the same time advocate for taking away people’s weapons, taking away weapons of the public. And of course, mass shootings and all these different issues, there are very serious issues and they are real issues. And at the same time, I think that preserving a population that is armed is a bulwark against tyranny in some ways.
The other part of it is, you look at the United States and there are a huge number of guns in private hands in this country, and the vast, vast majority of them are owned by conservative and far right people. Not many are owned by people with progressive values, who really value ecology and really value feminism and really value anti-racistm. I’m not saying that all conservatives are racist or whatever. That’s an oversimplification. But I think the fact is true, that all the weapons concentrated in the hands of the right is not good. And I think, as we see increasing instability, it makes sense to know how to use weapons. And again, that doesn’t mean you glamorize them. That doesn’t mean you worship them. And that doesn’t mean that you plan some sort of armed attack against whatever. That’s not what I’m talking about. But I do think that thinking about weapons and knowing how to use them can help move people on the left towards a greater sense of seriousness and a greater sense of power. I didn’t grow up in a gun culture at all, I didn’t shoot a gun until I was 21 years old, something like that. I wouldn’t consider myself a gun nut or anything along those lines. I don’t really enjoy shooting guns at all, although I do practice it occasionally and I do hunt, because I like to connect with the land and get my own food and get the best quality possible meat that’s local and organic and has no chemicals in it and was grown on the mountainside, not in some factory farm.
But I think when you critique the power of empire, when you critique U.S. imperialism, when you critique police brutality and you have never touched or fired a weapon, then I think that you perhaps have a skewed understanding or an incomplete understanding of what you’re talking about. And I think this can lead to some dangerous ideas. Many progressive people, leftists and people in the hippie community talk about things like violence doesn’t work, violence never works, which I think is just a stupid idea, frankly, I think the reality is that unfortunately, violence works really well. That’s why the US military uses it. That’s why the police use it. That’s why abusers and wife beaters use it, because it is very effective. And that’s not a good thing. But again, I think we need to be adults and face these realities.
Sam Mitchell: Yeah, well, I know that you of all people are keeping up with the trends, the skyrocketing number of environmental defenders being just flat out murdered by these guys. When I was reading something in the past few months, about one of these tribes in Brazil, these warriors, you know, and actually they need to be defending their land base. I am 100 percent in support of an Amazon indigenous person using violence to defend their land base and their culture. But at the same time, Max, I’m thinking in the back of my head, there is nothing that this Bozo Nero guy, as I call him, there is nothing that Bozo Nero would love more than an Amazon Indian to put an arrow through the throat of a soy farmer or a or a gold miner or someone building a hydro power dam. Are you following me? Then you would see what violence would look like. It would be a bloodbath. And they would say, well, they threw the first punch. That this guy with his bow and arrow killed some guy building a riot rod, driving a bulldozer or building a hydroelectric dam. Do you see where I’m going with this? And I would be cheering the guy with a bow and arrow, but I know what it would turn into, brother. What do you think about that?
Max Wilbert: Well, I think you’re absolutely right. And that’s why I think we can’t get caught up in dogma. I’m not a dogmatic pacifist. I’m also not a dogmatic advocate of violence. I think you need to be situational in the methods that you choose to use to achieve a certain goal. And if you are trying to defend your land, then in many contexts the best way to do that is going to be completely nonviolently. And that’s not a problem for me at all. I’ve participated in countless nonviolent actions and direct action blockades and protests and media events and all kinds of stuff on that spectrum. So, I don’t think that’s a contradiction at all. I think we need to be flexible in the way that we approach these things. But I also think that we need to avoid blaming the victim. And I think we need to recognize that of course what you’re saying is true, that the state will use violence as an excuse whenever it can. The reality is the states can be violent no matter what. The corporations are going to be violent no matter what. Their violence may take different forms depending on the situation, but their modus operandi is violent and whether they are sending in the military or whether they are using international trade agreements and unfair loaning practices. From organizations like the WTO and the World Bank, that force massive infrastructure projects on poor indigenous people and rural people all over the world, or whether we’re talking about banks here in this country and how they function and how they keep the poor poor and exploit people. They are using violence every single day. That is their main tool. And so our choice should not be some moral abstraction – not that morality is abstract – but I think that we need to be looking at what methods are going to be effective to stop them, and not artificially constraining ourselves based on morality. Morality that frankly I think we’ve been taught often. I think there’s a reality that we’re taught, Martin Luther King in schools and we’re not really taught about Malcolm X, and we’re not really taught about the Black Panthers, and we’re not really taught about revolutionary movements around the world, except for, again, the bourgeois American Revolution. And we have all internalized that training. Again, I think there’s a reason that we’re taught so heavily about figures like MLK and Gandhi, and even a figure like Nelson Mandela, who is lionized in the United States and looked at as this amazing figure. Well, very, very few people recognize that he was the leader of an underground military organization that was attacking and assassinating people in the apartheid government, in the apartheid state, and was coordinating sabotage, attacks against the electrical grid, against diamond mines, against power stations. And that side of the apartheid resistance has been completely whitewashed. And instead, we’re talking about Desmond Tutu and nonviolent protest and truth and reconciliation. The reality is that social change and revolutionary change throughout history has always been a messy process with a lot of different pieces and a lot of different people working in different ways. I don’t think that that means that you have to be opposed just because you’re using different tactics. And I think that ideally, the strongest movements do use all kinds of different methods and all kinds of different tactics across the spectrum, and they’re coordinated and they support one another. They’re not going to condemn one another for for using different methods. They’re going to just work in the most effective way that they can.
Sam Mitchell: I would add that they’re very savvy. We’re still on the first paragraph, and I made it exactly one paragraph into this whole list of quotes of yours. I wanted you to expand. So I’m just going to leave my notes behind then.
OK. You mentioned somewhere in the past 10 minutes and you’ve written about this, about whether humans are inherently … you know, I just interviewed this ecologist named William Reas. He should probably go listen to that interview, it was a last one of twenty nineteen. He is based from an ecological perspective, if not from a moral one, saying that humans are a plague on this planet.
