A criminal slips a police officer a handful of bills and walks free. A businessman buys a politician with a briefcase full of cash. We often think of bribery and corruption in these blatant terms, and as something that happens in poor countries, elsewhere.
But corruption often looks different.
In the United States, where I live, corruption is common. It’s also mostly legal.
In fact, dirty money has become part of the political fabric of our nation. It has become normalized, institutionalized, and even regulated. And yet, the effects of this corruption are just as insidious and destructive as blatant payoffs. Corruption is a rot in our political system, and it is spreading.
This article is about American corruption, but the story will be told by looking at one particular Canadian mining company called Lithium Americas, which is working in the United States through a wholly-owned U.S.-based subsidiary, Lithium Nevada Corporation.
For two and a half years, I’ve been fighting Lithium Nevada to stop them from destroying Thacker Pass — a biodiversity hotspot and Native American sacred site known Peehee Mu’huh in the Paiute language that is in northern Nevada, just shy of the Oregon border. Lithium Nevada, as you have probably guessed, wants to turn this place into an open-pit lithium mine.
This is a special place. Thacker Pass is home to dwindling sage-grouse, Pronghorn, mule deer, and golden eagles. It’s a migratory corridor and climate change refuge. It’s the watershed for local communities, and the site of two massacres of Paiute people, including one on September 12, 1865 in which US Army soldiers killed between 30 and 50 men, women, children, and elders in a surprise attack at dawn. It’s been recognized by the Federal Government as a “Traditional Cultural District,” a landscape of outstanding importance to Native American history and cultural identity.
And right now, as you read this, it is being destroyed by a corrupt corporation and a corrupt government. Bulldozers are rolling and centuries-old sagebrush, millennia-old artifacts, and the lives of precious desert creatures are being crushed under metal treads.
How is this possible? How, in a democracy where people have the right to protest, to speak out, to comment, to petition, to file lawsuits, how is it possible to have such a miscarriage of justice? And more broadly, how is it possible that our governmental system is failing to address the ecological catastrophe we are facing: the 6th mass extinction of life on Earth?
Part of the answer is corruption, which we can break down into five categories: lobbying, writing laws, the revolving door, campaign contributions, and community bribery. Let’s look at each in turn, using Lithium Americas and Thacker Pass as an example.
Lobbying: How Corporations Gain Disproportionate Access
Lobbying is based on a simple principle: that government officials should listen to their constituents.
Transparency International defines lobbying as “Any activity carried out to influence a government or institution’s policies and decisions in favor of a specific cause or outcome.”
“Even when allowed by law,” they say, “these acts can become distortive [harmful to democracy and justice] if disproportionate levels of influence exist — by companies, associations, organizations and individuals.”
Today’s lobbying is not the simple practice of people talking to their elected officials. Instead, it’s a tightly regulated $3.73 billion industry dominated by political insiders and major corporations, rife with corrupt “revolving doors,” and matched by at least $3-4 billion in “shadow lobbying” that isn’t regulated or disclosed to the public in any way.
The regulation of lobbying is essential to its proper functioning as a method of corruption. As Ben Price, National Organizing Director at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, puts it, “regulation is not so much a way to curb corruption, but more to the point, regulations legalize the corruption by defining the limits to it that will be disallowed.”
“In doing so,” he continues, “the principle effect of regulations is to shield bribery from legal liability by legalizing enough of it to serve the purpose of the corporate legislative influencers.”
Like advertising, corporations use lobbying because it works.
Studies have found that spending more money on lobbying and campaign contributions results in direct reductions in federal taxes, state taxes, and more federal contracts. One analysis looking at only the nation’s 200 most “politically active” corporations found they spent $58 billion on lobbying the federal government and “campaign contributions”[i] between 2007 and 2012, but received $4.4 trillion in federal subsidies, contracts, and other support during the same time period. That’s a 7,580% return on investment.
Another study found even bigger returns: “on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government” — a 76,000% payout.
Corporations are Writing Our Laws
Corporations use lobbyists because their wealth allows them disproportionate access to the government, meaning that they can build relationships with politicians and staffers, influence policy, share ideas, and even draft legislation. They can also bribe judges, as the recent Clarence Thomas corruption scandal shows. But it goes further. As one report in NPR notes, “It’s taken for granted that lobbyists influence legislation. But perhaps less obvious is that they often write the actual bills — even word for word.”
Our laws are being written by corporations.
And this isn’t just a federal problem. A 2019 USA Today investigation found more than 10,000 bills introduced to legislatures in all 50 states over an 8-year period were “almost entirely copied from bills written by special interests.” The report also notes that their investigation detected these bills using automated techniques, and “the real number is probably far higher.”
Our politicians rarely write laws. Instead, corporations and lobbyists write laws; congress sells the laws to the public; then lobbyists pay their congresspeople in campaign contributions, Super PAC funding, and revolving-door job opportunities – topics we will look at next.
The Revolving Door
Another way that corruption has become endemic inside the government of the United States is through what’s known as the “revolving door.”
The revolving door refers to the common practice of corporate employees quitting their jobs and going to work in the government, and vice versa. It’s quite common for government employees and elected officials to quit or end their terms and immediately get jobs in the industries they were supposedly regulating.
This is a sort of “retroactive bribery” where government officials do what corporations want, then get paid off afterwards. And it’s completely legal.
Occasionally there will be stories of lobbyists who stray into outright bribery — Jack Abramoff, notably — but these stories are rare, not because corruption is uncommon, but becauseyou don’t really need to break the law as a corporation: you wrote the laws. And you did it deliberately to make your bribery and influence campaigns legal.
As of 2016, about half of retiring senators and a third of retiring House Representatives register as lobbyists to collect their checks. This is equally common among Democrats and Republicans.
Lithium Nevada Corporation’s Lobbying Activities (the ones we know about)
Harbinger is “a leading federal government and political affairs firm” that was founded by and employs former high-level Republican congressional aides and political operatives. They have been listed as among the top lobbyists in Washington D.C. and made a total of $10.9 million in 2021 from a client list which includes the airline industry, major banks and investment firms, mining companies, biotech, the military-industrial complex, Facebook, electric utilities, General Electric, and the oil and gas industry.
“We leverage our experience as former senior staff to the Congressional Leadership and the Executive Branch to position clients for a seat at the decision-making table,” they write on their website. They continue: “[Harbinger is] founded on the belief that every client deserves partner-level legislative expertise” — a “boutique model” — that they use “for one simple reason: it gets results.”
In the state of Nevada, Lithium Nevada Corporation has hired at least 4 lobbyists since 2017 from two businesses: Argentum Partners, “a full-service strategic communications firm… with a hungry, energetic, and experienced team of lobbyists,” and Ferrato Corporation, “a full service bi-partisan public affairs firm.”
Notably, Lithium Nevada’s Argentum lobbyists included Mike Draper, who “helmed the media relations and public affairs for the planning, permitting, construction and opening of the Ruby Pipeline, the largest natural gas pipeline in North America.” The Ruby Pipeline was fought vehemently by environmentalists and Tribes in 2009 and 2010.
Campaign Contributions
Another technique of legalized corruption is “campaign contributions,” also known as donations to politicians.
Many countries in the world place strict limits on the amount of money that people can donate to political candidates, or even have political campaigns funded by the government, removing the influence of money almost entirely. The United States is not one of those countries.
Elected officials in the United States are desperate for money. The average U.S. senator has to rase $14,000 a day just to stay in office — and that’s once they’re already elected. This is true for both Democrats and Republicans, which is why corporations, both directly and through their lobbyists and employees, tend to play both sides by donating to both political parties.
