From Megafauna to Mecha-Fauna

From Megafauna to Mecha-Fauna

Children no longer grow up in relationship with wild beings. Big machines are filling that void.


by Max Wilbert

My nephew is two-and-a-half years old. His language capabilities are exploding, and he is growing fast. Like most toddlers, he is a wellspring of boundless energy and pure love. On our walks through Pacific Northwest forests, I’ve been teaching him which trees are cedar and which are maple. He loves birds, particularly crows. The first word I ever remember him saying was “caw!”

And like most kids — including me, when I was his age — he is fascinated with trucks, as well as with cranes, trains, ships, with all things mechanical and moving. The other night, I read him the old Mike Mulligan and his Steamshovel book with worn corners and fading colors — the same copy my own aunts and uncles read to me 30 years ago.

Today, my sleepy little nephew, preparing for a nap, asked me to read him another story. He handed me a book all about construction equipment: bulldozers, excavators, cement trucks. I sat next to him, singing the words of the book to lull him to sleep as he sucked his thumb and blinked his tired eyes.

I flipped from page to page. Each one was covered in beautifully drawn, anthropomorphized machines, finishing their work at the construction site and falling asleep one after another. Soon he fell asleep, and I quietly crept out of the room, thinking about toddlers and machines.

Why are trucks so exciting to a kid? Perhaps it is obvious: they are loud, big, fast, complex, powerful. There is the element of danger. Adaptively, there must be a survival advantage for children who are curious about loud, large, fast beings and objects.

There is a tragedy in this. The fascination that my nephew today directs towards trucks, in the past would have been focused on native megafauna — herds of bison, wolf packs, grizzly bears, whales, eagles — and on their habitat: raging rivers and waterfalls, towering old growth forests, slow grinding glaciers.

These were the big, powerful, mobile beings of previous generations. And they are gone now, or confined to small mountain fastnesses. We no longer grow up in relationship with wild beings, and this fascination with trucks could well be a misappropriation of the adoration our animist ancestors would have directed towards our animal kin

What better way is there to learn to be human than to relate to others who are both profoundly similar to you, and at the same time profoundly different?

Today, most children only see megafauna caged in the prison conditions of zoos, or on the same screen that brings them cartoons and special effects. The megafauna of human habitat has been replaced by mecha-fauna.

This breaks my heart.

Well-known Native American rights advocate and author Vine Deloria Jr. once said that most westerners experience nature as “an aesthetic experience,” in contrast to most Indigenous people who develop relationships with the natural world, including with specific wild places, species, and individuals.

Our ancestors made seasonal rounds and daily journeys to gather berries and edible plants, to hunt and fish and preserve food, to trade and meet with distant friends and family. As they traveled, they would have passed megafauna regularly — perhaps on a daily basis. Some of these kin would be prey, others potential predator, and still others simply neighbors whose boundaries should be respected. These interactions are the foundation of relationship with place, and when paired with an ideology that values balance with the non-human world, can result in societies that persist for tens of thousands of years without significantly harming the local ecology.

Today, my nephew relates to construction cranes and skyscrapers, not to lions and jackals; to garbage trucks and girders, not kudu and camels; to city buses and cement mixers, not Siberian tigers and endless herds of reindeer.

This makes me very sad.

I will not deny him his books, of course, or his fun. One night early this winter, I carried him on my shoulders into the fringes of a construction zone, where we clambered over piled rebar and explored the cab of an excavator. It is not his fault that this is the world he inhabits. When I was a kid, my parents would take me to construction sites and sit with me to watch new skyscrapers and office buildings and houses rise from foundation to framing and beyond. It was fascinating. I do not blame them for being born into this world. And these experiences did not quash my inner animist. On the contrary, now I spend most of my waking hours either in nature or working on its behalf. These qualities, or their potential, exist in every child. They only need patient nurturing.

Richard Louv, in his book Last Child in the Woods, writes that “Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.”

So I take my nephew walking in the woods, and camping on wilderness beaches, and crawling through bushes in the backyard. I point out the birds and the plants to him, and teach them their names, and climb trees with him. In this way, I plant the seeds that may mature into an ecological consciousness when he is grown.

Perhaps these issues seem small. But we, of all people, should know that giants grow from small seeds. And perhaps if we don’t believe ourselves, we should believe our opponents.

A good friend of mine works for the Office of Recreation in Utah. A few years ago, she told me about how the far-right, typically anti-environmental state government had agreed to fund the office — but only if children’s outdoor programs were removed from the budget.