I want to draw and find out where your line is. I don’t know whether you’re speaking for Deep Green Resistance, I just want to hear your own line.
I want to make clear that I understand that you draw a big line between global industrial capitalism, civilization, that whole messy thing, and humanity as a species. That you put those in kind of two separate camps. Well, I think a lot of people listening to this podcast probably agree with you 100 percent on that the global industrial civilization is the worst reflection of humanity, and we can all agree it needs to go, at least the people down in this rabbit hole.
But some people would say that even that’s not going far enough, that humans just need to go. What is your comment to the people saying that ending global capitalism still is not enough to save the planet, and we just need to have humans say bye bye and disappear?
Max Wilbert: Well, I think that’s a profoundly civilized thing to say. I think that’s only something that you can say if you grew up in a culture that is destroying the planet, which not every culture has done. You know, I grew up in a culture that’s destroying the planet. I grew up in a city, and grew up with cars and everything. So I can certainly understand the impulse and why people feel that way. But the thing is, people who are saying that are looking at history and interpreting it in a certain way. And the reality is, you can look at the same history and interpret it in a different way, or you can talk to people and look at situations where people are actually living in land based communities and see what’s happening ecologically, see what’s happening to the people. So, there are thousands of examples of cultures that have lived more or less in a balance, over the long term, with the natural world. And I think that this is actually an adaptive trait for human beings, to live in sustainable ways. And I think, for that reason, we are sort of born naturalists.
If humans are just given a little bit of training and a little bit of education and encouragement to learn about the local ecology, and immerse themselves, and exist within a living ecology, then I think that we can do it extremely well. That’s not to say that human beings don’t influence what’s happening around them in ways that could be called destructive. Quite obviously, humans are an apex predator. And apex predators always disrupt and change the world around them and always influence things, especially when they come into a new habitat for the first time. They’re going to upend things. They’re going to make a lot of changes. But that’s no different than if you don’t have wolves in an area, and then they’ll show up. They’re going to cause very similar changes to the ecology on a large scale. Nobody is saying that wolves are inherently destructive, right? I think humans are no different. For example, people look at the wave of extinctions that has followed with some species when indigenous peoples first showed up in certain areas, for example some of the Polynesian cultures, when people first showed up in North America… There is debate about these issues and they’re not well understood, because obviously we’re talking about ancient history. We’re talking about very limited records from archeology here. So we’re just interpreting the past, right? And that’s very limited. But what it appears like happened in these situations is that humans – again, an apex predator – showed up in an area, they caused a lot of change, they may have caused a few extinctions, and then things settled down. People figured out how to live in that area in a way that was balanced, and things more or less stayed the same for thousands of years after that. That is sustainability, and that’s an adaptive trait for human beings. And I think that, again, if you have not lived in that way, then it’s hard to perceive how that can happen. When you have grown up in a completely growth based culture, in a Judeo-Christian, Abrahamic religion, a world view of growth and patriarchy and as many children as possible and no relationship to the local ecology, then you’re going to look at that with skepticism. But the reality is that our natural state is an animistic state, where we are in real everyday relationship with the natural world around us, and we develop individual personalized relationships with certain places, a certain creek, a certain river, a certain forest, a certain herd of deer, a certain population of salmon, a certain family of grizzly bears, and we learned their habits and their ways, and we watched them not just for days or hours, but for years and generations. And we tell stories about them and we communicate about them with each other. We pass information down over time, and we develop ways to live, while not destroying these beings who are around us, who we love. That is so alien to most people in this culture today. Most people literally cannot comprehend that, because of the human supremacism that we’re inculcated with from birth. It seems completely unthinkable. So I would disagree that humans are inherently destructive. I think that is completely wrong. We can be incredibly destructive, but I think that essentially, when it comes to the nature versus nurture argument on this, it’s all about nurture. Humans are a very flexible species, and when we are raised in a destructive civilization that has no respect for the natural world and has this growth imperative, then things are going to go downhill fast. And that’s not just modern culture. That’s the story of the last 10,000 years, that’s civilization as a whole.
Going back to the Fertile Crescent, the so-called Fertile Crescent, that’s no longer fertile anymore because – I think Derrick said this on your show – the first written story of civilization is about Gilgamesh cutting down the forest, to build a city and to build an empire, an army and to become wealthy and powerful. That is the first written story of civilization. That’s the first written story. Civilization had existed for quite a while before this. This story was written from what we understand. And archeology tells us that indigenous peoples, people living outside of civilization, people living outside of mass mono crop agriculture, lived in balance for hundreds of thousands of years around the world, before civilization came. And when that transition to civilization happened, then you start seeing massive destruction. So, for example, global warming. A lot of people think it began with the industrial revolution and with the burning of coal and steam engines and so on.
That’s not actually true. Global warming actually began with civilization and the beginnings of widespread agriculture. For example, if you look in the ice core data, I think about thirty eight hundred years ago – something in that range, don’t quote me on that number –you see a big spike in methane emissions, and that corresponds with the beginning of rice paddy agriculture in Southeast Asia. There is a climate scientist named William Ruddiman, who argues and demonstrates from the data that the amount of greenhouse gases released by agriculture, and the destruction of habitat through the rise of civilization, the amount of carbon released is roughly equivalent to everything that has been released during the entire industrial period. It just happened over 10,000 years instead of over two hundred and fifty years. So these problems are not new. And for that reason, I think it’s easy for people to look back at ten thousand years of history and say, look at how destructive we’ve been. But the point is, you have to go outside history. You have to go into pre-history, because these indigenous communities, before civilization, did not have written records. And indigenous cultures, today and during the last 10,000 years, that have existed and have remained intact, have lived in profoundly different ways.
This isn’t to lionize or sort of falsely idolize indigenous peoples, because I think a lot of indigenous communities can be critiqued on all kinds of different issues. We all have disagreements about the best way to live, and not all communities that people call indigenous live sustainably or have lived sustainably at all times. I think that’s, of course, a vast oversimplification. We’re talking about thousands of cultures over thousands of years of history. We we can make some broad generalizations, but it’s dangerous to say that it’s always this way. You know what I mean?
