In these brief series, Max Wilbert explores the #ThackerPass Litium Deposit in Humboldt Count, Nevada which will serve as a lithium clay mining development project proposed by the Nevada government and federal agencies. This project will compromise the flora, fauna and streams of the area just for the sake of “clean” energy and profit.
This is the first video dispatch from my trip to the area of two proposed lithium mines in Nevada. I’m working to build awareness of the threats these projects pose and resistance to them. I’ll have more to share next week.
This video comes from the top of a ridge directly to the east of the proposed Rhyolite Ridge open-pit lithium mine in Southern Nevada. After arriving by moonlight the night before, I scrambled up this rocky ridge in the dawn light to get an overview of the landscape. Everything that you see here is under threat for electric car batteries.
This is habitat for Tiehm’s buckwheat, cholla cactus, sagebrush, rabbitbrush, prairie falcon, desert bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, jackrabbit, ring-tailed cat, and literally hundreds of other species.
Is it worth destroying their home and their lives for electric cars?
This is the traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
What killed 14,000 critically endangered buckwheat plants at the site of a proposed lithium mine to supply critical minerals for the so-called “green” electric vehicle industry?
This video reports from Rhyolite Ridge in western Nevada, traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
Was it rodents, or was it vandalism? Climate catastrophe or eco-terrorism?
Benjamin R. Grady, the President of the Eriogonum Society, said in a letter that “As distasteful as it is to consider, intentional human action may have caused the demise of thousands of E. tiehmii individuals over the course of two months from July to September 2020. Having studied this genus since 2007, I have visited hundreds of different Eriogonum populations across the American West. Never once have I seen this type of directed small mammal attack at any of those sites. To me, the widespread damage to just E. tiehmii plants was remarkable. The timing of this attack is also suspicious. The threat of a large-scale lithium mine has recently thrust E. tiehmii into the spotlight. This species has been monitored since the early 1990’s and this type of widespread damage has not been documented. While on site on the 23rd of September, I did not notice any scat, with the exception of a few scattered lagomorph pellets. I carefully examined uprooted plants and no actual herbivory was noticed. The green to graying leaves were unchewed and intact. Eriogonum species likely offer little reward of water or nutrients at this time of year.”
Either way, this video is a crime-scene investigation from the middle of the proposed open-pit lithium mine at Rhyolite Ridge, in western Nevada on traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
We don’t know what happened to these plants, but it is clear that they deserve protection. Ioneer’s plan to build an open-pit lithium mine at this site must be resisted.
Reporting from #ThackerPass#Nevada – site of a massive proposed lithium mine. Nevada government and federal agencies have fast-tracked the sacrifice of this mountainside in favor of a $1.3 billion dollar mine that could produce tens of billions in profits. Meanwhile, local streams will be polluted, Lahontan cutthroat trout spawning grounds will be smothered under radioactive sediment, Pronghorn antelope migration routes blocked, Greater sage-grouse habitat blasted to nothing, local people will have to deal with acid rain, ancient cultural sites will be desecrated, and this quiet wilderness will be turned into an industrialized zone — unless the project is stopped.
Reporting from amidst fields of fracking wells in Colorado, Trinity La Fay writes about the conscious experience of being in relationship to the place she lives, and the disconnect between people and land needed to maintain the destruction.
On the Colorado Rising website, the maps of oil and gas rigs light up the area just above where I live, past my friend’s house halfway up the state, all the way up and out along the plain in a great sweep. Like some demented statistical X, the active wells appear in a sea of blue dots: the abandoned wells. Combined, they swarm completely around the jagged Rocky Mountains, a rising, desperate sea of exploitation.