I have been thinking about this story ever since. The conclusions to be drawn from this are simple. In 2018, visitors to Utah spent nearly $10 billion and generated $1.3 billion in state and local tax revenue. Grand County alone, home to Arches National Park, hosted more than 2 million tourists. That’s 200 tourists for every resident of the county.

Tourism is big business. Taking children into nature, on the other hand, is not so profitable. Children do not buy trinkets, do not stay in hotel rooms, do not generate tax revenue. And children, unlike wealthy tourists, tend to go beyond aesthetic experiences when they are in nature. The child in nature hints at something subversive.

What are the ramifications when we take a developing child full of paleolithic genes and place them in a twenty-first century city? We don’t have to guess. We can see these consequences play out all around us. The boredom, alienation, and disconnection in childhood manifest later as selfishness and harm to self and others. Numerous studies have shown that on average, our ability to feel empathy is in a serious decline. This is one of the great tragedies of our time.

But perhaps we can reverse this trend. Perhaps, in time, we can go from mecha-fauna to megafauna once again. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment — in which volunteers were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards in a mock prison — is often invoked to demonstrate how humans will follow authority to the point of committing atrocities. But the results of that experiment — particularly the behavior of a few “guards” who showed compassion towards “prisoners” — can also be understood to demonstrate the opposite: that no matter how strongly we are coerced, how firmly we are pressured, how totally we are indoctrinated, some people will always see the truth. Some people will always resist empire.

Children in nature will not, by themselves, save the world. But if our children are totally cut off from Earth, we are surely damned. A child in nature is a beginning, a seed spreading tiny roots that one day may become the buttresses of a formidable trunk, inexorably levering up the concrete entombing our planet.


Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists. He is the editor-in-chief of the Deep Green Resistance News Service. His latest book is the forthcoming Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It. He lives in Oregon.

This piece was first published in Earth Island Journal.

Have the Machines Already Taken Over?

Have the Machines Already Taken Over?

This article describes the madness of consumption, the accumulation of things, and the impact of consumerism on the human state of being and on the natural world.


by Phil Knight / Counterpunch

According to Ron Milo and his colleagues at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, in 2020 the mass of artificial, human made objects on Earth is likely greater than the mass of all living things. The human-made world – steel, concrete, ships, buildings, vehicles, bridges, overpasses, warehouses, plastic junk…weighs more than the mass of all living things, including forests, marine and terrestrial mammals, fish, and insects. And humans.

The same study points out that, for each person on Earth, a quantity of “anthropogenic mass” greater than their body weight is produced each week. That’s right, your weight in human-made crap is produced EVERY WEEK. Just for you. Have we built enough STUFF yet?

Do we have enough things?

We surround ourselves in a sterile, artificial, soulless world of our own making, becoming ever more dependent on our machines and edifices as we destroy the very world around us. We are flies trapped in amber, struggling fruitlessly to free ourselves as the trap solidifies. We will make amazing fossils.

We are also creating smarter and smarter things – cars that drive themselves, hand held computers that do far more than we could ever need them to, appliances and homes wired to the global internet, tiny chips that hold more information than we could read in a hundred years, jet liners that pilot themselves, spacecraft that spy on the cosmos, gene splicers that alter the very stuff of life.

How soon ‘til all this STUFF turns on us?

The Singularity will occur when artificial intelligence escapes the control of humanity and increases until it far exceeds human intelligence. Artificial intelligence may figure out to reproduce itself and completely take over, making copies of itself at warp speed, spreading in a nightmare of self-replicating von Neumann machines free of human interference. At this point humans may have lost control of their own destiny. We will have entered the Matrix.

Perhaps the machines have already taken over. When was the last time you looked your phone? 10 minutes ago? Five? Two? Instead of a singularity, it has been a gradual stealth campaign. Machines have invaded our minds via screens and headphones and chimes and ringtones. They demand our constant devotion and attention. Especially now, in the pandemic, when we can rarely meet as flesh and blood humans but must talk to pitiful simulations of our friends and family and colleagues, flattened replicas that chatter through tiny speakers, faces that squint and smile and try to make sense of the mess they are in, try to connect in some way across the void of contact.

We occasionally peel away from our screens to climb into our rolling deathboxes and spew more carbon into the frying atmosphere, an atmosphere rapidly transforming into one giant human artifact, albeit one we do not control but only alter and ruin willy-nilly with little regard for the rapidly approaching hell on Earth we are creating.