Sam Mitchell: One of the things that I found missing in your work, you do not seem to talk about the issue of overpopulation very much. And I just want to say, sure, I know that you understand, if global industrial civilization comes down, that is going to mean the population of this planet is going to come down with it. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? Have you ever thought about what a sustainable human population living in balance with nature looks like on planet Earth?
Max Wilbert: Of course, that’s a huge issue, and I thought about it a lot. In terms of your last question, don’t have a number and I don’t think I could. That’s not something that I can dictate, it’s something that obviously will change, depending on the ecological circumstances that people find themselves in. I think the leading writer on this topic was William Catton, whose book “Overshoot” is one of the most important books that’s ever been written.
Sam Mitchell: Derrick Jensen’s “Endgame” and William Catton’s “Overshoot”, those are the ones I put at the top of my list.
This house of cards is coming down, you and I both know that, Max, whether we bring it down or it comes down itself. Do you believe that we’re going to be living on a planet of 10 billion people in 40, 50 years from now, or is that number going to be a whole hell of a lot less?
Max Wilbert: Well, that’s actually an interesting question. I think I may actually differ from a lot of the collapse people on this, because I don’t actually think that collapse of this culture is a given in the short term, and that sort of timeframe. I don’t think that’s a given. I think it could happen, but it does not seem faded at all to me. And I say that as somebody who traveled to the Arctic in a climate science expedition and has walked on thawing permafrost. I’m very familiar with all the feedback loops and the methane burp potential, and all these different issues. We don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know how fast these changes are gonna happen. But I think, this culture continuing to sail along and grow and grow and grow is the worst possible outcome.
And I think that even if nothing changes and nothing gets worse, we are already have enough reason to resist now. I don’t know what the future is going to look like. And I think that you are right, that the human population is not sustainable and it’s going to be lower at some point in the future. And there are a lot of ways that that could play out. It could be really bad, and just a ton of people all die very violent, horrible deaths. Or it could be achieved in a sort of more planned, humane way, by simply reducing the birth rate and letting natural deaths reduce population. Maybe the reality or how it will play out will be somewhere in the middle. I don’t know. But this issue is one of the reasons why I think feminism is such an important topic, because I think that the whole issue of overpopulation is incredibly tied up with agriculture and with patriarchy. And I would say the most important writer on this topic is Lierre Keith with her book “The Vegetarian Myth”. It’s sort of focused around the idea of diet, but it’s really about patriarchy and agriculture and civilization.
She points out rightly that within agriculture, within civilization, maximizing the number of births is the best way to increase growth. That’s the best way to make workers available for the workforce, to work in the fields, in the factories and to serve in the army. And the coordinated culture of control and domination, male domination, that is patriarchy, is something that has existed for a long time at this point.
All around the world, when you have examples of women actually gaining some level of political control and autonomy and pushing back the powers of the Abrahamic religions and pushing back the powers of patriarchal society, you see birthrates just plummet. The human population is unsustainable and it’s going to be lower, and I would prefer that to happen in a way as humane as possible.
Sam Mitchell: And I really hate to break in here, brother, but I am glad to say I’m going to be interviewing Lierre in a few weeks. I guess I’ll pick up with her on the book Bright Green Lies, since we did not have time to get to, we’re going to collapse here in a few minutes.
So Max Wilbert, if you’ve ever heard one of my interviews, you know how I always end them:
If you where not speaking with Sam Mitchell at Collapse Chronicles, where you had free reign for an hour, but you actually have the mainstream media with a microphone in your face saying “Max Wilbert, give us your 60 second sound bite to humanity and the opening bell of 2020”, what would those 60 seconds sound like?
Max Wilbert: Well, the problems that we’re facing are massive, and the political systems incapable of addressing them. So many of the solutions that we’re seeing, such as green energy, are turning out to be false solutions. We’re seeing a huge explosion in green technology and yet at the same time, emissions continue to climb and pollution continues to climb. So what do you do with that? I think we need fundamental change. We need broad economic change. And I think that looks like a complete restructuring of the global economy. How this could happen?
There are many different ways, and I want to support people who are working for these type of goals, working for deep growth, working for relocalization, working for permaculture. I want to support people who are working in all kinds of different ways. For myself, I have chosen a revolutionary path because I think that not only do we need to build up those alternatives, but I think we need to be prepared to dismantle the dominant systems of power that are destroying the planet. I don’t think they’re going to stop willingly. So, I would invite people who are interested in learning more about that or getting involved in that to reach out to me. Let’s get connected, so you can become part of this culture of resistance, because it’s our only chance. And I think that we are the inheritors of a beautiful tradition and we are living in perhaps the most important moment in the history of the human species. And what happens in the future is completely dependent on what we do now.
Sam Mitchell: Okay. And with that, Max Wilbert, we’re gonna have to wrap it up. Max Wilbert, thank you very much for taking an hour out of your schedule to come talk to us on collapsible chronicles, but more importantly, thank you for your work and keep up the good fight.
Deep Green Resistance stands for the resistance against the culture of empire, aka civilization. For many people this may sound very new, strange and, understandably enough, frightening; most people associate something positive with the term “civilization”. As a person born into this culture it is not easy to question it, and even harder to perceive the culture itself as the major problem. This is where DGR’s analysis comes in.
So, what is civilization?
History begins about 10,000 years ago, when humans stopped grunting in caves, invented agriculture and gradually settled down. Agriculture and sedentariness enabled the construction of ever larger cities, innovations such as the monetary economy led to trade relations and an increasingly complex division of labor. The development of writing systems made it possible to literally write history. From then on, a period of constant development began, with higher and higher, ever more complex forms of technology. Civilization was so successful that it has spread all over the world to this day.
This is just a short attempt to describe the common myth. Another description from writer Fabian Scheidler1:
“The standard version – the myth of Western civilization – tells of a process of tediously achieved progress which, despite all adversities and setbacks, has led to more prosperity, more peace, more knowledge, more culture and more freedom in the end. In this version wars, environmental devastation and genocides are slips, relapses, setbacks or undesirable side effects of a generally beneficial process of increasing civilization.”