I remember when the word fracking was used as a supplemental television curse. The way that they said it seemed perfect, as if they understood that it was a primary contributing source of the doom. The story was about a people who, ejected from a poisonous Earth, had colonized in space only to be pursued repeatedly by a predatory cybernetic race. A race they had created. I think stories are important. So does Joseph Campbell, but, as Mary Daly quotes him regarding child victims of sati (the Hindu practice of burning widows alive in the funeral pyres of their late husbands):
“In spite of these signs of suffering and even panic in the actual moment of the pain of suffocation, we should certainly not think the mental state and experience of these individuals after any model of our own more or less imaginable reactions to such a fate, for these sacrifices were not properly individuals at all.”
While I have visions of flickering relatives keening at the river’s edge, smell burning hair, feel the air being sucked from my lungs: he does not imagine their stories are relevant to his experiences.
So, harrumph.
Scrolling out on the Drilling Maps.com site, I see that we, at least, have the resistance of Mountain Range.
Texas; Oklahoma; Louisiana; Mississippi; Kansas; Michigan; the border between North Dakota and Montana. Just about every square inch from Cleveland, Ohio to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Charleston, West Virginia: like fire, the red dots blend. The names of places are all but erased behind them. I cannot see Arkansas written, but I know it is there. From Pennsylvania’s border with New York; all the way down California; all the way up from the Gulf of Mexico to the ice of the Beaufort Sea.
From the Great Lakes down to the Rio Grande; like a ring of fire around the coast of South America, like accidents waiting to happen from the Gulf of Oman to the Barents Sea; like sinking islands from the Arabian Sea to the Yellow Sea to the Tasman Sea. From the North to the South Pacific: companies know no boundaries.
The beneficiaries of these companies, the responsible, I wonder if they learn these names.
I wonder if they are all unreachably psychopathic, or stupid, or if it matters. The dead squirrel on the road; the stoodup friend; the barren landscape full of ghosts: to their experience, it does not matter if it was cruelty or carelessness.
Besides making it possible to set aflame the now undrinkable water that results from such enterprise, whose footage abounds online, Elementa, Science of the Anthropocene, hosts a special collection forum of “Oil and Natural Gas Development: Air Quality, Climate Science and Policy” wherein an article by Chelsea R Thompson, Jacques Hueber and Detlev Helmig, entitled Influence of oil and gas emissions on ambient atmospheric non-methane hydrocarbons in residential areas of Northeastern Colorado discusses ozone levels and calls it abstract.
Like Paul R. EhrlichPaul R. Ehrlich and Carl Sagan in The Cold and The Dark: The World After Nuclear War, everyone agrees that this is not working. Unlike that pivotal conference, however, modern realizations are lost in a desperate sea of distractions. Here is what The Cold and The Dark said abstractly:
“- survivors would face starvation [as] global disruption of the biosphere could ensue. In any event, there would be severe consequences, even in the areas not affected directly, because of the interdependence of the world economy. In either case the extinction of a large fraction of the Earth’s animals, plants, and microorganisms seems possible. The population size of Homo sapiens conceivably could be reduced to prehistoric levels or below, and extinction of the human species itself cannot be excluded.”
Boundaries are underrated.
According to me. Lots of people like to travel; I’m not into it. I have fallen in love with every landscape I’ve seen, but then, I didn’t get to know them. I live in a hard place that I know very well. Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson have a wonderful conversation during which they speak about the necessity of listening to the Others that are places to care for and live with them, and also the joy of being of a place: the intimacy that comes from noticing what cannot be observed in passing. It can be argued that Amber is ancient light that has been stored and that Jet is ancient darkness. Like Saga, they keep our stories. Shale; Oil; Gas; Tar: these exhumed ancestors seem to bellow as they burn that we wake sleeping titans at our peril. Or, as the article put it:
“The findings presented here suggest that oil and gas emissions have a large-scale regional impact on ambient [non methane hydrocarbons] levels, thereby impacting a large population of [-] residents, and representing a large area source of ozone precursors. The short-chain alkanes exhibit strong correlations with propane in Erie/Longmont, Platteville, and within Denver, supporting the conclusion of widespread impact of [oil and natural gas] emissions.”