For example, Jonathan Evans, CEO of Lithium Americas Corporation, donated at least $10,250 to political candidates between 2021 and 2022 including Catherine Cortez Mastow (Democratic Senator from Nevada) and Mark Amodei (Nevada’s Republican Governor). George Ireland, Board President of Lithium Americas, has donated at least $19,800 to candidates since 2011, including $500 to the Trump campaign and $6,600 to John Hickenlooper. Data from OpenSecrets.org shows that 7 other Lithium Americas employees, Board members, and associated parties gave at least another $10,819 to political candidates between 2018 and 2022.
These amounts don’t include the MUCH larger political contributions given by employees and family members of Harbinger Strategies, who gave $392,842 to political candidates in the 2020 election cycle alone.
Many of these people donated up to the legal limit, implying that if the limit were higher, they would give more money — and perhaps that they would seek ways to circumvent contribution limits via so-called “Super PACs” and other dark money techniques.
Keep in mind that less than 1.5% of Americans donate more than $200 to political candidates or parties in any given year. This is the domain of the wealthy.
The Payoff
Lithium Americas money is well-spent.
In what appears to be a quid pro quo for their lobbying and campaign contributions, Lithium Americas Corporation has been granted a total of $8,637,357 in tax abatements from the State of Nevada, including a partial sales tax abatement worth $5 million, a $3.3 million property tax abatement and about $225,000 in payroll tax abatements. That money is unavailable for schools, healthcare, social services, small business assistance, environmental programs, etc.
From the Federal Government, Lithium Americas has received a loan from the Department of Energy’s “Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program” (ATVM) which is likely to cover “up to 75% of the Thacker Pass’ total capital costs for construction.”
This loan program offers highly favorable terms that amount to a significant subsidy of as much as $3 billion USD.
Based on a very conservative estimate for Lithium Americas Corporation lobbying and employee campaign contribution of, say, $400,000, they’re looking at a return on investment of 2,100% — and that’s before including the massive financial value of the ATVM loan.
Community-Level Bribery
Corruption in politics is often matched with corruption at a local level.
Lithium Americas’ plans to destroy Thacker Pass have created serious community opposition among farmers and ranchers from the rural areas closest to Thacker Pass, among local citizens in the nearby town of Winnemucca, among environmental groups concerned about impacts to wildlife, plants, air, and water, and among Native American tribes concerned about their sacred and culturally important sites, animals, and medicines.
The response has been predictable. Anti-mining activist Joan Kuyek’s book Unearthing Justice: How to Protect Your Community From The Mining Industry describes the myths repeated incessantly by Lithium Americas and almost every mining company:
“The mine will create hundreds of jobs and enrich governments.”
The mine can make community members rich and solve all of their social and economic problems.”
“Modern engineering will ensure that the mine doesn’t damage the water, air, or the wildlife.”
When these myths are exposedasfalse, they resort to legalized bribery. At Thacker Pass, that takes the form of Lithium Americas Corporation paying for a new school for the community of Orovada, and signing an agreement with one local Tribal Councilwoman for construction of a cultural center. One tribal member, my friend Shelley Harjo, wrote in response: “A few promised buildings and a cultural center do not supersede the responsibility we have to our ancestors before us nor our obligation to our unborn after.” Another Tribal leader in the region says of the mining companies, “They take advantage of our poverty.”
That poverty gives the mining companies serious leverage. Among community members at Fort McDermitt, rumors of bribery are common.
Lithium Americas’ Involvement in Human Rights Abuses Overseas
Lithium Americas has deep business links and personnel overlaps with Chinese state-owned mining corporation Ganfeng Lithium (the largest lithium company in the world). In fact, Ganfeng and Lithium Americas are co-owners of an Argentinian lithium mining company known as Minera Exar.
The Minera Exar mining project is located in the Andean highlands in the so-called “lithium triangle,” an arid region near the borders of Chile and Bolivia. Over the years that Minera Exar has been active in the region, they — like other lithium mining companies in the area — have come under criticism for serious environmental and human rights abuses.
“Mining companies have for years been extracting billions of dollars of lithium from the Atacama region… But the impoverished Atacamas have seen little of the riches… one lithium company, a joint Canadian-Chilean venture named Minera Exar, struck deals with six aboriginal communities for a new mine here. The operation is expected to generate about $250 million a year in sales while each community will receive an annual payment — ranging from $9,000 to about $60,000 — for extensive surface and water rights.
The exposé continues:
“Yolanda Cruz, one of the leaders of the village in Argentina, said she signed the [community benefits agreement with Minera Exar] but now regrets it. At the time she valued the opportunity to create jobs for her village. But she now worries, ‘we are going to be left with nothing.’ she said. ‘The thing is the companies are lying to us —that’s the reality. And we sometimes just keep our mouths shut,’ she said. ‘We don’t say anything and then we are the affected ones when the time goes by.’”
Meanwhile, Ganfeng Lithium recently announced plans to mine for battery metals in the Xinjiang region of China, where the Chinese Government has detained and imprisoned Uyghyrs and other Muslim groups in forced labor and indoctrination camps.
Waste of Government Funds
We are being told the main goal of lithium mining at Thacker Pass is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This is another lie, a new type of corporate greenwashing which is becoming increasingly common. In fact, many analyses actually find that the emissions reductions from switching to electric vehicles are relatively minor.
Producing a single electric car releases greenhouse gas emissions—about 9 tons on average. This average is rising as the size of electric cars is going up substantially. The more electric cars are produced, the more greenhouse gases are released. And so while EVs reduce emissions compared to gasoline vehicles, bigger EVs don’t reduce them much. Analysis from the Center For Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice says that electrification of cars in the United States will reduce national emissions by only 6 percent.
Further, producing lithium at Thacker Pass would require 700,000 tons per year of oil refining byproducts — sulfur, perhaps largely sourced from the Alberta Tar sands. While Thacker Pass receives billions in subsidies from the government, carbon emissions are continuing to rise.
Environmental activist Paul Hawken, as another example, doesn’t put electric cars in his top 10 climate solutions. In fact, it’s number 24 on his list, with almost ten times less impact than reducing food waste, nearly six times less impact than eliminating the use of refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases, and behind solutions like tropical rainforest restoration (about 5 times as effective at reducing emissions as is switching to EVs) and peatland protection (more than twice as effective).
Corruption and waste go hand-in-hand. The data makes it clear that if reducing greenhouse gases is your goal, subsidizing the Thacker Pass lithium mine is not a good use of government funds. It’s wasteful.
If you actually want to allocate government funds to effectively halt global warming, giving money to extractive industries is the exact wrong thing to do.
Instead, start with women’s rights, educating girls, and making contraception and family planning widely available. Start with economic relocalization initiatives. Start with insulating homes properly, which may have the biggest immediate carbon impact per dollar spent. Start with demand-reduction initiatives.
Stop wasting taxpayer money on subsidies to Earth-destroying corporations, and start taking actions that really matter.
The Banality of Evil
Lithium Americas’ corruption reminds me of what political philosopher Hannah Arendt called “The Banality of Evil.” Writing of Otto Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi officer who was one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, Arendt explains that Eichmann felt no guilt; indeed, he never even considered that what he was doing might be wrong: “He did his ‘duty’…; he not only obeyed ‘orders’, he also obeyed the ‘law’.”
As one article states, “[Eichmann] performed evil deeds without evil intentions, a fact connected to his ‘thoughtlessness’, a disengagement from the reality of his evil acts. Eichmann ‘never realised what he was doing’ due to an ‘inability… to think from the standpoint of somebody else’. Lacking this particular cognitive ability, he ‘commit crimes under circumstances that made it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he [was] doing wrong’.”