Wikipedia provides the following definition:
“A civilization or civilisation is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication (for example, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.”2
According to Derrick Jensen, civilization is “(…) a culture – that is, a complex of stories, institutions and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (…), with cities being defined – so as to distinguish them from camps, villages and so on – as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (…), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville. Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth.”3
Deep Green Resistance uses Derrick Jensen’s definition of civilization. Civilizations are by definition not sustainable and never can be. Yet there are two possible ways for civilizations to end: Either they are consumed by a even larger and/or more powerful civilization, a process which is usually accomplished by the use of brutal violence and leads to deep, intergenerational trauma (as we’ve seen with the example of the Aztecs), or they collapse because they used up their resources and cannot expand any more for some reason (as we’ve seen with historical civilizations, and we experience nowadays with our own industrial civilization, which is on the edge of abyss because it is killing the planet).
This is why we advocate for a culture of resistance and the building of alternatives.
Civilization usually looks good only from the perspective of the civilized; Samuel Huntington puts it very aptly: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”4
We, as members of Western civilization, should listen very carefully and respectfully to the voices of others, in particular indigenous peoples, since they have been and and still are being hit hardest by the violence of our culture. The Osage chief Big Soldier said:
“I see and admire your manner of living. . . . In short you can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Every thing about you is in chains and you are slaves yourselves. I fear that if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I too should become a slave.”5
Apart from indigenous peoples, it is sometimes ethnologists who are able to see our culture from an outside perspective:
“On his expeditions, Lévi-Strauss came across a tribal culture that seemed irritable and highly dangerous to him. It plundered nature, devastated entire regions, worshipped arty idols, massacred its own kind and was notorious for its historical carnages. In the meantime, this exotic tribal culture has defeated all competitors and rules the world. Its name is ‘civilization’.”6
Let me end with the words of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore:
“The civilization of ancient Greece was nurtured within city walls. In fact, all the modern civilizations have their cradles of brick and mortar. These walls leave their mark deep in the minds of men. They set up a principle of ‘divide and rule’ in our mental outlook, which begets in us a habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another. We divide nation and nation, knowledge and knowledge, man and nature. It breeds in us a strong suspicion of whatever is beyond the barriers we have built, and everything has to fight hard for its entrance into our recognition.”7
“Civilization, civilization, pride of Europeans… Whatever you strive for, whatever you do, you always move within a lie. When you see it, the tears flow, the pain screams. You are the violence before the law. You are not a torch, you are a conflagration. Everything you touch, you consume.”
“European civilization... is a cannibal civilization; it oppresses the weak and enriches itself at its expense. It lets envy and hatred shoot up everywhere, wherever it goes, no grass can grow anymore… Its power comes from directing all its forces towards the sole aim of enrichment… Under the codename patriotism, it breaks the given word, shamelessly throws out its nets woven from lies, erects monstrous giant images in its temple dedicated to profit, in honor of the God it worships. Without the slightest hesitation we prophesy: this will not last forever!”8
1Fabian Scheidler (2015): Das Ende der Megamaschine, p.10 (translated from German)
Afeni Shakur is best known as the mother of the hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur. What is less well known is that she was a member of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party, a dedicated revolutionary who served time in jail for her political activities. Freedom Archives says her work “shaped the political discourse of Black Liberation movements in the 70s.” Visit their article on Afeni to hear excepts of her speaking.
In 1968, 21 members of the Harlem Chapter of the panthers were arrested on alleged bomb conspiracy charges, with bail set at $100,000. The following is part of a letter that Shakur wrote from prison in January 1970, decrying the colonial jail system and the entire U.S. state apparatus that has oppressed people of color since colonization arrived on this continent, and brought the first enslaved Africans shortly thereafter.
Featured image: Afeni Shakur speaks at a Black Panther Party Rally. Image via Freedom Archives.
By Afeni Shakur
We know that you are trying to break us up because we are the truth and because you can’t control us. We know that you always try to destroy what you can’t control. We know that you are afraid of us because we represent a truth of the universe. We are not being tried for any overt act nor for [the] attempt to commit any overt act–we are being tried for bringing within our minds the focusing of the ideas of centuries and trying to bring this knowledge into a workable plan to liberate our people from oppression. We are being tried only because we know you and because we are not afraid of you. We know of your history of lies, deceit and slavery. We know that you now have 80% of the world in slavery. We know how you turn nation against nation, tribe against tribe, brother against brother. We know that you are blood-thirsty, pitiless and inhuman. We have seen you justify the most inhuman crimes–the worst of which was the destruction of men’s hearts and minds. We know of your greed. We know that 10,000 army bases does not make this a “free world” except free for your exploitation and imperialism. How many civilizations have you destroyed?
In this country we know that we are not 2nd class citizens–we know that we are not citizens at all. We know that the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments did not liberate us–that they only legalized slavery and expanded the Dred Scott decision to include the Indians, Spanish speaking and poor whites. We know that things have not gotten any better–but only progressively worse. We know that this is the rich man’s courts, laws, and justice. It is his skies, and air–we can only look at it and breathe it if he says so. We know that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized protected robbery. But you teach the poor workers to be honest. We know that the Almighty dollar which everyone is taught to revere is only guaranteed by slavery and exploitation. We know that we live in a world inhuman in its poverty. We know that we are a colony, living under community imperialism. The U.S. that we see is not one of freedom, beauty, and wisdom, but of fear, terror, and hate. This is a nation of your laws, run by your police, and based on protecting your economic strength. The poor are politically, economically and legally non-existent that is why in jail, 80% of the inmates are non-white and all are poor. Yet even your sociologists and criminologists admit that 80% of these are innocent.