They recommend further monitoring.
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
Ehrlich, Paul & Harte, John & Harwell, Mark & Raven, P & Sagan, C & Woodwell, George & Berry, Joseph & Ayensu, E & Ehrlich, A & Eisner, T. (1984).Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War. Science (New York, N.Y.). 222. 1293. 10.1126/science.6658451.
This article written by Cypress Hansen describes the harm caused to large mammals due to pollutants and toxic chemicals entering our seas and oceans. Cypress suggests these beings offer a significant indicator of the health of earth’s waters.
Dozens of whales and dolphins that beached themselves on the U.S. Atlantic Coast contained high levels of pollutants and heavy metals in their blubber and liver tissues, a new study shows.
For the first time, scientists detected the widely used antibiotic Triclosan and the popular herbicide Atrazine in rare species that spend their lives hundreds of kilometers offshore.
While the findings suggest these toxins may contribute to the demise of marine mammals, more research is needed to determine direct cause and effect.
Marine mammals stranded on beaches in the southeastern United States died with high levels of pollutants stored in their organs and blubber, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Marine Science.
“Marine mammals are like a litmus test for the ecosystem,”
said lead author Annie Page-Karjian, clinical veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Florida Atlantic University. “Looking at them and the toxins they’re exposed to gives us a snapshot of what is happening in the marine environment.”
Thousands of chemicals from households, farms and factories quietly enter the ocean every day. Some readily absorb onto bits of another common pollutant: plastic. When mistaken for food by small animals like plankton and anchovies, plastic enters the food chain—along with the chemicals it soaked up.
While the amount of toxins eaten by one anchovy is minuscule, most marine mammals are apex predators, eating hundreds of fish, squid or krill each day. Through a process called bioaccumulation, small amounts of ingested toxins concentrate in carnivores over time, compromising their immune systems and bodily functions.
The researchers collected autopsy data from 83 toothed whales and dolphins that washed up in Florida and North Carolina between 2012 and 2018. They examined 46 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), 21 pygmy sperm whales (Kogia breviceps), and small numbers of animals from nine other species.
The team screened liver and blubber samples for heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic. They also checked for Triclosan, an antibiotic used in dozens of household products; Atrazine, an herbicide used on corn and sugarcane fields; and a handful of plasticizing chemicals such as BPA and NPE, found in countless products from food containers to clothing.
“We found some of the highest mercury concentrations that have ever been reported in any living thing anywhere, ever,”
Page-Karjian told Mongabay. Two bottlenose dolphins found stranded in Waves, North Carolina, and North Palm Beach, Florida, had more than 1,400 micrograms of mercury per gram of tissue (1,400 parts per million) in their livers. Just 10 parts per million of mercury can cause neurological damage in human fetuses.
Besides toxins in their tissues, every animal had a number of physical maladies including kidney deterioration, thyroid tumors and chronic liver disease. . .
This article was written by Cypress Hansen and published on 24 November 2020 in Mongabay. You can read the full, original article here:
“We do not want those whose first impulse is to compromise. We want no straddlers, for, in the past, they have surrendered too much good wilderness and primeval areas which should never have been lost.“
Mr. Wuerthner provides a long list of key conservation victories, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Olympic National Park – all of which were protected because heroic people refused to compromise. He cites notable failures, as well, writing:
“Pragmatists, in the end, leave messes for future generations to clean up. Capitulating to local interests with half-baked compromises in the interest of expediency typically produces uneven results. Either they do not adequately protect the land or create enormous headaches for future conservationists to undue often at a significant political and economic expense.“
The National Forests system was originally set up by President Theodore Roosevelt to protect forests from commercial activity – not log them. Compromises made by Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the Forest Service, resulted in mining companies (and later timber companies) gaining access to our National Forests. In the early 1900’s, almost no one could imagine that the seemingly limitless supply of virgin timber on private lands would one day be exhausted. They could not conceive that in a few generations’ time, timber companies and their partners in government agencies would be fighting tooth and nail to log the dwindling amount of old growth in our national forests – our collective natural heritage.