Lithium Americas is not killing people en masse, nor are they even among the “worst” mining companies. They may even be acting completely within the boundaries of the law. And yet they are complicit in cultural genocide, in ecological destruction for personal gain, and in what may be an even bigger crime against the future: greenwashing their destruction as positive and thus creating more financial and political incentives for more of this madness.
They believe that what they are doing is right and they are “following the rules.”
What Now?
The corruption at Thacker Pass is not unique. Lobbying, campaign contributions, greenwashing, and community bribery is common in the United States and across much of the world. I believe there is likely much more corruption that we are not aware of. Perhaps there really are briefcases full of cash being exchanged. We can only speculate. And, this article has not even begun to discuss the government complicity in lawbreaking, corruption, and ethical violations at Thacker Pass — a story that is, in some ways, even more sordid.
All of which is part of why academic analyses of the United States tend to show “economic-elite domination” rather than true electoral democracy or pluralism. The wealthy are running our country (and indeed, the world) Our government is corrupt, corporations are running rampant, and our world is being destroyed.
For many, the situation we find ourselves in is paralyzing. What can do in the face of this?
When I first came out to begin protecting Thacker Pass and setup a protest camp on the planned mine site in the depths of winter 2021, I had no illusions. I knew that the courts weren’t likely to save us. Remember, the laws were written by corporations. I knew that public commenting wasn’t going to work; the regulations are written to favor corporate interests. I knew that the government wasn’t going to help, since the politicians are mostly bought and paid for. I even knew that standard methods of protest would likely be ineffective, given the repression tactics and divide-and-conquer strategies that have been honed over centuries by corporations and colonizers.
As a society, we find ourselves in the midst of the 6th mass extinction event, a global climate catastrophe, and seemingly terminal overshoot. And as an environmental movement, despite our brave and inspired action, it has not been enough.
Whether you agree that this is needed or not, we can all agree that what we are doing isn’t working. I don’t have all the answers. But what I do know is that it’s time to go further.
This article was originally published on Earth Day 2023. Since then, there have been developments in Thacker Pass. Direct action has been able to halt mine construction for the moment. Read more about it here.
Featured image: Resistance in Thacker Pass by Max Wilbert
Editor’s Note: In the Fight for Who We Love series, we introduce you to one species every month. These nonhuman species are what inspires most of us to join the environmental movement and to continue to fight for the natural world. We hope you find this series inspiring, informative, and a break from news on industrial civilization. Let us know what you think in comments! Also, if there is a species that you want us to cover in the upcoming months, please make suggestions in the comments. Today it is Adélie penguins.
Adélie (pronounced uh-DELL-ee) penguins live in the deep south: Antarctica.
You know that movie Happy Feet featuring dancing penguins? Yeah, so those aren’t actually Adélie penguins they’re emperor penguins (the other primary penguin species who exclusively call Antarctica home).
But just because Adélies didn’t star in their own film doesn’t make them any less cute or important. Because they are rather attractive creatures with some extraordinary capabilities.
The Adélie penguins live on average from 10 to 20 years in the wild, can grow to about 24in/60cm tall, and spend most of their lives in the water, holding their breath for up to about six minutes and diving over 500ft/150m.
They’re also capable of swimming more than 100mi/160km in search of food. These expeditions are far reaching and can last more than 70 hours. 70 hours! That’s, like, nearly 5 days! I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine having the endurance for trips like that.
The Adélies are not only adept swimmers, but very good walkers and can traverse over 30mi/50km at a time. Given their waddle-like tendencies, perhaps that’s not a skill most of us would’ve imagined. I mean, how many of us humans walk that much? Sure, some of us do, but probably not many and not often.
THE BIGGEST THREAT
“…[I]t’s possible that up to 60 percent of current Adélie penguin colonies could experience population declines by the end of this century.” —Megan Cimino, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Climate Change is not only the biggest threat to Adélies, but to entire species across the globe. Bill Fraser, a biologist who has been visiting the Adélies over the past thirty years, was interviewed in the 2022 documentary series Frozen Planet II by James Reed and talks about one of the reasons why Adélie penguins are dying: the rain.
We humans often grumble a bit if we have to put on our raincoats when the weather is “bad.” But the Adélies can’t so easily deal with such drastic weather changes.
Since they are uniquely adapted to the cold temperatures and dry air in Antarctica, Adélies struggle to survive when the weather is rainy and humid. The penguins build their nests on bare ground using small stones, often returning to the same place to nest. But changes in the climate — for example, too much rain —seriously threatens the Adélies’ ability to nest. The rain soaks and flattens the chicks’ down feathers, which means that they no longer have built-in insulation against the cold.
NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) could prove in ice core samples that carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane, and nitrous oxides have increased in the last hundred years.
Over the last 800,000 years the levels of CO₂ ranged steadily from 170 to 300 parts per million (PPM), and in 2010 they reached a record high of 386 PPM. “In all ice core samples, there is a shocking increase in air pollutants in the last 100 years that directly correlates to car use and an industrializing global economy,” write scientists of the International Pollution Issues, an electronic research journal.
Pollution in Antarctica is also exacerbated by the “grasshopper effect, which causes persistent organic pollutants (POPs) to move from a warmer to a colder climate where they are consumed by several species. Species higher in the food chain, such as seals, penguins, and whales, are affected the most because they eat organisms that have already stored POPs in their fat and tissue. This is called bioaccumulation.
Native landscapes millions of years old are being bulldozed in the name of technological progress to make room for industrial civilization and human infrastructure — things like second homes, parking lots, and factories. These devastating changes to the earth have extreme effects on the weather patterns, and create conditions that never before existed in a region.
Human-induced changes also affect the ozone layer, a stratospheric layer which shields Earth from damaging ultraviolet radiation. According to the National Science Foundation to the United States, the ozone layer above Antarctica is being depleted during long, icy winters when stratospheric clouds harbor small particulates of chlorofluorocarbons and other aerosols. And this hole that has appeared in the ozone layer above Antarctica was reported by NASA in 2014 to cover an area of roughly 9.2 million mi2/24 million km2.
“Scientists predict that more than half of Adélie colonies will be in decline by the end of the century.”
Editor’s Note: The Earth is dying. The facts are there. Yet, not a lot of people take it seriously. Otherwise, we would have seen a much greater action around it. The following post tries to explain this phenomenon by the concepts of enlightenment, wétiko, denial of reality and maximum power principle, and by challenging the preconceived notions in our civilization.
My last post about enlightenment was to describe the simple fact that enlightenment does not bring happiness or fulfillment but is a stripping away of innocence and naïvety. Enlightenment is what experience and reality replaces idealism with. My own experience informs me that I must choose to look for positives rather than the negatives which initially overwhelm me. I must turn away from the anthropocentric perspective which I am naturally biased with. In this manner, I can then begin to look at the collective set of predicaments our species has brought forth and see it for the unvarnished truth that it really is. My writings aren’t unique, as many others write about the same topics as I do. However, very few actually point to the actual roots of these predicaments the way I do, and perhaps denial of reality (see link below) is one reason why. Doing so requires much grief work along the way, realizing the true nature of how we got to this point.
I brought the concept of wétiko into that post (as well as many others), and an article from Max Wilbert about Protect Thacker Pass made me realize that I should probably expand on this concept as well as point out the reasons for it. In the article, he quotes Jack D. Forbes, and then goes on to explain here, quote:
“‘The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko as an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious.’
That contagion is dangerous. None of us are immune. This is why all of humanity’s most lasting stories, from the Wendigo to Star Wars, tell of internal conflict. Whether you call it greed, temptation, evil, the Dark Side of the Force, or anything else, humans have the capacity for doing wrong.“
It was that very part which is so powerful that made me see that I need to expand on it to bring the reality of precisely what it is into the forefront. Most people brought up in western civilization cannot “see” wétiko because they are indoctrinated against it. (Go here for an indepth and complete description of what civilization is.) Elementary schools teach history in such a way as to present Europeans as the “good guys” and North American Indians as the “bad guys” when in reality, it is the other way around from an ecological standpoint. European cultures invaded North American Indians’ lands and used their superior technology to wipe out or marginalize the Indians wherever resistance was mounted. This same colonialism has presented itself time and time again all over the world, where a force with superior technology has wiped out culture after culture and relegated such cultures to history. The trouble with this is in the fact that those cultures actually lived in a far more sustainable relationship with their environment than most all of us today.
Most of us in western civilization look at land ownership, agriculture, and civilization itself as part of who we are, including our economic systems and cultural systems. Until one learns the reality about these systems being unsustainable, one almost never questions their necessity or their presence. Once one questions the presence and the necessity of continuing these systems, one becomes aware of the fact that humans lived without these systems for most all of our entire history except the last ten to twelve thousand years (in the case of civilization) and only the last 200 years or so has been industrial civilization.
“The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is a normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.” ~ Assata Shakur
This quote is poignant due to precisely the predicament we find ourselves in. Now, I still do not think that 8 billion or more human beings can live on this planet in a sustainable manner, regardless of how they live simply due to the fact that in order to provide habitat to that many humans more or less requires an amount of energy for habitat greater than can be provided through renewable resources (provided by photosynthesis). Still, there is no doubt in my mind that the humans who are alive today could live far more sustainably than those of us who live the Western Civilization lifestyle. The oppression most all of us face has to do with technology use, civilization, and the economic system currently being used, among many other items commonly discussed in the social justice realm.
Whether one calls the set of circumstances we find ourselves in a predicament, a multi-polar trap,dilemma, or something having a similar meaning as these, this set of circumstances is far different than a problem. This set of circumstances cannot be solved or answered with a simple solution or even a set of solutions. Even if the entirety of human population right now could cease all anthropogenic emissions immediately (something which is utterly impossible), ecological overshoot and climate change and many other symptom predicaments of overshoot would continue unabated (see Denial of Reality for the evidence). While eliminating emissions would be a really nice start to mitigating climate change, as long as overshoot is allowed to continue, we would have accomplished very little. The only way to reduce overshoot is to reduce technology use – in other words, we will need to promote degrowth and the abandonment of the system of civilization, because it is unsustainable. Civilization is supported by technology use and cannot exist without it. Even back when our species lived mostly in a sustainable fashion, we only did so after causing destruction first (usually in the form of wiping out the species we relied on for our very existence) and learning from our mistakes. Still, most Indigenous societies learned these lessons and even today still live in a mostly sustainable fashion compared to those living in the system of civilization.
Ultimately, Indigenous cultures found a way to live more or less in a subsistence lifestyle and did so in a very fulfilled way, being supported by other members of their society. Because each member felt supported by the other members, there was generally little unhappiness. If a member felt unhappy about something, it was discussed with others who helped the member come to terms with whatever ailed him or her.
Getting back to Max Wilbert’s quote, we see that wétiko psychosis is the cause of our undoing and that it is very contagious. How does this present itself in society? Take any form of technology from simple to complex and show a person unfamiliar with said technology this tool to help this person through his or her day. How likely would a person reject this new form of help, especially if you are his or her friend and YOU have it and are using it? Start with simple stone tools and progress through today’s computerized systems, robotics, AI systems (who hasn’t seen someone posting about ChatGPT?), cars, electricity, medical technology and so on. What you have just witnessed is the Maximum Power Principle in action. This is precisely what causes our lack of agency with regard to so many different topics, and also what causes the root issue of our unsustainability. For those who still believe in free will, go back to these articles I have linked here and read them. It took me a long time to accept the reality and I am all too painfully aware that providing the facts and evidence won’t change your mind because if it did, you would no longer have the impediment of that belief since it doesn’t exist:
“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.” ~Carl Sagan
As for folks who think we have the ability to go against the Maximum Power Principle, you are actually correct – we can go against it (in a sense). This is exactly what most Indigenous cultures did upon coming into contact with European cultures. The European cultures then subsequently wiped them out or sidelined them onto reservations because they held superior technology. I would even go as far to say that we should go against the MPP to the extent possible. This has been the attempt almost every activist has made at one point or another. However, we will then be fighting those who have superior technology and weapons (society will first label troublemakers as terrorists and use superior technology against those folks), and one can clearly see how that battle ends up. Some people may gasp at the reality of robotic dogs with mounted machine guns, but look at the technology that is available to the average person now! At the end of the day, going against the MPP is something that will only result in actually making a difference once everyone agrees that reducing ecological overshoot through reducing technology use, promoting degrowth, and promoting the abandonment of civilization is the correct way to handle the set of predicaments we have gotten ourselves into. The real question is this: Will that day ever come? I’m not going to hold my breath. As long as there are still people who choose to continue living under the system of civilization, they will consume and utilize the energy and resources that those of us who choose to conserve said energy and resources do not use, undoing any progress along the way. As long as there are those who resist giving up modern technology and civilization, reducing ecological overshoot becomes a test of character because we ALL live on the same planet. For anyone still believing otherwise, perhaps the shopping cart theory story might convince you that there are many reasons that society might still choose to live under our current systems rather than attempt to abandon it despite it being unsustainable. One last reason we lack agency is Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity I posted quite sometime ago.
The conclusion I have come to based upon all the evidence is one that I do not like at all; but one that I cannot deny either. We have very little if any agency to be able to do anything better than what is being done right now as long as there is still relative abundance. Only when the pain becomes too great will most people change their behavior, and this quote reminds me of this fact:
No one changes unless they want to. Not if you beg them. Not if you shame them. Not if you use reason, emotion, or tough love. There’s only one thing that makes someone change: their own realization that they need to do it. And there’s only one time it will happen: when they decide they’re ready. ~Unknown
Once one sees the enlightenment that I have disclosed in recent articles (going back to November) and comprehends our collective and individual lack of agency to be able to make serious change during this time of relative abundance, the best one can do is to follow their own conscience and to Live Now.
Editor’s Note: The civilization has destroyed many places in the name of progress, which they call ‘sacrifice zones.’ The following piece discusses different instances of destruction from recent history, and how the current economy has actively profited from those destructions. The views expressed in the article are of the author. DGR does not necessarily agree with all of the opinions expressed.
By Mankh
Considering the destruction caused by extractive mining and wars, the global corporate empire society sure seems like one huge controlled demolition. Before getting to the topic of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and specifically Thacker Pass aka Peehee Mu’huh, some examples and explanation of the context of controlled demolition.
Currently in Ukraine, various governments/investors are making bank on both ends of the stick: from the weapons manufacturers destruction end AND the BlackRock, Inc. (an American multi-national investment company) et al reconstruction end. A December 2022 CNBC headline spilled the beans: “Zelenskyy, BlackRock CEO Fink agree to coordinate Ukraine investment” and more recently: “The estimated cost of Ukraine’s reconstruction and recovery bill has grown to $411 billion.” — while US infrastructure crumbles. A key aspect of the reconstruction is multinational agri-businesses salivating over Ukraine’s rich soil, something rarely mentioned in umpteen war analyses.
Speaking of crumbling infrastructure, the derailed train and subsequent deliberate explosions of toxic chemicals in Palestine, Ohio (which includes rivers), has created an environmental disaster; another controlled demolition because lack of care for railroad maintenance and extra care for dollars helped create the accident waiting to happen.
From an article by Tish O’Dell and Chad Nicholson:
“Three days after the derailment, on Feb. 6, we watched as Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, in consultation with Norfolk Southern representatives, greenlighted a plan to blow holes in five of the cars containing toxic chemicals, which would lead to a ‘controlled release,’ and residents in nearby communities were ordered to evacuate. … By Feb. 7, according to a Norfolk Southern service alert, trains were running through East Palestine again. As thousands of dead fish floated in local waterways, as nearby residents were reporting sickness and dying pets, as untold long-term health and environmental problems lurked in the hazy future, the railroad chugged back to business as usual.”
The broader issue to consider is this: controlled demolition requires careful preparation or deliberate lack there of—and then with the virtual flick of a switch, it happens . . . like dominoes. And a ‘new reality’ is created. What quickly followed the 9-11 attacks was the Global War Of Terror, later determined to have been riddled with lies.
After Covid-19 began, there were lockdowns and a slew of enforced restrictions, many of which were later deemed unwarranted. The world changed in a flash, as did the economy, with many small and some larger businesses going bust, as the elite rich got richer. Yet whatever one’s opinion about all that, the message from the natural world was quiet and clear: rivers and skies cleared up! . . . showing that healing can happen quickly―if we drastically curtail the business as usual of industrial capitalism.
After Ukraine re-began with Russia’s attacks (because the situation ‘began’ in 2014 with the Maidan/neo-Nazi coup overthrowing elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych) . . . economic sanctions, global economic shake-ups-and-downs, nuclear saber rattling, and more, including the above mentioned agri-business ploy, which, by the way, is also global, as, for example, Bill Gates is “the largest landowner in the U.S.,” owning “270,000 acres spread across 18 different states.”
A Twitter post on March 20, 2023, by esteemed journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, succinctly sums up the media-military-complex modus operandi:
It is estimated that over 2 million people died in Iraq as a direct result of the unprovoked invasion led by Bush and Blair. The whole horror was a fraud, based on lies and corrupt 'intelligence'. So why believe similar sources on Ukraine, Russia, China?https://t.co/qBNQb57IOK
And though not as visibly dramatic, preparations for controlled demolition are happening again with the deliberate push for EVs (Electric Vehicles). For example, in New York, November 2022:
“Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation that will advance clean transportation efforts by removing barriers to the installation of electric vehicle charging stations on private property.”
&
“The Charge NY initiative offers electric car buyers the Drive Clean Rebate of up to $2,000 for new car purchases or leases. Combine that with a Federal Tax Credit of up to $7,500, and it’s an opportunity you wouldn’t want to miss. If you are a New York State resident looking for a new car, it’s a great time to buy or lease a plug-in hybrid or battery-powered car that qualifies for the Drive Clean Rebate.”
As any reader of Deep Green Resistance News Service and those following or participating in the efforts to Protect Thacker Pass knows, “clean” is false advertising and you would want to resist the opportunity. In the broad case of EVs, we, as human beings and as consumers have choices that can affect or re-direct the trajectory of this huge deliberate push for EVs, which is a kind of heating up of boiled frogs controlled demolition . . . because if not stopped, suddenly EVs will dominate the roads and landscapes, while sacred habitats and Native lands are destroyed.
As lawyer and Protect Thacker Pass co-founder Will Falk has alluded to in various interviews and videos, many aspects of the legal system are rigged in favor of government and corporate control of mining; this is a form of control with the goal of demolition of habitat and wildlife, too-often along with desecration of Native lands for profit.
I don’t have the answers for how to stop such control freak factors, but at least recognizing that there are various preparations so that a demolition ‘goes smoothly’ will help each person/group/organization find a best way to participate so as to help prevent specific preparations and perhaps prevent the controlled demolition of Thacker Pass aka Peehee Mu’huh, as well as other sacred site hot spots.
The natural world of plants also has an array of unseen or barely visible preparations until . . . a flower buds then blooms or fruit ripens; let’s call that process a controlled creation or the unfolding of innate potential, as with a seed. This is what those who care about the Earth work hard to defend, protect, and preserve—the natural cycles.
Further demolition examples
In 2017, investigative journalist, author and filmmaker Greg Palast reported:
“…an eyewitness with devastating new information about the Caspian Sea oil-rig blow-out which BP had concealed from government and the industry.
The witness, whose story is backed up by rig workers who were evacuated from BP’s Caspian platform, said that had BP revealed the full story as required by industry practice, the eleven Gulf of Mexico workers ‘could have had a chance’ of survival. But BP’s insistence on using methods proven faulty sealed their fate. One cause of the blow-outs was the same in both cases: the use of a money-saving technique, plugging holes with ‘quick-dry’ cement. By hiding the disastrous failure of its penny-pinching cement process in 2008, BP was able to continue to use the dangerous methods in the Gulf of Mexico, causing the worst oil spill in U.S. history.”
As with East Palestine and umpteen other so-called disasters, cutting corners for profit is too-often a factor with controlled demolitions.
“Disasters like these keep happening because the system — the train — keeps rolling, exactly as it was designed to, foisting the consequences onto communities and their environments and hoarding the spoils for the economic elites, while government regulatory agencies issue permits and legalize it all.
“Since this country’s founding, our system of government has placed profits and property interests over people and planet. The derailment in East Palestine illustrates this clearly. For over 150 years, railroad workers have been telling employers like Norfolk Southern and the government that their working conditions are deplorable and dangerous.
“With deregulation of the industry in the 1980s, which included Wall Street mergers and ’short term profit imperatives,’ trains have been getting longer and longer while the number of train workers gets smaller and smaller.”
“Villages along the road are coated with airborne debris. There are no flowers to be found. No birds in the sky. No placid streams. No pleasant breezes. The ornaments of nature are gone. All color seems pale and unformed. Only the fragments of life remain. This is Lualaba Province, where cobalt is king.”
“‘The trees were all gone’: Indonesia’s nickel mines reveal the dark side of our electric future”
To consider these areas as sacrifice zones is a form of mental trickery because it allows people to think that, overall, things are OK, a few bad apples but things are OK in the big apple tree picture. But the other perspective is that things are not OK because continuing to destroy habitats, pollute rivers and air has a cumulative effect. Out of sight, out of mind is no longer an excuse because even with Internet and book censorship, you can often find true information—with a bit of effort.
At Thacker Pass, Lithium Americas’ attempt to destroy the habitat and Native lands for lithium for EVs and other gadgets represents a watershed moment in the global and local greenwashing attempt to revolutionize the extractive energy economy. But the problem with that is, as the word suggests, such ‘revolutions’ wind up back where they started in circular fashion, yet only with a ‘new’ look.
The east coast of Turtle Island is riddled with the aftereffects of the so-called revolution of 1776: New York, New Jersey, New England, New Hampshire, New Haven, New London, New Bedford . . . and on it goes, out to New Mexico and elsewhere. Such ‘newness’ has a track record of destruction and enforced relocation of Native Peoples, and that’s some of what’s on the proverbial table at Thacker Pass.
Shift the narrative . . . dis-invest . . . donate $s . . . employ some monkey-wrenches . . . organize, defend, protest, write something, talk . . . think about a specific area of the in the works controlled demolition that you feel you could literally help thwart. Find a way to do something so as to help prevent yet another control freak demolition. Find a way to do something to preserve “the ornaments of nature” and the lifestyles of those who care for them.
Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is a verbiage experiencer, in other words, he’s into etymology, writes about his experiences and to encourage people to learn from direct experiences, not just head knowledge; you know, actions and feelings speak louder than words. He’s also a publisher and enjoys gardening, talking, listening, looking… His recent book is Moving Through The Empty Gate Forest: inside looking out. Find out more at his website: www.allbook-books.com
Editor’s Note: In the following piece, Sue Coulstock invites you in Nuyts Wilderness Walk. Along the journey, she shares her reflections on Australia’s colonial past, and the many nonhumans who call the wilderness their homes.
By Sue Coulstock
Recently we did an impromptu reconnaissance hike in a pocket of remnant old-growth Karri/Tingle forest, in preparation for doing the Nuyts Wilderness Walk for the first time later this Southern autumn. I’ve blogged our hikes for years to share with overseas friends and thought I’d share this one with fellow DGR people from all over the world. Many of you will be consciously limiting overseas travel, so I wanted to give you a vicarious walking experience in Australia with us.
As we were exhausted from working a bit too hard, we set out without a particular walk target, just to enjoy the forest and possibly have our lunch at the Mt Clare hut.
Here’s a context map of this special part of the world. There are no roads south of the Deep River; it’s walk-only. That situation is a little analogous to the amazing South Cape Bay Walk in Tasmania, where the road ends at Cockle Creek and from there you hike to the ocean – in that case, to the southernmost point of Tasmania.
There are sadly so few areas left in the world like this. We are such a terribly destructive culture. 250 years ago Australia was still unmarred by European civilisation and its large-scale annihilation of native ecosystems and cultures. Many people don’t think it’s even a problem. It’s not helped by the fact that Australia, like the US, has a highly urbanised population. Most Westerners essentially grow up in captivity and have little exposure to or understanding of natural ecosystems. I met kids in socially disadvantaged parts of London who had never seen a tree that hadn’t been planted by humans, and who didn’t even have an interest in such things. I went on a bush camp with privileged high schoolers from Sydney’s Northern Beaches who screamed when they saw insects and who immediately got out their pocket wet wipes when they got a bit of mud on their legs when we went hiking. They were ecstatic to get back to the shopping complexes that were their natural habitat. People can live and die entirely swallowed up in dystopia, so far from their roots as biological beings that they may as well live on a space station.
This is at the start of our walk at John Rate Lookout.
And we shall be your Hobbity guides today, so that if you live far across the seas, you can have a vicarious experience of this ancient ecosystem, which I shall do my level best to make vivid for you through photos and prose, so that hopefully you will be able to feel that part of you went walking with us.♥
There’s a boardwalk at the lookout with steps leading to the Bibbulmun track and a sign suggesting people walk into Walpole. We were heading in the other direction.
John Rate, perhaps unwittingly part of the machine that pulled down the Old Growth Forests, got a mention on this sign but I bet his much-feted understanding couldn’t have held a candle to the ecological understanding of the Noongar people who used to live in this forest. He’s celebrated for “discovering” a species of Tingle tree, as Captain Cook was celebrated for “discovering” Australia. It’s an odd way of looking at Australian history, to imagine people could have lived here for 60,000 years ignorant of this tree or of the continent beneath their feet.
You have to read the tourist information signs in the forest areas with a large grain of salt. It’s better to get into the forest and let it inform you.
Brett and I are so aware that urban and agricultural landscapes are terribly scarred and ecologically degraded, even the ones considered picturesque. It’s funny how the Western euphemism for degradation is “development” – I laughed when I heard a story about an Indigenous man from a rainforest saying, “What do you mean you want to develop this forest? It’s already developed – it took millions of years to get to this point!”
We treasure being able to immerse ourselves in relatively unspoilt areas, and to listen, with our bodies, minds and hearts, to what nature is saying to us. This is like coming home, on a fundamental level. It is like visiting a living cathedral, and learning about the respect and kinship you are supposed to have with the web of life. It is learning your place, which is as one species among many, and not as the alleged cream of creation, nor as the self-proclaimed pinnacle of evolution. It is learning about yourself as a biological being, walking for hours as your ancestors did on the African plains, down from the trees with hairless skin to help with evaporative cooling.
I’d not felt that energetic when I woke up that morning, and we had considered shorter walks even than the open-ended “John Rate Lookout to maybe Mt Clare hut if we can make it that far.” Yet we ended up walking for hours without committing to that in the first place, just because it was so magnificent to be in this forest.
Hollow spaces, nooks and crannies everywhere. The whole place teeming with life, despite the fact that we’ve tried to crush life out of these forests, and have significantly succeeded in doing so. I’d love to travel back in time 250 years and stand in this place, before this country took the dubious honour of having the worst rate of mammal extinctions in the world and people bulldozed entire ecosystems off the face of the earth.
One of the things nature teaches is that we’re all both eating, and becoming food for others in turn. The feathers of this Port Lincoln Ringneck Parrot were left behind after it became a meal for another creature. When its body has been through and partly become that creature, the expelled remains become food for decomposers and nutrition for plant roots. We are stardust and we go around and around to make this glorious diversity of life on earth with each other. Or at least we are supposed to.
Civilised humans on the other hand like to be at the end of every food chain, taking and taking, eating everything and never giving back, not even after death, when our bodies are nowadays typically either burnt to a cinder with the help of fossil fuels, or entombed in a box of furniture-grade wood (from the body of a tree) six feet under and far out of the reach of the soil organic layer where decomposition occurs and feeds a plethora of species including, finally, plants – but oh no, why should we give back? Why should we admit we’re part of all of this when we can pretend to be above it – above the web of life which birthed us? When we can make believe we are some superior being only owed and never owing, not a mere part of the biosphere but its appointed master and annihilator?
A song about world views…
It really is insane, all this crazy desperate need
For unknowable magic, strange supernatural power
You’re flying through space at a million miles an hour
For 4 billion years, the sun keeps coming up
It’s all too wonderful for words but for you it’s not enough
You should step out of the shadows yeah and step into the light
All too wonderful for words, but precious few in Western culture who truly see it and who deeply care for it. The astronomical things sketched in the song, or the beauty and intricacy of the biosphere – which for our society is primarily a resource to be exploited, not Life to be honoured. Your life is cheap, if you’re an ordinary citizen, as many have found out and are continuing to find out when push comes to shove; and it’s even cheaper if you’re some other being, especially if you’re not “cute” (i.e. big-eyed and rounded and resembling the human infant), or if you’re as visually and behaviourally different to Homo allegedly sapiens as a tree or a slime mould. To The Economy, you’re just a commodity, valued according to the money you can make someone else. It’s The Economy, stupid. There is no community – not a human community, not a biotic community – these things don’t matter, when push comes to shove; the best they get from the power structures of our society is lip service, pretence and equivocation.
From the time I was a young child and first disappeared into the wooded foothills of the Italian Alps with only a four-legged canine companion in the late 1970s, I felt embraced by the natural world, safe, welcome; and I felt an ever-increasing awe and love for it as I got to know it better. When I was an adolescent, I began to look through the microscope of biology, ecology, physiology, biochemistry, physics etc at the natural world, like Gulliver’s Travels to Brobdingnag where he was suddenly tiny and could see the world in much more detail than ever before; like a Fantastic Voyage into the bloodstream of the biosphere. My awe and love for the natural world continued to grow.
I still feel this embrace, and my inner response to it, every time I go out to where nature is still writ large and still breathing. From the time I was a child, I’ve touched branches and reeds on the sides of trails with affection, loved the aroma of leaves and flowers and of earth after rain (for which we can thank the actinomycetes), and liked to feel raindrops on my skin. I’ve delighted in the presence of ants, bees, dragonflies, ladybirds, butterflies, scrolly-antennaed moths, chirpy crickets, praying mantises. And that’s just some of the insects…if I were to enumerate other sources of delight in nature, I could fill volumes (and I have).
So let’s turn our attention to some of the special trees on this hike. Close to Walpole there are three species of Eucalyptus referred to as Tingles, which grow into veritable giants, especially in girth. Over the hundreds of years, a lot of them get their bases carved out by fire, which is a normal feature of sclerophyll vegetation such as we steward at Red Moon Sanctuary, and also, at longer intervals, of the eucalyptus forests in the higher-rainfall areas towards Walpole. Indigenous Australians prevented major wildfires with mostly cool-burning cultural burning practices, at the right times to reduce risk and encourage biodiversity, such as the plants and the animals they depended on for food. In a summer-dry ecosystem where microbial decomposition activity is seriously inhibited, the right fire at the right time (generally small-scale, cool, and near the start of reliable rains) can be a helpful tool for turning dry dead plant material into nutrient-rich ash, which gives a boost to soils, promotes new growth in plants and allows for spectacular flowering. It also gives a good start to the seedlings that have the space and light to grow when dry dead material is converted to ash. Good plant growth and flowering in turn benefits grazing and nectar-feeding animals.
Another benefit of fire is that it tends to create shelter and nesting hollows in the older trees and in fallen trunks, which benefit birds, mammals such a possums, insects, etc etc. In the bases of many old Tingle trees, these are more like caves!
The next photo has Brett standing in the base of the tree for scale.
Now I’m zooming in, and you may see him better!
Now we’re looking up at the tree.
There is rather too much of it to get even half of it into frame. Since we actually didn’t know we were going to do a walk we’d not done before when we set out in the morning, we didn’t take the good camera that usually accompanies us for documentation. These snaps were taken on an iPod, which is a bit limited and produces a bit of distortion, most notably in people photos.
Next, Brett spotted a bright orange bracket fungus with an unusual shape.
It’s probably a Curry Punk (Piptoporus australiensis). The guide book says “edibility unknown” and that made me recall an answer I got when I was little and asked which fungi you could eat, and was told, “You can eat all fungi, but some of them only once.”
Since we knew people overseas or in cities would be interested, we took photos of quite a few different hollow Tingle-tree bases. (By the way, not all of them are hollow!)
So here’s another.
I went inside this tree but couldn’t look out of the “window”, it was too far up for me! So Brett photographed through it from the outside. The ground outside the tree is usually significantly higher than inside because the fire carves right down into the buttresses.
This was the view out. You can’t see it properly, but in the first one Brett pretended he’d been speared through the head with his walking stick. So I hereby dub this photograph “The Spearhead From Space“ (after an old Dr Who episode – my husband is a big fan).
This would be quite a nice place to overnight in if you brought a camping mattress and some mosquito veils. The base would easily accommodate a Queen-sized bed, not that you’d bring one of those. It also has great views.
This was the “door”…
This was the roof, considerably above me.
And this is another window.
We continued on our merry way. The temperature in the forest was most pleasant, even though we had been cooking already in the sunlight on the way there. The moment you step into this tall forest, you are mostly walking in shade or dappled sunlight; only occasionally there is a burst of full sun. This is how life makes conditions for nurturing more life; creates a wonderland of species and habitat and microclimates and even influences the weather.
And we Westerners chainsawed, logged and bulldozed most of these forests into oblivion, and much of what is left into a shadow of its former glory. This is one of the little patches in which old-growth trees can still be found. Most of South-Western Australia’s forests and woodlands were converted to farmland, where pastures and monoculture crops swelter under the sun in summer and exposed soils dry out and die. Because we think what we do is so superior to what the Indigenous people who lived here for 60,000 years did. And we won’t last 60,000 years, we’ve already destroyed much of Australia in under 250 – we’re a short-term thrill with chronic delusions, mostly about how clever and superior we are, and how our technology will save us.
This next photo, Brett was very adamant should be called ” The Moss-Tache”…
And then we were crossing Tingledale Drive, and arrived in the Nuyts Wilderness trailhead area, where there were lots of information signs.
We continued up Mt Clare – at this point the Bibbulmun Track and the start of the Nuyts Wilderness Track overlap, as you can see on the context map at the start of this photoessay. The climb up was on a gentle slope.
There were more information signs…
If you look closely behind the third Tingle in the background in the next photo you can just see the roof of the Mt Clare camping hut. You may have to look lower down than you are expecting as these trees are enormous…
Usually we stop and rest at these huts all along the Bibbulmun trail – they appear at approximately day walk intervals. However – and this was a first for us – the Mt Clare hut had been freshly repainted and reeked of industrial solvents, so we tried the open-air outdoors table instead. It too was most malodorous, as perplexing a phenomenon in such a near-pristine ecosystem as when you go mountain climbing with a chain smoker. So we checked our map and decided to have lunch at the gazetted suspension bridge across the Deep River, which sounded very interesting. We haven’t been across a suspension bridge on a hike since our half year in Launceston in 2009, where we were frequent hikers on the Cataract Gorge trails.
On the way there were some major tree hugging opportunities. Here’s a Tingle with a solid base.
An old-growth Tingle is not easy to hug. It’s a bit more like leaning in affectionately, but there’s no way the arms go anywhere near around even a fifth of the 12m circumference. Nevertheless, I think the intention is perceived in some way. These are ancient beings hundreds of years old. No wonder Tolkien wrote about Ents.
I don’t know how anybody can think cutting one of these down is fine and dandy, but in this world, every day, we are losing such trees to insane humans working in an insane economic system. I don’t know how anyone can think they make it right by “replanting” another tree. It would take hundreds of years to get to the same life stage, if it even lived that long – and natural forests plant themselves, thank you very much, and unlike plantations, are a treasure trove of genetic diversity and relationships. Humans only had to start planting trees after their own activities obliterated most of the trees on this Earth. We owe much more than we can ever repay, and it’s farcical to talk about carbon credits and biodiversity offsets. It’s a veneer of greenwash to conceal a core of ongoing and ever accelerating destruction, while people abuse words like “sustainable” and “love” and make “Centres of Excellence” for biological research which is never allowed to say no to profit and “progress”.
Here’s some upwards photos of the same tree! I got much of the trunk in the first one, but needed another to look at its crown in the canopy.
We had a kilometre to go until the Deep River; beautiful forest, and a fairly steep descent. As we approached the river valley, granite started peeping out of the ground.
The photos visually flatten out the actual steepness – in the next photo, we were upslope and across a small tributary valley from the dog who was climbing the slope on the other side!
“C’mon, keep up!” – says the dog, looking back at us. She could smell the water and was keen for the promised swim. When I know we have definite swimming opportunities ahead, I tell her there is a “splish” coming up. Dogs find words easier if you use onomatopoeia. This is also why when we’re talking to her, a car (or car trip) is a “brroom-brroom!” and the mention of this word at home gets excited leaps from her and immediate attempts to herd us out of the front door. I should film it sometime.
Descending towards the Deep River, there were some majestic Karri trees. The binomial name for this one is Eucalyptus diversicolor, and you’ll understand why looking at its bark.
I actually love the fact that on the remote and serious trails, things aren’t constantly manicured and tidied up for the convenience of typical urban walkers. I like having to climb obstacles in places like this and to use my wits and my body to work out puzzles, instead of having a kind of pedestrian freeway presented to me, as is the case for the touristy spots like Bluff Knoll and the Granite Skywalk. I enjoy having to look closely at where I am going, and figuring things out. Not having such opportunities is just another way of dumbing down our world, our inner lives, and our physicality. I come properly alive in wild places. The animal I am recognises what gave birth to me, to us, long ago.
And then we were at the suspension bridge.
We stopped in the middle of this wobbly, free-swinging bridge to drink in the views of the Deep River. I took two photos, to the west and to the east, which you are about to see. But just before I took them, I asked Brett to please stop jumping up and down, because I was taking a picture. And he said, “I’m not jumping up and down!”
“Hahaha…sorry!” Long time no suspension bridge. (But it’s exactly the sort of thing my husband has been known to do…not to deliberately interfere with photography, but just for the joy of it…♥)
And once arrived at the other side, our delighted dog cooled herself down in the Deep River.♥ We’d been giving her intermittent drinks from a bottle we take especially for her – in summer, there’s not much water in this landscape. Jess is nearly 11 now and needs extra TLC, plus a sofa recovery day after a long hike, but so far she is still coping well with extended walking and would be outraged to be left behind when we do something so fun. In her prime she used to run rings around my endurance horse, or our mountain bikes, and cover at least twice the distance we did; plus she swam like a hydrofoil as a young dog. I actually think it’s kinder to an animal to put it down when it gets to the point it can’t do the things it enjoys the most anymore, and not let it linger. We’re not at that point and right now she’s on excellent arthritis treatment that re-lubricates the joints. She also these days really enjoys her sofa recovery days, combined with good grub, which allow her body to rest and repair. In a way, we’re a bit like that ourselves these days.
Fabulous dog.♥
We lunched on the steps of the bridge, in the shade, with a breeze blowing on us and the water flowing by. Brett had made us our favourite hiking salad: Just cut carrots and cheddar cheese into cubes, mix in a roughly 3:1 ratio, dress with lemon juice and cayenne pepper. Even the dog likes it. We also had salt and vinegar peanuts, half a home-grown Cox’s Orange Pippin apple each, and water from the drink bottles, mine with a splash of lemon.
Morning tea en route to Walpole had been ice cream made by the Meadery – double coffee for him; hazelnut on top, chocolate on the bottom for me. Normally we do that after a hike, but today we put it in the tank first. Waiting at home to balance us up in the evening was a big dish of moussaka, with home-grown zucchini, potatoes, tomatoes, herbs; kangaroo mince from Woolies (we’re currently out of home-grown beef mince), cheese sauce on the top potato layer, tons of grated pepper.
Kangaroo is equivalent to venison; the top predators were largely removed on the respective continents and neither the common deer species or the Western Grey Kangaroo are endangered, but the landscape has to be protected from overgrazing (and not just by kangaroos) or we’re going to accelerate bird and small mammal extinctions, not to mention flora, insects etc. We’re happy to co-graze wild kangaroos and emus with the cattle and equines on the pasture/permie previously cleared fraction of our place and don’t deter them; we welcome their presence and, excepting for our vegetable garden, deliberately made the fence passable to them but not to the livestock. (Top and bottom polybraids in the internal fences are hot but the middle is not, so they can slip through without getting zapped. Also, for boundary fences, have you heard of kangaroo gates?)
Occasionally local Noongar people will take a roo for their traditional food from the healthy local populations, including from Red Moon Sanctuary; and we eat the odd one that gets put down due to injuries like broken bones. A local octogenarian bushie friend who died last year brought us the occasional fresh roadkill he found by the highway; Trowunna Wildlife Sanctuary in Tasmania does the same to feed their charges. We don’t have Tasmanian Devils, but we do have a dog and stomachs of our own and these carcasses need taking off the roads. It’s not for everyone, but we’re fine with it if it’s fresh (and Jess prefers it when it’s not, and will track down her own). If you grew up in the city you may be appalled, but we didn’t and we do live close to the cycle of life and its realities. Also I’m a very good cook, and we’re both foodies – so don’t imagine that there are taste or food safety compromises.
Alas, the food that nurtures, repairs and powers us, and the acceptance that we should give ourselves in turn to the nurture, repair and powering of other beings when our lives end, instead of locking ourselves away like misers when we’re dead. Hat firmly off to Indigenous Australian traditional burials, and the sky burials in the Himalayas, and any other culture who recognises that we are part of the circle and need to act and live like it.
And then we were homeward bound again, for variety taking the loop route via Tingledale Drive back to the Bibbulmun (see map at start).
There were more Tingles with hollowed-out bases whose cubbies I tried out.
There was an agricultural clearing in this valley with something that looked like an outdoor education camp.
It was really hot on the road – removing a forest will change the microclimate. Local cattle were looking to rest under shade trees. Many of the big-business paddocks near where we live haven’t got a single tree in them and it should be illegal to keep animals in shadeless pastures – but the big corporations have got into the beef game and are making their own rules, which are all about maximising profit and pushing family farmers out of business. It’s expensive and time-consuming to plant shelter belts as we did, and you won’t break even financially on them through increased livestock productivity – we do it because it’s the right thing for umpteen reasons including livestock welfare, biodiversity conservation, soil conservation, the water cycle, water quality in rivers/estuaries etc, but having worked as an environmental scientist and seen how this goes, I don’t expect environmental and animal welfare issues to be given more than lip service and occasional window dressing projects by our powers that be. Money and greed drive basically everything in our culture, and big business is good at obfuscating and at finding scapegoats for a largely ignorant public to swallow.
Glory be, in this non-corporate little valley someone was deliberately planting Peppermint trees by the roadside for shade. You can see them in this view back towards the south-east. We have planted clumps of them too; a decade later they become enormous and make welcome shelter areas for birds, insects and domestic pasture inhabitants.
Mature shade trees are very popular things…
We rather felt like lying down under one of these trees ourselves, at this point. There is a world of difference between spending a summer midday in a tall forest, or walking on a road through a clearing. And to be honest, our feet were beginning to hurt after several hours of serious hiking that hadn’t strictly been on the agenda when we woke up – and it’s not as much fun to hike on vehicle tracks than twisty-turny walk trails.
Occasionally, remnant roadside trees provided a bit of shade. We were very happy to get to the Bibbulmun track intersection and back into the proper forest, where Brett was keen to pose for a photo.
He is such a drama queen. I’ve got a very similar photo of him at the tail end of our 8-hour loop climbing Cradle Mountain and returning via the Twisted Lakes, from years and years ago…
We were very happy to be out of the sun again.
Fallen forest trees make such great habitat opportunities…and it’s so annoying when ignorant people take their chainsaws and 4WDs into forests to “tidy up” and get a trailer load of firewood, thinking they’ve done some kind of community service when they’ve actually made wildlife homeless. This is where we are at – with a largely ecologically ignorant population of zoo humans thinking like this, about this and hundreds of other situations involving other species. Where do you even begin, and what hope if it conflicts with their existing world views, which are so precious to many and almost written in stone? That’s adult…it was a lot better working with adolescents, who were more open-minded and willing to look critically at the everyday and “normal” than their alleged elders and betters, than it is to try to have discussions like this with adults who have shut shop.
Thankfully I also know adults who haven’t shut shop, and continue to learn and to modify their working hypotheses; and they love the natural world. Those are my tribe, and it’s a small tribe, possibly endangered, but much loved and appreciated!♥
And that’s all the photos! We got back to John Rate Lookout, where we immediately took off our hiking boots to air our hot and tired feet, and drove home barefoot, listening to mostly acoustic music and chatting about this and that while fantasising about large cups of tea and bed rest. What an excellent day – and such an unexpected long adventure on a completely new-to-us trail! I couldn’t sleep for ages that night due to all the metaphorical champagne bubbles fizzing around inside of me. A day like this makes up for so many days of toil and staying home, for living on a smallholding in the middle of nowhere and no longer travelling much in the world. A day of wonder where you see and embrace wild nature, and she sees and embraces you.
♥ ♥ ♥
All the photos in this piece were taken by Sue Coulstock and Brett Coulstock.
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