We see that inhuman treatment but are told that we do not. We see men beaten to death in jail but are told that they died of “natural causes” but we are liars. Just as we are always presumed guilty. We heard the judge tell us that “The law didn’t apply to us,” but it isn’t in the record–and of course we lie. We are born criminals and liars. We know we are innocent but we are liars. The people know we are innocent but they don’t count. The prisoners know we are innocent but they too are liars. The guards and even the captains of the guards know we are innocent but they can’t testify. They will lose their jobs. We can prove we are innocent. But we wonder does it really matter. We can prove it in detail and we will, but just in general the charges against us in this indictment are ridiculous and are contradictory to our basic beliefs. We have never been asked as a people whether we wanted to be governed by your God, your laws, your justice, your customs, your speech, dress, and ethics. We do not. We have no respect for them. We have no respect for your laws, taxes, your gratitude, sincerity, honor and dignity–you have no respect for them yourself. You don’t respect us–thus we don’t respect YOU…
This interview between Derrick Jensen and Christoper Ketcham examines the U.S. government’s taxpayer-funded wildlife slaughter program. Ketcham exposes Wildlife Service’s use of poisoned bait, aerial gunning, neck snares, leghold traps (banned in 80 countries), and cyanide traps to kill millions of wild animals each year in the United States. This conversation originally aired on the show Resistance Radio.
Featured image: Wildlife Services employee or contractor holds a wolf killed by aerial gunning in Idaho. USDA photo.
Derrick Jensen:
My guest today is Christopher Ketcham. He’s a freelance writer for Harper’s, The New Republic, Vice, and many others. Today we discuss Wildlife Services – but before that – he has a new book out, a very good book, called This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West. That book is a product of 10 years of research and travel across the public lands of the west.
Chris, first off, thank you as always for your tremendous work in the world and second thank you for being on the program.
What is ‘Wildlife Services’?
Christoper Ketcham:
I devote two chapters in my book to Wildlife Services because they are such a heinous operation of the federal bureaucracy. Basically, Wildlife Services is a branch of the US Department of Agriculture. Specifically, a branch of the Animal, Plant and Health Inspection Service at the USDA; whose purpose is to slaughter wildlife to protect industry.
Now on western public lands most of that slaughter is conducted to benefit one industry; the livestock industry. What we’re talking about here is a killing machine of: aerial gunships, helicopters, airplanes, cyanide landmines distributed across the landscape, poison collars placed on sheep, and all sorts of traps designed to kill those animals deemed predators and pests by the livestock industry.
What do they mean by predators and pests? Well, the livestock industry generally asks Wildlife Services to kill out wolves by the tens of thousands, when the wolves threaten cows and sheep. Coyotes are slaughtered every year to protect livestock. Black beers, grizzly bears, cougars, and then a host of other animals that you wouldn’t think would make the death list for the livestock industry but do. Animals like beavers and prairie dogs.
You know both of these are keystone species in western ecosystems. Beavers because obviously they dam water, they create meadows, and they are incredibly important in arid land ecosystems for the simple fact of creating water retention in the uplands. Prairie dogs create habitat for many other species. Their burrows are said to allow water to more efficiently percolate into aquifers. Generally, when you see prairie dogs on the landscape in the west, you are looking at healthy grasslands.
The livestock industry wants to kill out beavers because beavers dam up water that stockman want to use to water the cattle and grow hay. Prairie dogs have to be eradicated in massive numbers because the prairie dogs are considered competitors for forage with cows.
And on, and on and on.
During the 20th Century it is estimated that Wildlife Services killed something like tens of millions of animals across the west to benefit this one industry: the livestock industry. It is a campaign of destruction, poisoning, and bloodshed that is paid for by the US taxpayer, to the tune of something like 150 million dollars a year.
04:55
DJ:
To be clear, taxpayers pay 150 million dollars a year to slaughter wildlife?
CK:
Yes. It is very efficiently done. We often castigate the US government for being inefficient. This is a well-run program, a smoothly-oiled machine of mayhem.
DJ:
You’ve talked about wolves and coyotes. I want to come back to that, but something I think about every time I throw out birdseed is that they also kill birds. It’s extraordinary to me that they kill birds who are feeding on the farms where they grow birdseed so I can have a bird-feeder in my back yard.
They kill lots and lots of, say for example, red-wing black birds, or is that a different organization?
CK:
That’s Wildlife Services. The bird kills are often done to protect agriculture. Not to protect livestock but cropland operations of all types. But they also slaughter birds that threaten air traffic. If you have large flocks of starlings or sparrows (whatever it might be), they may get caught in the engines of jets. Well, Wildlife Services will go in and make sure that those birds do not pester air traffic.
DJ:
Before we get back to wolves, coyotes etc., can we talk for a second about 1984 and just the name Wildlife Services? Is this not a beautiful name?
CK:
It is the perfect Orwellian name. Wildlife Services has its origins in the 1890s when it’s predecessor, called the Bureau of Biological Survey, would go around and identify, specifically wolves, that were considered a threat to stockman in the west.
The Bureau of Biological Survey really got its teeth into this business in Colorado, where the stock industry and wolves had gone head to head for many years. The stockman could not successfully eliminate the wolves. They turned to the US government for help to kill these wolves. So from 1905, we see the Bureau of Biological Survey is aiding the US Forest Service so that the forest rangers can go out and kill the wolves.
After 1931 Congress passed the Animal Damage Control Act that basically established the Bureau of Animal Damage Control – a far less Orwellian name right. That name at least sort of says what the agency does – controls animal damage, controls the animals.
In the 90s (I believe) Animal Damage Control got its name changed to Wildlife Services via some inventive bureaucrat who figured, “hey we are going to service the wildlife with a shotgun!”. So that’s the history in brief of the naming of Wildlife Services.
08:48
DJ:
Right now when I look out the window and I see a couple of bears, literally at this moment, and I know bears get killed a lot.
How does it actually work that an animal gets targeted for killing? Is this just routine, or does it usually take a request by the rancher? Are they basically acting as taxpaid servants of individual ranchers, or do they go out and kill the wolves, coyotes etc. prophylactically?
09:32
CK:
What happens is yes you can have an individual rancher who determines, through questionable means, that some of his livestock have been killed say by a pack of wolves ranging locally on the public lands nearby, or even on private lands. So, he calls up Wildlife Services, “I’ve got a problem. You’ve gotta come in an investigate”.