Lessons for the Elliott Mr. Wuerthner’s impassioned writing has left me wondering what lessons future generations will glean from the current process surrounding the Elliott State Forest (likely to be handed over to OSU with their timber-centric “research design” in the coming weeks). How will they see the unusually short public outreach/comment period and the rush to complete the OSU plan in time for the Land Board’s approval? How will they judge our mainstream environmental groups who seem afraid to openly criticize the egregious shortcomings of the plan and process? Will future Oregonians accept that compromise was the best we could hope for with the Elliott State Forest?
Insight from the Advisory Committee: In a recent email, Bob Sallinger (Portland Audubon member serving on the Advisory Committee) clarified the current situation with OSU’s draft plan for the Elliott:
“The draft plan calls for cutting up to 3287 acres of mature forest (between 65 and 152 years of age) over a period of a couple or two decades using selective harvest (20%-80% retention). Several hundred acres within this 3287 acres are on the younger side (65-100 years old) but the majority is in 100-152 year range…
I don’t think there is anybody in the conservation community that thinks it is a good idea to cut these older stands or that the research benefits outweigh the benefits of preserving 100% of the older stands…Ultimately the question the conservation community will need to decide is whether they can live with the tradeoffs in this plan…
Pretty much 100% of the changes and concessions over the past year have been made to address conservation concerns. Despite that fact, if conservation interests sign-off, it looks like we will have consensus among all stakeholders including tribes, timber, counties, hunters and rec, and schools…
So bottom line is that there are definitely tradeoffs in this plan. There would be under any management scenario. In a perfect world we would lock up the entire Elliott as a carbon/ biodiversity reserve. However the same issues that have necessitated a decades long battle over the Elliott are still in play today.
Folks will have to decide whether the inclusion of things like clearcuts in about 14,000 acres of existing plantations (under 65 years of age) or selective harvest in a limited number of stands >65 are deal breakers or not. In doing so, I would encourage folks to think carefully about the other pathways that are available to us.“
I have great respect for Bob. He has been a true conservation hero on the Advisory Committee. But the 12-member committee was compromised at the outset by the inclusion of hardliners with vested economic interests (Douglas County Commissioner Chris Boice is a great example). When Bob writes about the need to live with tradeoffs and reach consensus among all stakeholders, I wonder what happened to the broader group of stakeholders – the citizens of Oregon. I also wonder why experts in forest ecology and carbon were not included on the committee – while timber interests were.
When it comes to the fate of the Elliott, surveys show Oregonians overwhelmingly support conservation. When I see DSL and the Land Board showing such great deference to OSU, I wonder, “Where’s the deference to Oregonians?” When it comes to this state forest, one ought to defer to the citizens of this state. And when it comes to compromise and tradeoffs, one has only to look at the millions of acres of clearcuts in our state and federal forests to understand that we’ve already compromised our natural heritage.
Pictures Tell the Story: OSU’s latest draft plan for the Elliott State Research Forest (ESRF) is an unwieldy mix of contradictions, obfuscation, and technical jargon put together by folks who clearly are not adept at communicating with a broader audience. When it comes to understanding this fundamental issue of compromise in the Elliott, pictures are the key.
The map below shows the locations of older trees (indicated by darker shades of green) in the Elliott State Forest. It is important to note that significant quantities of older trees are scattered across vast stretches of the Forest.
Tree age classes in the Elliott State Forest (darker = older)
This next map shows the habitat of threatened birds (marbled murrelet in red and northern spotted owls in blue) in the Elliott. Predictably, the habitat is closely aligned with the older stands.