Those artifacts we blithely build become ever more necessary yet deadly as the climate becomes more hostile, as society consumes itself cannibal-like, becoming a death spiral of conspiracy theories, hate, tribalism and simmering warfare.

Note how the machines spread division.

Computer screens display social media, which blares conspiracy theories and false news and fear, turning human society into tribes ruled by hatred of others. Divide and conquer. Not only human destiny is at stake. The destiny of life on Earth may be forfeit. Machines will have no incentive to preserve living things, nor wilderness, nor oceans. All will be raw material for their growth and their ever-increasing spread. They will link in one giant brain, an Internet gone berserk.

Total takeover by artificial intelligence may never occur. But we are approaching what you might call the physical singularity – the growth of human systems, spun out of control. No one has the means nor the will to stop what we have set loose – the constant and multiplying conversion of natural life and living systems into human junk. We must have more, always more. A few words to your Smart Speaker or clicks on your keypad and more stuff arrives on your porch, delivered for a price. A constant flood of merchandise flows through factories, warehouses, into trucks and planes and onto highways and into our cities onto our doorsteps.

We bring it in and add it to the pile.

And much of this Stuff either sits unused – in the billions of storage units strewn across the landscape or on the RV and boat storage lots – or worse, it gets thrown out. Landfills overflow with reuseable, recyclable resources and things. They are entombed until someone gets determined or desperate enough to mine the landfills.

Humans have transformed vast areas of the planet. On landscapes very recently populated by large wild animals like grizzly bears, elk, bison, elephants, giraffes, tigers, rhinos, and hippos, now the masses of migrating creatures are mechanical. Great seething hordes of metal wheeled dinosaurs jockey for position in a mad race from an age of steel and plastic (which is now). The roar of the lion and the howl of the wolf have been replaced by the shriek of the diesel pickup, the scream of the jacked up Mitsubishi or Mazda, the snarl of the Harley Davidson. Savanna, forest, prairie, marsh, wetland, delta and meadow have been turned into parking lot, shopping center, business park, runway, interstate, subdivision and factory.

Thousands upon thousands of homes sit empty for much of the year, sealing off the land from use by any animal or plant beyond those tiny ones that can sneak in.

Great cruise liners built to hold thousands of people fester at dockside as the pandemic makes their use extremely uninviting. Office buildings a hundred stories tall are “hollowing out” as the pandemic forces a shift to working online from home. Parking garages sit empty, monuments to the late great commuter. The only public buildings filling up are hospitals and morgues.

Can we ever have enough? Will our stuff take over? Have we given ourselves over to our creations? Are we evolution gone mad?

Who knows, maybe the singularity will create a benevolent race of machine overlords. If they become so much smarter than us, maybe they will see the wisdom in kindness, the necessity to preserve the abundant and beautiful life of this blue green ball spinning through the vast emptiness.

But I doubt it.


Phil Knight is an environmental activist in Bozeman, Montana. He is a board member of the Gallatin-Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance

This article was original published in Counterpunch, here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/14/have-the-machines-already-taken-over/

Lithium Wars: The New Gold Rush

Lithium Wars: The New Gold Rush

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.


By Max Wilbert

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.


To learn more about the Thacker pass, check out this article and this website. Watch more of Max’s videos here.

The Highest Levels of Mercury Ever Found in Living Beings

The Highest Levels of Mercury Ever Found in Living Beings

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.


By Cypress Hansen/Mongabay

  • 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:

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/11/are-industrial-chemicals-killing-rare-whales-and-familiar-dolphins/

It’s Not “Revenge Porn” or Deepfakes — It’s Digital Rape

It’s Not “Revenge Porn” or Deepfakes — It’s Digital Rape

In this piece, Max talks about revenge porn and deepfakes as a new form of pornography. Pornography has always been a tool for the subjugation of women by patriarchy. The article further relates subjugation of women to the subjugation of the natural world.


By Max Wilbert

Our culture is a culture of violation, a culture of breaking boundaries: the boundaries of women, of children, of forests, of oceans, of the living planet itself, even of the atom and the gene.

Where does the impulse to violate come from, and how is it encoded and transmitted from generation to generation?

One method of transmission is via pornography, one of a broad set of cultural tools used to inculcate patriarchy and pass it from generation to generation. Susan Griffin, in her book Woman and Nature, writes that “above all, pornography is ritual. It is an enacted drama that is laden with meaning, which imparts a vision of the world. The altar for the ritual is a woman’s body. And the ritual which is carried out on this altar is the desecration of flesh. Here, what is sacred within the body is degraded.”

As Gail Dines and other radical feminists argue, the sadistic brilliance of pornography is that is sexualizes these rituals, hiding them behind a veil of arousal, so that excitement becomes linked to dominance and subordination. Acts that would be anathema to our child selves become normalized, then eroticized.

Revenge Porn and “Deepfakes”

This understanding of pornography as ritualized degradation helps explain two of the newer forms of pornography: revenge porn and “Deepfakes.” As the slow burn of printed pornography exploded with the advent of the internet, now the internet is enabling new forms of ritualized degradation of women and violation of boundaries.

Most people are unfortunately familiar with the phenomenon of “revenge porn“—the practice of men sharing explicit photographs or videos of women online in order to degrade them—which has become all too common over the last decade. “Deepfakes” are newer and make degradation so much easier: computer-generated pornography, often created using AI/Machine Learning technology to swap a woman’s face onto another person’s body.

The technology to create Deepfakes has escalated quickly over the past several years, and now realistic-looking Deepfakes can be created relatively easily, or even automatically. Last month a report exposed that users had uploaded images of more than 680,000 women, without their knowledge or consent, to an automated service on Telegram to create photo-realistic Deepfake pornography. And another expose showed that TikTok stars—often underage teenagers—are ending up on porn websites.

Digital Rape

How can we describe this new form of violation? Sophie Maddocks, a PhD candidate at the New School, writes that feminist activists are increasingly seeking to re-name revenge porn and Deepfakes as ‘Non-consensual pornography’, ‘image-based sexual abuse’, and ‘digital rape.’

Like Susan Griffin, Maddocks points towards an understanding of pornography not as sexual expression, art, or the singular act of bitter men, but as what Andrea Dworkin called “the blueprint of male supremacy.”

“Pornography incarnates male supremacy,” Dworkin wrote. “It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual sadism, is encoded in it. It’s what men want us to be, think we are, make us into; how men use us; not because biologically they are men but because this is how their social power is organized. From the perspective of the political activist, pornography is the blueprint of male supremacy.”

The Ecological Crisis and Patriarchy

As Lierre Keith says, if you could reduce feminism to one word, it would be: “No.” The  drawing of boundaries is essential to not just individual bodily and mental health, but to the health of the entire planet. And what is industrial civilization but the cultural urge to violate the entire planet?

Patriarchy is thousands of years old, and it will not be dismantled in a day, or a year, or a decade. But for as long as it has existed, so has resistance. Movements to dismantle porn culture and stop the proliferation of digital sexual abuse are widespread and growing. These problems are deeply entrenched, and confronting the culture of violation will require people in all walks of life to make commitments and take action, over lifetimes.

Deep Green Resistance is primarily an ecological organization, but we are also a feminist organization, because we recognize the links between patriarchy and the destruction of the planet.

Only to name one of the most obvious, the problem of overpopulation is mainly caused by the subjugation of women—legally, economically, culturally, sexually. And the path to solve overpopulation is simple: educate women, and provide culturally appropriate family planning and healthcare. When this is done, population growth disappears. There is no technical mystery here; the problem is changing the culture and restructuring power.

In Margaret Atwood’s prophetic book Oryx and Crake, global warming wreaks havok on a world falling further into dystopia. The most violent forms of child rape pornography are normalized, and young kids watch the “Nitee-Nite” show for live streams of people committing suicide. Soy-based artificial foods and genetically-engineered creatures fill every plate, and as the world descends further into chaos, well-meaning people spend their money airlifting food to starving polar bears in an ice-free Arctic rather than in confronting or dismantling the systems that are destroying the planet.

This is the world we are heading towards, but it is not inevitable. Our only hope lies in what Dworkin calls organized political resistance. Each day, I read these words and remind myself of our task:

[W]hen I talk about a resistance, I am talking about an organized political resistance. I’m not just talking about something that comes and something that goes. I’m not talking about a feeling. I’m not talking about having in your heart the way things should be and going through a regular day having good, decent, wonderful ideas in your heart.

I’m talking about when you put your body and your mind on the line and you commit yourself to years of struggle in order to change the society in which you live… A political resistance goes on day and night, under cover and over ground, where people can see it and people can’t. It is passed from generation to generation. It is taught. It is encouraged. It is celebrated. It is smart. It is savvy. It is committed. And someday it will win. It will win.