A Wildlife Services trapper will come in and do a quote “investigation”. Now I’ve written in my book about what these investigations amount to. They are in fact usually cursorily, incompetently done, and designed almost always to substantiate the initial claim of the rancher regardless of the evidence.
The rancher can say these cows died by wolves and the trapper will look around and say, “well it doesn’t look like there’s any evidence of a wolf attack, but we’ll call it a wolf attack anyways”. Thereafter, the whole machine starts going into gear and after that you’ve got aerial gunships prowling the area and you’ve got traps laid out.
These are steel leg-hold traps. They are extremely painful. When an animal gets trapped in these things there’s incredible suffering that goes on. Especially given that the trap-shut-times for Wildlife Services are not regulated. You can leave a trap out and just check it every week instead of every day or every other day as required by a certain federal statute.
This rancher who called in Wildlife Services usually gets satisfaction in that Wildlife Services is generally pretty good at tracking down and killing the wolves who supposedly did the crime. Even though, as I mentioned earlier, there’s often not much proof of that (so called) crime.
13:01
On the other hand, you have what’s called prophylactic killing. In which Wildlife Services will go out and just start hammering local populations, say of coyotes. This involves flying around, usually in an airplane, and just gunning down coyotes on sight. They call this prophylactic killing “preventative”. Whereas, killing that occurs after there is evidence, that’s called corrective. So, you’ve got preventative and corrective.
Most of the killing by Wildlife Services is preventative. In that there is no actual evidence of the pack of coyotes in question say having actually attacked anything. They are just killed preemptively. Because they might go after livestock some day in the course of their life.
At this point, you get, you understand, that this absurd. This is crazy. But this is how the system operates.
14:14
DJ:
That reminds of that famous line from a slaughter in France many hundred years ago. A town in France was going to wipe out a certain radical sect of Christians. They couldn’t figure out who was which sect and the person who ran the town commanded his troops, ‘kill them all and let God sort them out’.
It’s the same sort of thing.
CK:
Yup that is exactly the mentality.
DJ:
I want to go back to the wolves, but I want to comment something; when it is shown that the wolf killed a cow or a sheep, the ranchers get paid. Can you talk abut that?
CK:
Right, that is the depredation compensation program for want of a better phrase. Yes, the federal government will reimburse a rancher for the dead cow if it is proven that the cow was preyed upon by say a wolf or a cougar, or whatever predator, might be a grizzly bear or a wolverine. This incentivizes cattlemen to falsify their claims of depredation.
Cows and sheep are open-range animals. They are subject to all sorts of inclement weather conditions, rough terrain, and accidents: a cow falls off a cliff, gets caught in a slot canyon or struck by lightning, or just lost; a baby ewe gets lost and dies. There are many, many ways for livestock to perish on open range. But if you can show they perished from predators then you get paid. This is obviously a recipe for corruption of the system because of that incentivizing.
17:11
DJ:
Don’t they also get paid higher than market value for ones that have been shown to be a predator kill or purportedly shown?
CK:
No, I think they get paid full market value. For example, this could be a calf that was killed, but I think they would get paid for the full market value of the calf as if it were to have grown to full maturity for sale.
DJ:
My point on this is ultimately, this is something I’ve never understood. The only way I can understand this is a hatred of nature. That honestly if I were running cows, I don’t care if I sell it to a slaughterhouse of if I get money [from the government]. It doesn’t matter. It seems like it would be just a fine business. I wouldn’t care if my cows got eaten as long as I got paid. I don’t understand why the ranchers get to cry victimization when they’re getting paid for the dead cow anyway. That’s what I’m getting at. It makes no sense to me. From the rancher’s perspective it’s like, “yea I don’t care if wolves eat all of them. That means I just sold my entire crop of cows”.
18:32
CK:
Yea now look what we are talking about is not a cost-benefit analysis. There is a cultural ground from which these ranchers are reacting to predators. That culture is about domination of the natural world. The livestock industry’s always been about domination and control of nature, and subjugation of the western landscape: so that cattle can be safe in a place where it’s to arid really for this invasive species (Bos Taurus) that evolved in humid Europe. And where there are tons of predators that will kill the cows as they naturally should, because you know, wolves are going to prey on sheep. Always, it’s always been done.
When they see this predator come in and kill their cows and their sheep, it’s an offense to the moral order. To the cultural moral order of their universe. That, to a certain extent, explains the level of hysteria on the part of stockman when confronted with the presence of predators on the western landscapes.
20:08
DJ:
When we talk about ranchers on the western landscape, we are not generally talking about some homesteader running three cows. This is actually big business, right?
CK:
If you look at the number of permittees who take out a permit to run cows on public lands, most of the permittees are either corporations looking for tax breaks, hobbyists like Ted Turner (so rich people who view these cows as playthings), or mining companies that run cattle in order to also secure the water rights that come with cattle permits. So, for the for the most part we’re not talking about hard scrabble range clans, the little guy eking out survival on the public lands. Those people do exist, but for the most part, public lands ranching is corporate business or is the stuff of rich people.
Rich people who do own herds will contract with local cattlemen, local cowboys, to manage the range, the herd and the public land. These guys aren’t the real owners of the property, they’re just servants for the wealthy who actually own the cattle. It’s the ranch hands and ranch managers who’ll be the most pestiferous and most angry when confronted with predators on the public lands, because they grew up with the culture (public lands ranching culture) and in order to keep a job, while they serve the absentee gentry, the aristocracy who owns most of the cattle on public lands.
DJ:
You keep saying public lands and I think a lot of people in the west know this but maybe people in the east don’t, maybe even in the west don’t. We are not talking about a wolf or grizzly bear crawling up onto your porch and taking the sheep that is sitting two feet from your door. We are actually talking about people who are making a living off of grazing their cows or sheep on land that actually belongs to the public and is rented out to these corporations at sub-market values. We are talking about a huge subsidy even if they weren’t given the additional subsidy of killing predators.
23:33
CK:
Yea that’s right. Let’s make this clear, we are talking our land, the common land. Owned by every American citizen. In fact, a co-sovereign on these lands, for determining how they should be used, or not be used. How they should be protected and preserved. A lot of the so-called depredation on livestock does occur on public land in very wild places in the back country, far from people’s homes, far from people’s private land. And yes, Wildlife Services is yet another subsidy extended to the public lands ranching industry.
The total value of that subsidy, with all the inputs accounted for – everything from road maintenance, fence building, water diversions, to sub-market leasing rates for cows, to the operation of Wildlife Services – one estimate has the total subsidy for public lands ranching coming out to something like a billion dollars a year. One billion dollars. And the remarkable thing here is that public lands ranching only accounts for two percent of all the beef produced in this country. So, a billion dollars for two percent of the beef nationally.
At the same time, you have a regime of incredible waste and destruction to protect public lands ranching producing that meager two percent of beef. Wow, again this is just crazy when you think about it. But there it is, it is the fact of American life and it has been so for a long, long time.
25:38
DJ:
I want to mention something that happened I believe a year or two ago that has just horrified me even more than all the wolf killings. A grizzly bear killed some chickens in somebody’s ranchette in Montana and so they shot the grizzly bear. It blew me away because chickens are one of the most common creatures on the planet and grizzly bears are endangered. I used to raise chickens when I lived in Spokane and coyotes would get them once and a while. That’s the cost having chickens run free in coyote territory. It offended me on a whole other level that you would kill an endangered species because it killed a couple of pet chickens of somebody who’s wealthy enough to own a ranchette. To kill an endangered species, especially under those circumstances, seems horrific to me.
CK:
I agree. It’s a reflection of the deranged values of our society. No other way to put it.
DJ:
In Washington state, there has been every year multiple members or entire packs wiped out, and it is all to serve one ranching outfit. I’m sure there are others to serve as well, but every year for the last six or seven years, there’s a guy [Len McIrvin] who absolutely refuses to take any payment for any wolf kills and any time a cow dies, he wants the entire wolfpack wiped out. You’ll see sympathetic articles about him in the newspaper saying it is driving him out of business etc.
But I did a little research and the guy only claims to lose like two or three cows a year and he runs 4,000 cattle. Honestly if you can’t survive two cows out of 4,000 lost then you’re doing something wrong. In this particular case, they’re serving one guy who is wealthy enough to run 4,000 head of cattle.
Take any of that any direction you want to go.
Note: there’s less than 125 wolves total in Washington state according to news media.
CK:
One comment I can make among several that can be made, there is a simple fact that public lands ranchers are constantly promoting themselves to be the paragons of self-reliant business: that they are the hard-scrabble individual who is out on the range. Yet, they are constantly whining and complaining and calling in the federal government to help them out with the slaughter of these evil wolves or the other subsidies that we mentioned earlier.
Meanwhile, the actual rates of depredation are very low compared to the total number of cows going out on the range. For example, a former Wildlife Services tracker named, Carter Niemeyer, told me something like you have millions of beef cattle going out in the northern Rockys Range and something like a quarter of a percent of them are lost to predators. A quarter of a percent.
Again, the hysterical reaction of this Washington rancher [Len McIrvin] can be explained by a cultural background in which these wolves are seen as an offence against the order of things. And conveniently at the same time he can trick unwary journalists into believing that this is not just a threat to the moral order but an economic threat to his very survival. But both are just lies, convenient lies.
It is incredible to me that this tiny minority in the west, public lands ranchers, exercise such outsized influence on how we manage our lands. It’s really incredible. Talk about capture by a tiny minority against the interests of the broad majority.
31:51
DJ:
The people you talk to, in your experience, do the frontline workers at Wildlife Services, are they fueled by ‘it’s just a paycheck’ and the Upton Sinclair ‘it’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.’?
Or do they think they’re doing a great thing, have a claim to virtue, or do they feel bad about killing so much wildlife?
CK:
I think it depends on the trapper. I’ve interviewed a number of ex-trappers and read documents and media coverage of trappers in the past, who had quit the agency in horror at what they had done. There’s as incredible variety of experience out there.
There are some trappers I think who are passionately engaged in killing predators to protect the livestock industry. Which is what they believe, they believe they are protecting the livestock industry. Hence their passion. These are people who grew up in small rural communities where livestock ranching was a way of life.
I interviewed a guy in Wyoming for my book. I just called him ‘Bob’ because he was very much afraid of being outed in his community and being even physically threatened if he spoke out against the ranching industry. He wrote a letter to Brooks Fahy, who is an activist who has for many years worked to expose Wildlife Services.
Bob wrote that he, “quit because of the unethical and brutal methods I was required to do as a trapper. A lot of stock people are the most bloodthirsty, animal-abusing people you could ever find.” Bob also said that he was, “all for defunding Wildlife Services as it is nothing more than a government subsidy for a bunch of murderous ranchers.”
When you hear that, that’s a guy who was a trapper for many, many years.
He goes on, “it’s the sheep men I can’t tolerate. They’re just bloodthirsty rotten. A coyote or wolf to them, just something to be killed. In the county I’m in (that is in Wyoming), the sheep men are brutes, bullies, either you do what they want, you kowtow to them or you quit or get fired. The ranchers think they’re your boss and they are. It’s a dirty deal and it’s been going on for a long time. Most of the guys at Wildlife Services aren’t as bad as they’re made out to be. But they’re pushed into a lot of things they don’t want to do.”
So, there you have it, I think that answers your question.
There are the guys who are themselves as bloodthirsty as the ranchers. There are others who are just getting a paycheck, and they’re like ‘goddam I don’t want to do this, but I need the money’.
DJ:
We have talked about the horrors of the cyanide, landmines and everything else. We are not simply talking about adults, but I have heard about denning. Killing entire dens of pups of various wildlife species.
CK:
Oh yes. The practice, I’m not sure if it’s still ongoing, but the practice for many years was to track down a coyote den where the pups were holed up and smoke them out. Set a fire around the mouth of the den and as the pups come out, they get clubbed or they themselves burn up. They also used a phosphorus compound called a den smoker.
Dick Randel was a Wildlife Services trapper in Wyoming, like the aforementioned Bob who I also interviewed. Dick Randel used this den smoker, “suffocating the pups was the theory” he wrote. “But they’d often scramble for cracks of light at the entrance. You could hear them howling when they hit the flames and burned alive. The pups ran into the chemical fire trying to get out and it would eat through their tissue, hiss and smolder right into their guts. And they were still clawing at the blocked entrance.”
That’s one of the practices, again paid for by the US government. Our government on our land. Guess we should be proud right?
37:27
DJ:
Just last week Wildlife Services was poisoning prairie dogs in Colorado. I’m presuming that where they kill blackbirds, they also use poison? How do we convey to people the utter horror of what is happening at public expense on public lands?
CK:
Think of those coyote pups having their guts burning from phosphorus compounds, and just think of that over and over and over again.
Then do you want to do something about it, call your congressperson and ask, “are you voting to allocate money to Wildlife Services operation year after year?” Because most congresspeople are. Call up the USDA and call up the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) that runs and oversees directly the Wildlife Services program.
Call up congressman Peter DeFazio of Oregon, who is one of the few representatives in Congress who has stood up to Wildlife Services. He has attempted to pass legislation to defund their programs and to substantially change the congressional mandate that Wildlife Services got with the Animal Damage Control Act 1931 – basically revise it if not repeal it.
I think the thing here is you have stockmen who are very politically engaged. They are constantly complaining to local officials, country officials, the county commissioners, their state elected officials, and their congressionals that, “these goddam predators are a problem”. You have a lot of people in officialdom listening to this very vocal constituency. What you don’t have opposing that vocal minority is the great majority of Americans who are aghast at these very cruel practices.
What you need is civic engagement. I repeat this over and over again in my book. You need a citizenry that is enraged and engaged. Until that happens, Wildlife Services will continue on and on slaughtering and killing with your money and with not much scientific basis for the killings. This is irrational killing.
41:10
DJ:
I have heard that killing coyotes paradoxically leads to coyote population explosions because they reproduce. Is that correct?
CK:
That’s in my book as well. I interviewed a guy, Robert Wilgus, of Washington State University, who looked into that. He found that if you disrupt pack structures of wolves and coyotes, you actually increase the amount of attacks on livestock. That is quite helpful to Wildlife Services right, so they kill more coyotes, that produces more depredation on livestock, meaning you have to come pack and kill more coyotes, which produces more depredation of livestock. It’s a closed circle where they always get more funding and there’s more killing to be done.
42:30
DJ:
It destroys local social structures and often older members of the predator community will keep crazy younger members in check. A great example happened earlier this year. I mentioned earlier that I see bears all the time, well there was a mother bear who showed up with a baby and she was around for a while and then the baby disappeared. Sometimes males will kill babies to bring the female into heat.
That was seeming kind of weird to me. Someone did some research for me and it ends up normally there will be females who have territory and then males have sort of a meta territory. A big male will make sure that other younger males don’t kill the babies. He’ll basically keep the youngsters in check. But if somebody shoots the old male, and then there’s chaos for a while, you’ll end up with younger males killing the babies.
So, the point is that if you had Wildlife Services come in and kill a pack leader or disrupt a pack, I’m just validating what you just said, it’s going to create chaos, which is going to create some more strange behavior that’s harmful to everybody around.
CK:
Well that’s exactly right. That is what Rob Wilgus found out. That the social structure disruption of predators – whether it be coyotes, wolf packs, local mountain lion populations, or as you remarked also black bear populations – leads then to all sorts of behavior that wasn’t occurring previously. For example, the adult mountain lions will indeed prevent younger mountain lions from going after livestock.
If you were going to approach all the slaughter with a scientific method, that doesn’t justify the slaughter, but it would at least make sense from a bureaucratic perspective. But they’re not even approaching it with a scientific method. It is just randomized violence meted out against predators without any ecological or behavioral understanding.
45:45
DJ:
Let’s pretend that you are able to do one thing and but not another. The thing you’re not able to do is eliminate public lands ranching on the west. You don’t get to do that. But you do get to completely defund Wildlife Services. What do you think would happen? What would that lead to?
CK:
I think you would have a lot of vigilantism. A lot of ranchers going out and killing these predators themselves.
The three S’s: shoot, shovel and shut up. I think you’d have widespread illegal distribution of poisons, such as banned thallium sulphate and sodium fluoroacetate (1080). I think you’d have a lot more sodium cyanide spread across the landscape. I think you’d find more carcasses of animals poisoned with those compounds. I don’t think that would accomplish much frankly, just getting rid of Wildlife Services.
You get rid of Wildlife Services then you also have to have an accompanying regime of enforcement for protection of predators. We don’t have that.
DJ:
You want people to call their congressperson and get engaged. If it’s not merely to dump Wildlife Services, are you suggesting this problem won’t be solved until public lands ranching is also eliminated in the west?
CK:
Yea that’s ultimately where we have to go with this. You really have to eliminate public lands ranching if you want to protect predators on a widespread scale in big ecologically-relevant landscapes. It begins with searing into your consciousness that image of the coyote pups’ guts burning with that phosphorus compound and go from there. Use that as your inspiration, because that’s what we’re really talking about when we talk about the livestock industry in the west.
DJ:
Thank you for that. I want to reiterate something you said earlier. Even if you got rid of all public ranching in the west, that’s only two percent of beef production in the US.
CK:
If you’re a meat eater, it’s not going to affect the price of steak. OK, you still get your hamburger.
DJ:
Which probably came from Georgia anyway.
CK:
Right [laughs]. One of the biggest public lands ranching states if Nevada. The little state of Maryland produces like five-ten times as much beef, some incredibly big figure I forget exactly. That much more beef than all the expanses of Nevada.
DJ:
This is as they say, really low-hanging fruit in terms of environmental reward for economic cost.
Is there anything else you want to say about Wildlife Services?
CK:
Just that they need to go. The only way to get them to go is for the public to make them go.
DJ:
Thank you so much for your constant advocacy for wild nature.