Habitat for threatened birds in the Elliott State Forest
This final map shows how the OSU would divide the forest. The purple areas (denoted as “CRW”) would be “conservation research watersheds”, with limited logging allowed. The dark green areas (labeled as “MRW Reserve”) will be subject to experimental treatments (= logging) in the coming decades. The orange areas (labeled “Extensive”) will undergo thinning in which 20-80% of the trees are to be cut (including thousands of acres of older trees). The light green areas (labeled “Intensive”) are composed of trees less than 65 years of age, and will be subject to clearcutting.
OSU’s research design for the Elliott would perpetuate clearcutting or fragmentation in well over half the forest (conservation reserves shown in purple)
Viewed from the perspective of older trees and habit for our threatened birds, OSU’s plan for the Elliott is a complete disconnect. As the maps clearly show, it would sacrifice a majority of the Forest to continued clearcutting and fragmentation.
George Wuerthner’s eloquent words could not be more applicable to the Elliott:
“In far too many cases, there is a tendency to believe that it is necessary to appease local interests typically by agreeing to weakened protections or resource giveaways to garner the required political support for a successful conservation effort. However, this fails to consider that in nearly all cases where effective protective measures are enacted, it has been done over almost uniform local opposition.
In those instances where local opposition to a conservation measure is mild or does not exist, it probably means the proposal will be ineffective or worse—even set real conservation backward…Nevertheless, many environmentalists now believe that due to regional parochialism and lack of historical context, significant compromises are necessary to win approval for new conservation initiatives.“
The Elliott State Forest has already been heavily compromised – OSU’s plan would perpetuate the mistakes of the past.
The essence of OSU’s plan for the Elliott – the area on the west side would be protected, the area to the east would face continued fragmentation via a complicated matrix of “forest management” (including ~14,000 acres of clearcutting).
“You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you’re not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that’s going on. Try to make yourself aware of what’s happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.”
—Bill Ayers, cofounder of the Weather Underground.
A black tern weighs barely two ounces. On energy reserves less than a small bag of M&M’s and wings that stretch to cover twelve inches, she flies thousands of miles, searching for the wetlands that will harbor her young. Every year the journey gets longer as the wetlands are desiccated for human demands. Every year the tern, desperate and hungry, loses, while civilization, endless and sanguineous, wins.
A polar bear should weigh 650 pounds. Her energy reserves are meant to see her through nine long months of dark, denned gestation, and then lactation, when she will give up her dwindling stores to the needy mouths of her species’ future. But in some areas, the female’s weight before hibernation has already dropped from 650 to 507 pounds. Meanwhile, the ice has evaporated like the wetlands. When she wakes, the waters will stretch impassably open, and there is no Abrahamic god of bears to part them for her.
The Aldabra snail should weigh something, but all that’s left to weigh are skeletons, bits of orange and indigo shells. The snail has been declared not just extinct, but the first casualty of global warming. In dry periods, the snail hibernated. The young of any species are always more vulnerable, as they have no reserves from which to draw. In this case, the adults’ “reproductive success” was a “complete failure.” In plain terms, the babies died and kept dying, and a species millions of years old is now a pile of shell fragments.
What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair?
We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That’s 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.
There is a name for the tsunami wave of extermination: the Holocene extinction event. There’s no asteroid this time, only human behavior, behavior that we could choose to stop. Adolph Eichman’s excuse was that no one told him that the concentration camps were wrong. We’ve all seen the pictures of the drowning polar bears. Are we so ethically numb that we need to be told this is wrong?
There are voices raised in concern, even anguish, at the plight of the earth, the rending of its species. “Only zero emissions can prevent a warmer planet,” one pair of climatologists declare. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis, states bluntly that global warming has passed the tipping point, carbon offsetting is a joke, and “individual lifestyle adjustments” are “a deluded fantasy.” It’s all true, and self-evident.
“Simple living” should start with simple observation: if burning fossil fuels will kill the planet, then stop burning them.
But that conclusion, in all its stark clarity, is not the popular one to draw. The moment policy makers and environmental groups start offering solutions is the exact moment when they stop telling the truth, inconvenient or otherwise. Google “global warming solutions.” The first paid sponsor, Campaign Earth, urges “No doom and gloom!! When was the last time depression got you really motivated? We’re here to inspire realistic action steps and stories of success.” By “realistic” they don’t mean solutions that actually match the scale of the problem. They mean the usual consumer choices—cloth shopping bags, travel mugs, and misguided dietary advice—which will do exactly nothing to disrupt the troika of industrialization, capitalism, and patriarchy that is skinning the planet alive.
As Derrick has pointed out elsewhere, even if every American took every single action suggested by Al Gore it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent. Aric tells a stark truth: even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average American’s annual one ton of garbage production, “your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That’s thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste.”
Industrialism itself is what has to stop.
There is no kinder, greener version that will do the trick of leaving us a living planet. In blunt terms, industrialization is a process of taking entire communities of living beings and turning them into commodities and dead zones. Could it be done more “efficiently”? Sure, we could use a little less fossil fuels, but it still ends in the same wastelands of land, water, and sky. We could stretch this endgame out another twenty years, but the planet still dies. Trace every industrial artifact back to its source—which isn’t hard, as they all leave trails of blood—and you find the same devastation: mining, clear-cuts, dams, agriculture. And now tar sands, mountaintop removal, wind farms (which might better be called dead bird and bat farms).
No amount of renewables is going to make up for the fossil fuels or change the nature of the extraction, both of which are prerequisites for this way of life. Neither fossil fuels nor extracted substances will ever be sustainable; by definition, they will run out. Bringing a cloth shopping bag to the store, even if you walk there in your Global Warming Flip-Flops, will not stop the tar sands. But since these actions also won’t disrupt anyone’s life, they’re declared both realistic and successful.
The next site’s Take Action page includes the usual: buying light bulbs, inflating tires, filling dishwashers, shortening showers, and rearranging the deck chairs. It also offers the ever-crucial Global Warming Bracelets and, more importantly, Flip-Flops. Polar bears everywhere are weeping with relief.
The first noncommercial site is the Union of Concerned Scientists. As one might expect, there are no exclamation points, but instead a statement that “[t]he burning of fossil fuel (oil, coal, and natural gas) alone counts for about 75 percent of annual CO2 emissions.” This is followed by a list of Five Sensible Steps. Step One? No, not stop burning fossil fuels—“Make Better Cars and SUVs.” Never mind that the automobile itself is the pollution, with its demands—for space, for speed, for fuel—in complete opposition to the needs of both a viable human community and a living planet. Like all the others, the scientists refuse to call industrial civilization into question. We can have a living planet and the consumption that’s killing the planet, can’t we?
The principle here is very simple.
As Derrick has written, “[A]ny social system based on the use of nonrenewable resources is by definition unsustainable.” Just to be clear, nonrenewable means it will eventually run out. Once you’ve grasped that intellectual complexity, you can move on to the next level. “Any culture based on the nonrenewable use of renewable resources is just as unsustainable.” Trees are renewable. But if we use them faster than they can grow, the forest will turn to desert. Which is precisely what civilization has been doing for its 10,000 year campaign, running through soil, rivers, and forests as well as metal, coal, and oil. Now the oceans are almost dead and their plankton populations are collapsing, populations that both feed the life of the oceans and create oxygen for the planet.
What will we fill our lungs with when they are gone? The plastics with which industrial civilization is replacing them? In parts of the Pacific, plastic outweighs plankton 48 to 1. Imagine if it were your blood, your heart, crammed with toxic materials—not just chemicals, but physical gunk—until there was ten times more of it than you. What metaphor is adequate for the dying plankton? Cancer? Suffocation? Crucifixion?
But the oceans don’t need our metaphors. They need action. They need industrial civilization to stop destroying and devouring. In other words, they need us to make it stop.
Which is why we are writing this book.
THE DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE BOOK
Strategy to Save the Planet:
