“The coercive sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada is genocide proper,” Dr. Karen Stote, professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and author of An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and Sterilization of Aboriginal Women, asserted in a statement to Intercontinental Cry (IC) . Her distinction alludes to the alternative phrasing of ‘cultural genocide’, a semantic preferred by judges, policy makers and other Canadian officials when referencing the plight of Canada’s First Nations.
Stote elaborated that, “…imposing measures to prevent births within a group, when done to undermine the ability of a group to continue to exist, is an act of genocide”. The crime is fully realized “…when [this] coercive sterilization is understood within the larger context of colonialism, as one of many policies/practices imposed on Indigenous peoples that allows the increasing encroachment of Indigenous lands and the reduction of the number of those to whom the federal government has obligations.”
Dr. Kim Anderson, Cree/Métis writer and fellow Wilfrid Laurier professor who specializes in community engaged research in Indigenous communities, supported Dr. Stote’s statement in a phone conversation with IC. “Genocide is the term for [these] systematic strategies. The ultimate end of sterilization is that people are unable to have children and that’s genocide.”
Anderson spoke of the many stories emerging from inside her own personal network of First Nations women today, stories detailing events that took place in Canada as recently as the 1960’s and 1970’s. She went on to contextualize them in reference to a larger, more compounded strategy of genocide on Canada’s First Nations’ families. Rather systematic in approach, attacks against Indigenous family structure and even more specifically, “Indigenous mothering,” have been methodically inflicted going back to first contact. Anderson painted a picture of deep sociocultural wounds from strategic attacks that pierced the most sacred parts of Indigenous life; she described how this frightening history of oppression and abuse made the sterilization era all the more traumatic, in the context of Canada’s greater colonial grand strategy.
A universal legal definition of genocide was outlined in Articles II and III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948. According to Article II, the two main elements of genocide are the “mental” and the “physical.” The mental element considers the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
The physical element is itemized into five parts: killing members of the aforementioned group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members of the aforementioned group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members; “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;” “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;” and, “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
These criteria are what Stote refers to when she describes Canada’s handling of its First Nations residents as “genocide proper.” Perhaps a more palatable term to some, cultural genocide has made its way into the larger conversation; its presence there nuanced in a manner that is alternately valuable and distracting.
The terminology of “cultural genocide” is currently used by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a description of Canada’s policies of forced removal and residential schools. In relation to this – and to how much work really does still need to be done to address Canada’s colonial legacy – Anderson was quick to point out a disturbing statistic: there are more First Nations children in the Canadian welfare system now, than were removed to residential schools in the previous era.
Though care must be taken to prevent a battle of semantics from overshadowing these very real and very current issues, there are times when these nuances do matter; even more if they play host to evasion strategies of the hegemonic variety. One of the themes Stote explores in her book is Canada’s role and responsibility – in collusion with other hegemonic, western interests operating at the “UN level” – for the deletion of the article on ‘cultural genocide’ from the 1948 Genocide Convention.
To be clear, Canada actually went as far as threatening to opt out of the entire Genocide Convention if it was included, and was a direct force in the collective opposition that culminated in its removal. Interestingly enough, the measure was supported by the entire Soviet Bloc, while its critics – other than Canada – included the U.S. and most of Western Europe. There were two notable environmental factors contextualizing this sequence of events.
First of all, these circumstances were unfolding in the wake of Hitler’s genocide in Germany; and protections geared specifically at “culture” were presented as superficial in comparison. Secondly, it was all taking place on the cusp of the McCarthy era. It is conceivable that western interests were preemptively protecting other systematic strategies that were being developed – and executed – to target communist, or otherwise political groups, from appearing on the radar of Convention upholders. In any event, the terminology was omitted and with it, the legitimacy of ‘cultural genocide’ under international law. The terminology was revived in 2007 as part of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, but was again ultimately excluded in favor of the more succinct expression of “genocide.”
The practices of coerced and forced sterilizations of Indigenous women – and men – must also be understood in the context of both what appears to be this large scale appeal for genocidal impunity, and as well within the violations of basic consent. The American Bar Association outlines a complex set of standards regarding a ward of the system’s ability to give consent in terms of biomedical practices and research. Indigenous peoples in some contexts – trapped in the cyclical patterns of settler violence and imperialistic intrusion upon their lives and culture – especially historically, were definitively unable to give legal consent, even when consent was sought – be it under the most pretentious of terms considering Indigenous peoples were veritable prisoners of war at this point in Canada’s history. Accordingly, an examination of historical documents by Stote revealed “problems: such as a lack of interpreters, … a lack of informed consent, [or] consent forms not being translated into the languages spoken by Indigenous peoples.”
The extent to which Canada was coloring outside the ethical lines with their practices of forced sterilization is further realized in terms of another case in point. Stote related that,
The first high dose birth control pill was being prescribed in Indigenous communities, 1964-1965 at least, before contraceptives were legalized for these purposes – in 1969 – with the intent to reduce the birth rate, and to “reduce the size of the homes the federal government would need to provide.
Considering the Catholic Church’s position on birth control, it might be assumed that their own activity in relation to Canada’s First Nations during this period would steer far and wide from the government’s unholy interventionism. It is therefore especially confusing that they actually worked in collusion with the Canadian government in terms of these methodical strategies to wipe Canada’s First Nations off the face of the planet. This unholy alliance is perhaps most evident in Canada’s long-running policy of forcibly removing Indigenous children from their homes and families, and imprisoning them in residential Christian schools funded by the state. As detailed above, this practice stands on its own as a violation of the Geneva Convention, even after the phrasing “cultural genocide” had been struck from the official document.
The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their lands and resources. If every Aboriginal person had been ‘absorbed into the body politic’, there would be no reserves, no treaties and no Aboriginal rights.
During a recent trip to Bolivia, Pope Francis issued an apology for the “sins” the Catholic Church committed against the Indigenous of Latin America. Members of Canada’s First Nations would undoubtedly be well served by a similar statement from the (if ambivalently) human rights-oriented Pope. Canadian First Nations organizers were disappointed that former Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, did not issue a more direct appeal for an apology for the Church’s role in the residential schools when he met with the Pope recently. Assembly of First Nations Chief Perry Bellegarde strongly lamented that move (or lack of one) citing at the time:
Today would have been a powerful and appropriate day to issue that invitation and it would help survivors in their healing journey.
Enter in Justin Trudeau, Canada’s newly elected Prime Minister and Leader of the Liberal Party, who quickly responded to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s release of its final report detailing Canada’s history of residential schools on December 15, 2015. The report documents a horrific legacy of physical and sexual abuse that culminated in an official death toll of 3,200 — though Commission chairman, Justice Murray Sinclair, estimates the actual number to be much higher.Trudeau’s comments — themselves a potential harbinger of a long awaited policy pivot — came after he met with leaders from 5 First Nations communities in Ottawa on December 16th.
To bring the discussion back to coerced and forced sterilization, it is important to note that these atrocities were certainly not limited to Canada. These ethical anomalies are well documented to have occurred in many other nation states as well, including the United States of America.
In 2000, the American Indian Quarterly journal published an article entitled, “The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women.” Researchers concluded their assessment with encouraging news regarding more recent trends concerning Native autonomy in health care practices, but laced any implied optimism with a warning:
While the sterilizations that occurred in the 1960’s and 1970’s harmed Native Americans, Indian participation in their own health care since 1976 has strengthened their tribal communities. Sterilization abuse has not been reported recently on the scale that occurred during the 1970’s, but the possibility still exists for it to occur.
To punctuate that ultimately prophetic statement is a much more recent case from Peru, in which around 350,000 women – the majority of whom were Indigenous Quechua, Aymara, Shipiba, or Ashaninkas – were coercively sterilized by a government health program under the administration of former President Alberto Fujimori. (Fujimori was later sentenced to 25 years in prison for grave human rights violations not directly related to sterilizations.)
The issue of consent loomed large in Peru as well. Sometimes the procedures were done completely in secret after childbirth, and sometimes the only form of consent was a waiver signed by a relative (disturbing, from a few angles, given the language barriers.) There were a number of factors that disabled proper consent protocol, and likewise a number of negative impacts women experienced in the aftermath.
Alejandra Ballón, who has written a book about the procedures in Peru under Fujimoto, noted that, “The women lost their strength and could no longer work as farmers, but also many were abandoned by their male partners, and forced to immigrate to the cities.” In November of 2015, a mobilization of about 80 Peruvian women – victims of these practices of forced sterilizations between 1996 and 2000 – took to the streets demanding justice.
It’s impossible to know if there are similar accounts of impact on the victims of forced sterilizations in Canada, because the necessary research has not been carried out. According to Anderson, this is what makes Stote’s ongoing work so important. She also points to the need to collect the stories of Canada’s First Nation eugenics-era survivors, while they are still alive. She may even take on the latter task herself, having had a dream about it.
Anderson further contextualized Canada’s history of sterilizing its First Nations women as being spawned from this broader eugenics movement that was born out of the writings of Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883 . It was a movement, she points out, that Indigenous peoples were constantly targeted by.
Seven years before Nazi Germany passed the Nuremburg Race Laws that outlawed German Jews from having sexual or marital relations with anyone of German or mixed ancestry, Alberta passed “The Sexual Sterilization Act” in 1928. The legislation outlined the conditions and procedures for sterilizing individuals who were deemed to have “undesirable traits.” Five years later, in 1933, British Columbia passed a law of its own, “An Act Respecting Sexual Sterilization.” Like its eastern counterpart, British Columbia’s legislation outlined the who, the where, and the how in regards to sterilization of those who were considered wards of the state and possessed some sort of “undesirable trait.”
One has to wonder, as professor and Lakota-American, Dr. Lehman Brightman did during his historic speech at the end of “The Long Walk” in 1978 (which followed the famous occupation of Alcatraz in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s) if this “trait” was in fact resource-rich land and unconquered territory. Brightman proclaimed, regarding Natives in the United States at that time:
We won’t have any need for reservations if we don’t stop the sterilization of our youth, and of our women, and of our men.
Even amidst the height of these draconian practices, most of the time the need for actual consent was at least legally recognized. In other words, it is possible that B.C. was breaking its own laws in regards to methods used to forcibly sterilize Canadian First Nations women.
The United States filters monies through agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID], the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation for population control programs. These agencies were responsible for the sterilization of men and women in regions such as Puerto Rico, Brazil, Guatemala, Africa, and Panama.
Exact figures are unattainable in terms of just how many Native Americans were sterilized in the U.S. during the 1970’s. Brightman, who devoted much of his life’s work to the issue, put his educated guess at about 40% of all Native American women alive at that time, and 10% of Native men. Brightman figured that the total number of Native women sterilized during that decade was between 60,000 and 70,000, and has labeled it “criminal negligence and criminal genocide.” Citing the language issues, among other issues related to consent, Brightman asserted: “They’ve sterilized all of our women by trickery, by fraud and by crook. They’ve asked them to sign consent forms that they couldn’t read, in English; they’ve sterilized them without telling them about it; and they’ve sterilized them by lying to them and telling them the operation was reversible.”
Documented survivor counts are accumulating among Canada’s First Nations community as well. According to Stote: “We know (according to other researchers, i.e., Christian, 1974 and Grekul, 2004) Indigenous peoples were targeted under Alberta’s eugenic legislation (1928-1972), making up 6-8% of those sterilized overall, despite only being about 3% of the population; although in later years (1969-1972), they made up over 25% of those sterilized.”
Stote’s own research – reviewing the first of three federal files she searched in all – uncovered sterilizations performed on Indigenous women at 14 different federally operated Indian Hospitals across Canada. Another set documented sterilizations on First Nations women from 32 different northern settlements; and, a third set detailed the experiences of women from the Baffin, Keewatin, Mackenzie, and Inuvik zones.
Unfortunately for Canada’s First Nations, neither sterilizations nor history are easily reversed; and as such, neither are the sustained impacts of the genocide of eugenics. One of the surest ways to make sure these tragedies of recent history are not repeated in the present or future, is to heed the call to aggregate and document the collective and individual stories and memories of Canada’s First Nations women who are still living with the effects.
In terms of relevance in modernity for Canada’s First Nations, Stote explained to IC that:
I think the discourse of blaming individuals for social problems, for the poverty conditions in which they live, and for having children they “can’t afford” is still very much with us. It is more cost effective to blame individuals, and to view them (or their reproduction) as the cause of their situation rather than examine the larger political, economic and social system in place that creates poverty, social problems, etc. And for Indigenous women in Canada, but many other places as well, it is conditions of colonialism and the failure of the federal government (settler population in general) to uphold obligations to Indigenous peoples that is creating the marginalized status and poverty conditions in which Indigenous peoples are forced to live. These conditions of colonialism are ongoing.
These very issues have come to a head recently as yet another First Nations woman has come forward with an account of a recent sterilization that occurred outside of the boundaries of proper consent. Melika Popp, a Saskatoon woman who was sterilized after the delivery of her first child, was assured the process was reversible and shared, “I felt very targeted. It was under duress. I was definitely hormonal at that time.”
For more recent survivors like Popp, the struggle to come to terms with ongoing impacts has just begun. Others have been carrying these burdens for decades without a platform on which to speak out. In terms of what it will take to jumpstart the healing process for all, thus allowing Canada’s victims, their families, and their communities to move forward, Anderson had some words:
Story-telling and testimonial can be a healing process for people, to [realize] that their voice and their story is heard. In general, North Americans are really uninformed about Indigenous history on the continent and the brutality that was involved, and maybe are resistant to learning about that because it triggers all sorts of other feelings, like white guilt, but the only way to go forward is to work with the truth. It is also important to talk about it within the framework of assessing the family breakdown. Family is so important to Indigenous cultures…the attack therefore has been so devastating…recognizing and naming this is a significant form of healing.
According to recent reports, a surprising leader in the race to make amends on issues of forced and coerced sterilizations is the southeastern state of North Carolina. North Carolina announced their intentions to be the first state to financially compensate victims of its particularly aggressive sterilization programs, in early 2012. Estimates cite that North Carolina alone sterilized 7,600 people between 1929 and 1974. Out of 768 claims made, 220 living victims were designated to receive checks of $20,000 each. Under the compensation policy, the sterilizations had to have taken place under the state’s Eugenics Board; unfortunately, various judges and social service workers were apparently “greenlighting” them off the books as well.
Stote also weighed in with some insight about how Canadians can move forward as a whole on the trajectory towards justice and healing.
On an individual basis, I think those on whom these injustices were perpetrated should be asked about what needs to be done. Gathering the details of what happened, when, on whom, and under what conditions, would be made much easier if there was an honest and forthcoming attempt to, at the very least, acknowledge [that] this type of thing happened to Indigenous peoples in Canada. More broadly, I have consistently heard and seen Indigenous peoples struggling for the right to self-determination as peoples, to have their ways of life respected, their bodies respected, and to have settlers uphold their end of the original responsibilities and relationships that were laid out between them and Indigenous peoples. So, I see that as a great place to start. I think this will require Canadians to really take the initiative in learning our history, and to challenge those we have been allowing to make decisions on our behalf. This will ultimately need to include a restructuring of our social, political and economic life in Canada.
Keri Cheechoo, a Cree woman from the community of Long Lake #58 First Nation, and a PhD. Candidate at the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, offered some final thoughts in a statement to IC:
As peculiar as it sounds, I awoke at about three in the morning with two words swirling in my mind: forced sterilizations. I scribbled them down on the back of a receipt and went back to sleep. The next day I began reading and engaging in dialogue with those both close to me, and in the Academy, and I began to realize that the scope of forced or coerced sterilizations in Indigenous women is both appallingly enormous and disturbingly concealed.
It is my opinion that forced or coerced sterilization is an act of violence on Indigenous women. The colonial agenda of genocide that was endorsed in the form of forced or coerced sterilization of Indigenous women contributed directly to the colonization of the land. Indigenous women are conduits, we are connected to the land in an esoteric way, and a permanent loss of reproduction and reproduction rights directly impacts our capacity to inhabit or to disrupt attempts at land theft.
I think it is important that the Canadian federal government endorse the 41st Call to Action in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada Report, which indicates: “We call upon the federal government, in consultation with Aboriginal organizations, to appoint a public inquiry into the causes of, and remedies for, the disproportionate victimization of Aboriginal women and girls. The inquiry’s mandate would include: i. Investigation into missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls; [and] ii. Links to the intergenerational legacy of residential schools.” (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action, 2015, p. 4)
It is my growing belief that it is vital that this piece of hidden Canadian history be exposed, and that mainstream Canada become educated on the historical trauma of forced or coerced sterilizations on Indigenous women.
Author’s note: Special thanks to Dr. Karen Stote, Dr. Kim Anderson, Quanah Parker Brightman, and Keri Cheechoo for their vital input and support.
Standing in a pinyon-juniper forest on a high slope above Cave Valley not far from Ely, Nevada, I am lost in an ancient vision. It is a vision born under sublime skies stretching above wide, flat valleys bounded by the dramatic mountains of the Great Basin. The vision grows with the rising flames of morning in the east. The night was cold, but clear, and the sun brings a welcome warmth. When the sun crests the mountains, red and orange clouds stream across the sky while shadows pull back from the valley floor to reveal pronghorn antelope dancing through the sage brush. A few ridge lines away, the clatter of talus accompanies the movement of bighorn sheep. The slap and crack of bighorn rams clashing their heads together echoes through the valley.
As the morning passes, the sun shines through pine needles and juniper branches to dapple the forest floor in silvers and golds. The trees offer shade where patches of snow glimmer and whisper with the smallest sounds of melting. Pinyon pine cones are scattered across the ground. As they open, their seeds – delicious, nourishing pine nuts – become visible. Beautiful, blue-feathered pinyon jays gather the nuts in their beak before flying off to cache them for the deepening winter.
Humans have long participated in this vision though the vision is far older than them. From a place deeper than my mind’s memory, in the memories of the borrowed materials forming my body, I feel a kinship to this land’s original peoples. For thousands of years, in this part of the Great Basin, Shoshones and Goshutes have stood looking out at valleys like this one as they gathered the pine nuts that provided the most important winter food source making it possible for humans to live in the Great Basin’s harsh climate.
As I let my memory flow into the past, I see hundreds of generations of Shoshones and Goshutes living well off the gifts the land freely gives. Living in this way, I know their relationship with the land could have lasted forever. Pinyon pines could have gone on offering their pine nuts to jays, rats, and humans. Junipers could have gone on twisting in wooden gymnastics and growing their bundles of blue berries.
A herd of cattle catches my attention and I remember that this is just a vision, after all. The presence of cattle, here, forces me to confront the reality of the Great Basin’s ongoing destruction. An anxiety accompanies the cattle. It is the anxiety that flows from the knowledge of ecological collapse. I envy the hundreds of generations of Shoshones and Goshutes who had no reason to question the eternity of their culture.
Following the slow steps of brown and black cows, I see a metallic glint on the valley floor where streamers are tied onto fences built by ranchers so that sage grouse will not fly into the fences and kill themselves. I have seen the bundles of feathers and blood mangled and stuck in the wire fences. The cattle march to a shallow pond. A thin, but growing ring of algae floats on the pond’s surface while piles of cow shit litter sandy soil stripped of any vegetation. From the pond comes a strangled, gurgling sound. Despite the drought, water is being pumped from already strained wells to support the cattle.
The valley floor is striped in green and yellow patches. The green patches represent healthy, native sage brush and the yellow patches represent invasive crested wheat grass. I have learned how in the 1950s and 60s, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) initiated a series of projects designed to strip away sage brush to replace it with imported Asian crested wheat grass. Not long after white settlement cattle herds wiped out most of the native grasses in the Great Basin, so now the land must be forced to support them. Destroying the sage brush has had disastrous consequences including contributing to the collapse of sage grouse populations who, as their name suggests, require healthy sage brush for habitat.
Above the valley floors, where the pinyon-juniper forests drape across the mountains’ shoulders, are brown swaths cut into the land where the forests have fallen victim to the BLM’s so-called “vegetation treatment projects.” These vegetation treatment projects are really just clear-cuts justified by the BLM as “providing woodland products to the public,” “maintaining sage brush habitat,” and “protection of property and infrastructure.”
As my experience of this ancient vision disintegrates with the reminders of the processes threatening life in the Great Basin, I remember why I came here. I came, specifically, because I had heard of the BLM’s practice of clear-cutting pinyon-juniper forests. Friends of mine asked me to write about threats to pinyon-juniper forests. I had never seen a clear-cut pinyon-juniper forest before, I knew very little about the Great Basin at all, and I’ve always thought the best way to write about the land is to seek a true relationship with it.
So, my friend, the great activist, writer, and photographer Max Wilbert flew to Salt Lake from Eugene, Oregon and we made plans to drive from my home in Park City, Utah to Nevada to see both living pinyon-juniper forests and clear-cuts. We met up with Katie Fite, a biologist and the Board Secretary for the environmental protection group, WildLands Defense. Katie brings over 30 years of on-the-ground experience to environmental advocacy possessing expertise in the Great Basin’s ecology.
***
I walk through the shades and shadows of a healthy pinyon-juniper forest. Songbirds create their music celebrating the beauty of their home. Social ravens gossip back and forth diving down to ask who I am. From time to time, I catch a grey glimpse of a rabbit bounding out of my path. The gentle hooting of an owl falls from the treetops. Though I am several hundred yards from any of my companions separated by ridge lines and hundreds of trees, I do not feel alone. A sense of deep familiarity, the feeling shared when friends gather, settles over me.
It is the 19th of November. The full cycle of seasons in the Great Basin carries the range of temperature extremes. The summers are dry and hot and the winters are frigid with plenty of snow. Even a single day in the Great Basin reflects these extremes. Last night dropped below freezing and I woke with a crisp layer of frost on my sleeping bag at dawn.
In the cold times like these, the slopes of the mountains are the warmest places to be because as the sun comes up and heats the air on the valley floor, the warm air rises. The slopes of the mountains are also where the pinyon-juniper forests are. By mid-morning, the sun is strong and hot. Even though the temperatures fell into the teens Fahrenheit last night, the temperature gains the 60s by noon. The forests, then, are the most comfortable places to be in both the cold night and the hot day. The forests are warmer at night and in the morning than the valley floors, and when the sun beats down during the day the trees offer soothing shade.
It feels, to me, that these ancient pinyon-juniper forests enjoy caring for humans.
I feel I could walk through the forest like this for miles. Then, the trees abruptly stop. The shade ceases and the sun strikes my eyes with a physical force. A cold wind, driven wild over unbroken space, slaps my face. The sudden openness is a shock. I almost trip. Behind me is a living forest, before me is a void.
I have stepped into a clear-cut.
To my left for a mile, to my right for a mile, and a quarter mile across, the land is brown. The long limbs of pinyon pines slump across the gnarled trunks of junipers. I have only seen pictures of human massacre sites. Bodies, frozen and stiff, heaped in piles. And these clear-cuts are truly tree massacre sites.
I can tell this particular clear-cut was “chained.” Chaining is a practice employed by the BLM and is done by stretching a U.S. Navy battle-ship anchor chain between two crawler tractors. The tractors are driven parallel to each other, dragging the chain across the forest floor, and uprooting everything in the chain’s path.
The area chosen for chaining has no logic, no reason behind it. The clear-cut follows no straight lines. The path the crawler tractors took follows no pre-conceived geometric plan. No one mapped out where trees would be cut and where they wouldn’t. The cut looks more like the devastating consequence of a petulant child’s temper tantrum than the cold-calculations of forestry professionals.
Moving through the middle of the clear-cut, now, the worst part is the silence. The silence is more than the absence of sound. This is a spiritual silence. The void seeps from the empty space where a forest once stood and flows into my consciousness. Where moments before I was surrounded in the sense of the presence of life, now there is nothing. Nothing, except the rotting corpses of a once thriving forest community.
I want to know how this is possible. I want to know what justifications cleared the way for this destruction. I want to know who is behind this. I want to know why.
***
The history of pinyon-juniper deforestation in the Great Basin as well as a list of justifications and motivations for deforestation is too long, perhaps, for one essay. The truth is, I am still learning. I have spent the last three weeks reading everything I can about pinyon-juniper forests and I wish to sketch a broad storyline. This storyline includes dominance of ranching and mining interests in Nevada, a governmental bureaucracy that consistently drinks the kool-aid prepared by ranchers and miners, the historical amnesia that characterizes settler colonialism, insidious racism, blatant genocide, and what pinyon-juniper expert Ronald Lanner calls “dendrophobia for which there seems to be no treatment.” Because one essay cannot possibly provide the whole story – a story pinyon-juniper forests desperately need to be told – I will broadly describe the major themes in this essay and I plan on writing a series on pinyon-juniper forests exploring specific themes in more detail.
The history of pinyon-juniper deforestation in the Great Basin is a glimpse into the dominant culture’s insanity. There was a truly sustainable way to live in the Great Basin, but the arrival of European settlers doomed that way of life. The Shoshones and Goshutes lived for thousands of years hunting game in the spring and summer and gathering pine-nuts in the fall. This sustainability involved understanding how to manage their populations so the land’s ability to support humans would not be drawn down. Ronald Lanner in his foundational work “The Pinyon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History,” credits pinyon pine-nuts as the essential food source that made it possible for humans to live in the Great Basin. Of course, the Great Basin’s original peoples have always known this, and know that destroying the forests is suicidal.
European settlers arrived in droves looking for precious metals and bringing their “white man’s buffalo” (domesticated cattle). Mines were established and the only reliable source of wood in most of Nevada was pinyon-juniper forests. Lanner explains, “The production of mineral riches would not have been possible in nineteenth century Nevada without the pinyon woodlands and their vast supplies of wood. The opening of a mine was only the first of many operations necessary to convert hard rock into treasure. Huge labor forces had to be brought in to work the mines and to build and operate stamp mills, smelters, amalgamators, and concentrators. Lumber in enormous quantities was needed for these operations: timbers for shoring the mine shafts, charcoal for smelting ore, cordwood for heating and cooking. The great Nevada silver boom ran on wood.”
Lanner goes on to quantify the destruction and the numbers are absolutely devastating. He explains the destruction around Eureka, Nevada in the 1870s: “A typical yield of pinyon pine was ten cords per acre, and a cord made about 30 bushels of charcoal. So the furnaces of Eureka, working at capacity, could in a single day devour over 530 cords of pinyon, the produce of over 50 acres. An additional 20 acres a day were being cut to provide cordwood for the mills. After one year of major activity, the hills around Eureka were bare for ten miles in every direction. By 1874, the wasteland extended twenty miles from town, and by 1878 the woodland was nowhere closer than fifty miles from Eureka.”
As is so often true, the destruction of the land is the destruction of the land’s original peoples. Lanner describes the situation in Nevada for the Shoshone as a “vicious circle” and writes, “The mining and urban activities there required huge amounts of wood and the burgeoning population consumed prodigious amounts of food. Local Indians helped provide both of these commodities by working for wages as lumberjacks and ranch hands. Those who cut down trees were destroying the source of their traditional winter food, pine nuts. Those who punched cattle aided and abetted the eradication of the native grasses that provided their traditional summer fare of grass seed. The more these food sources were destroyed, the more dependent the Indians became on wages; and the more they engaged in lumbering and ranching for white men, the more they destroyed their food sources. By the time the bubble burst in the 1880s and 1890s when the mining industry collapsed, the pinyon groves were gone, the valley grasslands were fenced for cattle, and much of the old culture was forsaken.”
The 1950s ushered in the next era of pinyon-juniper deforestation as ranchers became jealous of the presence of trees on potential grazing lands. Lanner notes that since the earliest white settlements in the Great Basin, accessible tracts of woodland had always been grazed. Lanner sums it up writing that overgrazing and timber trespass “combined to make the woodland one of the worst abused vegetation types in the West: even now the acre of woodland where one can find refuge from the ubiquitous cow pat is a rarity. But, as the post-World War II hunger for red meat mounted, the Forest Service started carving up National Forest woodlands with bulldozers and chains, hoping to create greener pastures.”
The ranchers’ jealousy of trees persists to today though new justifications for deforestation have been developed to thinly disguise the ranchers’ war on forests. A recent public scoping notice published on September 29, 2015 by the BLM, Carson City District, Sierra Front Field Office is illustrative.
It is not within the scope of this essay to address the problems with each of the BLM’s justifications. Many of the justifications require their own, full essay to thoroughly undermine them and I plan on writing those essays. Several of the reasons may be addressed, here, though. The BLM’s notice makes no attempt to hide ranching interests as a primary purpose for the treatments. This is clear as the BLM explains that one purpose of the vegetation treatment project is “to maintain and enhance rangeland health.” The problem with this is the Great Basin is not rangeland. The valley floors are naturally covered in sage brush and the highlands are pinyon-juniper forests. Converting the region into rangeland is only possible through great violence.
The BLM gives another justification for the deforestation with, “A large focus of this project would be to improve and protect greater sage-grouse habitat, and treatments would be designed to address threats to greater sage-grouse from invasive annual grasses, wildfires, and conifer expansion.” Of course, it was the BLM’s own disastrous policy of sage brush clearing that led to the sage grouse collapse in the first place. The BLM goes on to blame invasive annual grasses (most of which were brought to the Great Basin by settler activities), wildfires (exacerbated by human-created climate change, drought, and the planting of imported grasses that burn more quickly than native grasses), and finally to conifer expansion. By conifer expansion, the BLM is referring to pinyon-juniper forests who are simply regrowing in regions where they had been cut down by the mining operations of the 1870s.
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I hope this essay serves as an introduction to the beauty of the Great Basin’s pinyon-juniper forests, the gifts they have long provided, and the dangers confronting them. It is time the BLM’s pinyon-juniper deforestation projects be stopped. The good news is a coalition of allied activists with Deep Green Resistance and WildLands Defense is in the early stages of planning a campaign to save these beautiful, essential, ancient forests. The first step is recognizing their inherent value as living beings. Stay-tuned for more updates including ways to get involved. Join us and stand on the side of pinyon-juniper forests.
Editor’s Note: The second installment of this multi-part series on pinyon-juniper deforestation can be found here.
Will Falk moved to the West Coast from Milwaukee, WI where he was a public defender. His first passion is poetry and his work is an effort to record the way the land is speaking. He feels the largest and most pressing issue confronting us today is the destruction of natural communities. He is currently living in Utah.
The term “development” is just colonialism applied to the natural world, says Derrick Jensen.
“Sustainable development” is a claim to virtue. The word “development” used in this sense is a lie.
The word “develop” means “to grow,” “to progress,” “to become fuller, more advanced.” Some synonyms are “evolution, unfolding, maturation, ripeness,” and some antonyms are “deterioration, disintegration.” And here is a real usage example from a dictionary: “Drama reached its highest development in the plays of Shakespeare.”
But here’s the problem: A child develops into an adult, a caterpillar develops into a butterfly, a stream harmed by (say) mining might possibly in time develop back into a healthy stream; but a meadow does not “develop” into white-box houses, a bay does not “develop” into an industrial port, a forest does not “develop” into roads and clearings.
The reality is that the meadow is destroyed to make the “development.” The bay is destroyed to “develop” it into an industrial port. The forest is destroyed when the “natural resources” are “developed.”
The word “kill” works just as well.
SUSTAINABLE DESTRUCTION
Think about it. You’re going about your life, when someone comes along who wants to make money by “developing” the “natural resources” that are your body. He’s going to harvest your organs for transplantation, your bones for fertilizer, your flesh for food.
You might respond, “Hey, I was using that heart, those lungs.”
That meadow, that bay, that forest were all using what you call “natural resources.” Those “natural resources” were keeping them alive. Those “natural resources” are their very body. Without them they die, just as you would.
It doesn’t help to throw the word “sustainable” onto the front of whatever you’re going to do. Exploitation is still exploitation, even if you call it “sustainable exploitation.” Destruction is still destruction, even if you call it “sustainable destruction.”
One sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. We industrialized humans think we’re smarter than everybody else. So I’m going to lay out a pattern, and let’s see if we can recognize it in less than 6,000 years.
GREEK SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
When you think of Iraq, is the first thing that you think of cedar forests so thick that sunlight never reaches the ground? That’s what Iraq was like before the beginnings of this culture. One of the first written myths of this culture was of Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of what is now Iraq to build great cities.
Oh, sorry, I guess he wasn’t deforesting the region; he was “developing” the natural resources.
Much of the Arabian Peninsula was oak savannah, until these “resources” were “developed” for export. The Near East was once heavily forested. Remember the cedars of Lebanon? They still have one on their flag. North Africa was heavily forested. Those forests were destroyed—I mean “sustainably developed”—to make the Egyptian and Phoenician navies.
Greece was heavily forested. Ancient Greek philosophers complained that deforestation was harming water quality. I’m sure the bureaucrats at the Ancient Department of Greek Sustainable Development responded that they would need to study the problem for a few years to make sure there really is a correlation.
In the Americas, whales were so abundant their breath made the air look perpetually foggy and were a hazard to shipping. “Development” of that resource removed that hazard. Cod were so numerous their bodies slowed the passage of ships. “Development” of that resource fixed that, too. There were so many passenger pigeons that their flocks darkened the sky for days at a time. Once again, “development” of that resource got rid of them.
Do you know why there are no penguins in the northern hemisphere? There used to be. They were called great auks. A French explorer commented that there were so many on one island that every ship in France could be loaded and it would not make a dent. But that “resource” was “developed” and the last great auk was killed—oops, I mean “developed”—in the 19th century.
200 SPECIES A DAY
Two hundred species went extinct just today. And 200 will go extinct tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that.
Every biological indicator is going in the wrong direction.
And we all know why. The problems are not cognitively challenging. “Development” is theft and murder. “Development” is colonialism applied to the natural world. “Development” is kleptocracy—a way of life based on theft.
The reality is that the meadow is destroyed to make the “development.” The bay is destroyed to “develop” it into an industrial port. The forest is destroyed when the “natural resources” are “developed.” The word “kill” works just as well.
Here’s another test of our intelligence: Name any natural community—or ecosystem, if you prefer mechanistic language—that has been “managed” for extraction, or that has been “developed”—by which is meant industrialized—that has not been significantly harmed on its own terms.
You can’t, because managing for extraction is harmful, as we would all recognize if, as in the example above, it happened to us. We would all recognize that if an occupying army came into your home and took your food and a couple of your relatives that your family would suffer.
So why, with all the world at stake, do we suddenly get so stupid when it comes to “sustainable development”? Why do we have such a hard time understanding that if you steal from or otherwise harm a natural community, that natural community will suffer harm?
ENSLAVING THE PLANET
Upton Sinclair wrote: “It’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it.” I would extend that to read: “It’s hard to make people understand something when their entitlement depends on them not understanding it.”
In the 1830s, a pro-slavery philosopher argued that slavery was necessary because without it the slave owners would not have the “comforts or elegancies” upon which they had become so accustomed.
The same is true here, when we extend the understanding of slavery to the natural world, as this culture attempts to enslave—read, “develop,” oops, “sustainably develop”—more and more of the living planet.
In short, we’re allowing the world to be killed so we can have access to ice cream 24/7. And we call it sustainable development so we can feel good about ourselves as we do it.
The good news is that there are a lot of people who see through the bullshit. The bad news is that this doesn’t, for the most part, affect policy.
A story may help make this clear.
Before the big Rio Earth Summit in 1992 (and wasn’t that a success! Things are so much better now, right?), the US ambassador to the United Nations sent out high level assistants across the country, ostensibly to get public input as to what should be the US position at the summit. One of the meetings was in Spokane, Washington, where I lived at the time. The hall was packed, and the line of people to speak snaked to the back of the building. Person after person testified that “sustainable development” was a sham, and that it was just an excuse to continue killing the world.
They pointed out that the problem is not humanity, but this culture, and they begged the US representative to listen to and take a lead from Indigenous peoples the world over who lived well and lived truly sustainably on their lands, without “development.” (In fact, they lived well and sustainably because they never industrialized.) They pointed out that “development” inevitably forces both Indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers off their lands. Person after person pointed out precisely what I’m saying in this article.
When we were through giving our testimony, the representative thanked us for our support of the US position and for our support of “sustainable development.” It was as though he hadn’t heard a word we said.
SUSTAINING THE EXPLOITATIVE LIFESTYLE
Here’s the problem: The word “sustainable” has since been coopted to not mean “helping the real world to sustain,” as in playing your proper role in participating in a larger community that includes your non-human neighbors, but instead to mean “sustaining this exploitative lifestyle.”
Think about it: What do all of the so-called solutions to global warming have in common? It’s simple: They all take industrial capitalism (and the colonialism on which it’s based) as a given, and the natural world as that which must conform to industrial capitalism. This is insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality.
The real world must be primary, with whatever social system you are talking about being secondary and dependent, because without a real world, you don’t have any social system whatsoever. “Sustainable development” is a scam and a claim to virtue because it is attempting to sustain this exploitative, destructive culture, not the world on which it depends.
And that will never work.
So many Indigenous people have said to me that the first and most important thing we must do is decolonize our hearts and minds. Part of what they’ve told me is that we must break our identification with this culture, and identify instead with the real world, the physical world, the living Earth that is our only home.
I want to tell one final story. In his book, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton asked how it was that men who had taken the Hippocratic Oath could work in Nazi death camps. He found that many of the doctors cared deeply for the health of the inmates and would do everything in their power to protect them. They’d give them an extra scrap of potato. They’d hide them from selection officers who were going to kill them. They’d put them in the infirmary and let them rest for a day. They’d do everything they could, except the most important thing of all. They wouldn’t question the existence of the death camp itself. They wouldn’t question working the inmates to death, starving them to death, poisoning them to death. And this failure to question the larger framing conditions led these doctors to actively participate in the atrocities.
With all the world at stake, it’s not good enough for us to paste the word sustainable in front of the deceptive word development when what we really mean is “continue this exploitative and destructive way of life a little bit longer.” That destroys the words sustainable and development and, of course, contributes to the ongoing destruction of the world. It wastes time we do not have.
With all the world at stake, we need to not only do what we can to protect the victims of this culture, but we have to question the continuation of this death camp culture that is working the world to death, starving the world to death, poisoning the world to death.
Robert Jay Lifton noted that before you can commit any mass atrocity, you must convince yourself and others that what you’re doing is not atrocious, but rather beneficial. You must have what he called a “claim to virtue.” Thus the Nazis weren’t, from their perspective, committing mass murder and genocide, but were “purifying” the “Aryan Race.” They weren’t waging aggressive war but gaining necessary Lebensraum. The United States has never committed genocide, but rather has fulfilled its Manifest Destiny. It has never waged aggressive war, but rather has “defended its national interest” and “promoted freedom and democracy.” Today, the dominant culture isn’t killing the planet, but rather “developing natural resources.”
This is to say that any culture foolish and insane enough to murder the planet that is our only home would of course be foolish and insane enough to attempt to provide justifications for this murder.
That brings us to An Ecomodernist Manifesto, the same sort of claim to virtue we’ve come to expect from this culture’s several thousand year tradition of nature-hating. Heck, the first written myth of this culture is of the hero Gilgamesh deforesting what is now Iraq to build a city and make a name for himself. Fast forward a few thousand years, and that’s the same nature-hating and empire-building story being told in An Ecomodernist Manifesto (and that has been told in myriad ways in between).
The narcissism, entitlement, and gaslighting starts at the beginning: “To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes truer every day. Humans are made from the Earth, and the Earth is remade by human hands. Many earth scientists express this by stating that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. As scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens, we write with the conviction that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene.”
“The Earth is remade by human hands.” Remade is such a nice word, isn’t it? Much better than destroyed, murdered, ravaged, grievously harmed, don’t you think? Gilgamesh and those who came after didn’t deforest and desertify what was once called the Fertile Crescent, they remade it from cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground into cities and deserts. The Egyptians and Phoenicians didn’t kill the forests of North Africa, they remade them into navies and deserts. This culture hasn’t wiped out 98 percent of the world’s ancient forests, wetlands, grasslands; it’s merely remade them, complete with remaking the plants and animals there into extinction. This culture isn’t killing the oceans; it’s merely remaking them such that there probably won’t be any fish. It’s not extirpating elephants and great apes and great cats and two hundred species per day; it’s merely remaking them so they’re extinct. It doesn’t commit land theft and genocide against Indigenous peoples, instead it merely remakes them and their landbases.
Further, the sort of remaking they’re talking about in this Manifesto is not done by all humans, as they claim. It’s done by specific sorts of humans, who feel entitled to take everything on the planet, the sorts of people who might call it a “human planet.”
I live on Tolowa Indian land in what is now far northern California. The Tolowa lived here for at least 12500 years, and when the Europeans arrived, the place was a paradise. There were so many salmon in the rivers that the rivers were “black and roiling” with fish. The Tolowa and Yurok and Hoopa lived here truly sustainably, and could have continued to do so more or less forever. Members of the dominant culture arrived less than 200 years ago, and immediately embarked on campaigns of extermination—the authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto might call these “campaigns of remaking”—against the human and nonhuman inhabitants.
And what was the point of all of these campaigns of extermination remaking? It was no different in the 1830s than it is now, and it is no different now than it was in the time of Gilgamish. The point is to allow Gilgamish to create a city and make a name for himself; I mean, to allow the Chosen People to enter the Promised Land; I mean, to allow the superior ones to create an empire upon which the sun never sets; I mean, to allow the superior ones to Manifest their Destiny; I mean, to allow the superior ones to create a Thousand Year Reich; I mean, to allow the superior ones to do so much damage to the planet that they name a fucking geologic epoch after themselves; I mean, to “allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene.”
The authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto also state: “Violence in all forms has declined significantly and is probably at the lowest per capita level ever experienced by the human species, the horrors of the 20th century and present-day terrorism notwithstanding.”
Who would have guessed that when you redefine violence perpetrated by your culture as not being violence but rather as “remaking,” that you can then claim that “violence in all forms has declined significantly”? I’m not sure members of the two hundred species driven extinct today would agree that “violence in all forms has declined significantly.” Nor would members of Indigenous human cultures being driven from their land, or being exterminated: Indigenous human languages are being driven extinct at an even faster relative rate than are nonhuman species. But I guess none of this counts as violence in any form whatsoever. Because of this culture’s “remaking” of the planet, wildlife populations across the world have collapsed by 50 percent over the past forty years. Because of this “remaking,” the oceans are acidifying, and are suffocating in plastic. I guess none of this counts as violence in any form. This “remaking” of the planet is causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the world, in fact so far as we know the greatest mass extinction in the history of the universe. And violence is down? Only because they don’t count the violence they don’t want to count.
They also don’t count the violence of subsistence farmers being driven from their lands. Nor do they count the violence of humans (and nonhumans) losing their traditional ways of living in this great “remaking.” They don’t count the horrors of factory farming or row-crop agriculture.
The authors state, “Globally, human beings have moved from autocratic government toward liberal democracy characterized by the rule of law and increased freedom.”
I don’t think those subsistence farmers forced from their land and into cities would agree they’re living in a time of increased freedom. And I don’t think any of us have the freedom to live free of the world this culture is “remaking.” Do I have the freedom to live in a world with more migratory songbirds each year? More amphibians? Do I have the freedom to live in a world not being murdered? This culture gives its victims the choice: “Adapt to the world we are remaking to suit us, or die.” This is not fundamentally different to the choice this culture has long offered Indigenous peoples, of “Christianity or death,” or “Give away your lands and assimilate, or death.” Once you give in to this culture, stop defending your land from this culture, become dependent on this culture, work for this culture, identify with this culture, propagandize for this culture, serve this culture, then the culture and its proponents may stop attacking you. But if you don’t give in, you will be exterminated. As we see. And none of this is considered violence.
A few years ago I was interviewed by a dedicated Marxist who believes it’s possible to create an industrial system in which all economic exchanges are voluntary, absent of any violence or coercion. Of course, as with the authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto, he didn’t count violence against nonhumans or the natural world as violence. He also said that cities could exist under such a society.
I asked, “What do you use for transportation?”
He said, “Buses.”
I asked, “Where do you get the metals for the buses?”
“Mines.”
“Where do you get the miners?” Mining is one of the first three forms of slavery, and the primary way to get people into mines has always been coercion, whether it’s at the point of a sword or gun; or through laws such as those of apartheid; or through other means of destroying people’s access to land, and therefore access to food, clothing, and shelter, and therefore self-sufficiency.
He said, “You pay them enough that they’ll do it.”
I said, “What about pollution in the river? We agree that mines pollute, right? It’s impossible to have a mine without harming the land and water and air, right?”
He agreed.
I said, “What about the people who live next to the river which will now be polluted?”
“You pay them to move.”
“What if they’ve lived there for 12500 years, and their ancestors are there, and they refuse to move?”
“Pay them more.”
“They refuse your money.”
“How many are there?”
“What difference does that make? Let’s say 500.”
He said, “We vote.”
I said, “So the million people in the city vote to take the land from the 500 people who live along the river?”
He said, “Yes.”
I said, “You do realize that by not questioning the industrial infrastructure, you have moved within one minute from being a staunch advocate for only voluntary economic exchanges, to defending colonialism, land theft from the Indigenous, and democratic empire, right?”
Cities have always depended on a countryside (also known as colonies, also known as nature) to exploit.
The authors state, “Whether it’s a local indigenous community or a foreign corporation that benefits, it is the continued dependence of humans on natural environments that is the problem for the conservation of nature.”
Often those trying to justify the destructiveness of this culture conflate Indigenous people living in place and affecting their landbase with the clearly destructive activities of transnational corporations. The claim seems to be: because humans lived someplace, and affected the land there (as every being will affect all other beings: the bacteria who live inside of you affect you, some in very positive ways), then that gives the dominant culture carte blanche to act however it wants. As the anti-environmentalist Charles Mann puts it: “Anything goes. . . . Native Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same.” This is, of course, completely insane (and self-serving). Anyone with integrity understands the difference between Indigenous peoples living in the same place for 12500 years and the place being capable of supporting them for another 12500 years, and the dominant culture extracting resources to make a buck (oh, sorry, “remaking” the place).
Of course humans affect the land. Salmon affect the land. Alder trees affect the land. Beavers affect the land. Prairie dogs affect the land. Wolves affect the land. Oyster mushrooms affect the land. But the question becomes: does your presence on the land help make the land healthier? There’s a world of difference between participating in a living landbase on one hand; and extracting resources or “remaking” the land on the other. The former is a relationship; the latter is theft, murder, and control.
It was said of the Indians of northern California that they of course made decisions that affected the land (just as do salmon, redwood trees, and everyone else), but that these decisions were made on the understanding that the people were going to be living in that same place for the next five hundred years. In other words, their decisions were made based on their embodied understanding that their own health was entirely dependent upon the health of the land.
This is precisely the opposite of what those who promote extractive economies do, and it is precisely the opposite of what the authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto propose. They propose that the “problem” is “the continued dependence of humans on natural environments.”
But that’s not the “problem.” That’s the reality. We live on the Earth, our only home, our only source of air, water, food, shelter, our only source of everything that brings life. It is physically impossible to “decouple,” to use one of the favored words of the Manifesto’s authors, the health of the land from the long term health of those who are dependent upon this land. Sure, you can steal from the land to build a city and a navy, and use that city and navy to conquer more land. Sure, you can continue on a path of expansion across the globe, cutting down forests and draining wetlands and damming rivers and making dead zones in oceans and extirpating nonhumans and stealing land from Indigenous peoples who were living there sustainably, so long as there are always new forests to cut down, new prairies to convert to croplands (and then to wastelands). So long as there are new frontiers to violate and exploit, new places to conquer and steal from (sorry, “remake”) you can continue to overshoot carrying capacity and destroy the planet. And in the meantime, you can build a hell of a big city and a hell of a big name for yourself. But you should never pretend that can be sustainable.
The authors ask, “Given that humans are completely dependent on the living biosphere, how is it possible that people are doing so much damage to natural systems without doing more harm to themselves?”
I keep thinking about what might be the internal and social experience of bacteria on a petri dish. At some point, a few of the bacteria might say, “There are limits to how much we can grow. Do you think we should start planning on how to live here sustainably?”
Others respond, “Things have never been better. If we just keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll create not only a good but great bacteriocene!”
The naysayers again point out that the petri dish is finite.
They’re shouted down by the optimists, who say, following the authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto, “To the degree to which there are fixed physical boundaries to . . . consumption, they are so theoretical as to be functionally irrelevant.” The Ecomodernist bacteria insist that what’s really necessary is to decouple (one of their favorite words, too) their own well-being from that of the petri dish.
This discussion flourishes until the end, when the “remade” petri dish can no longer support life.
I briefly want to point out one more explicit lie, and one more false conceit. The explicit lie is, “The average per-capita use of land today is vastly lower than it was 5,000 years ago, despite the fact that modern people enjoy a far richer diet.” First, “average per-capita use of land” is a ridiculous measure of ecological or social health. The point of life is not, as the Bible suggested, to “go forth and multiply.” The point is not, to move this to the 21st Century, to project capitalism’s definition of success onto the real world and try to “get large or get out.” The point is and always has been the health of the land. A society with fewer members living in a long-term participatory, mutual relationship with the land is a far better measure of ecological and social health than is how much land each person requires. A sane culture would figure out how many people a piece of land can permanently (and optimally) support, and then make sure they’re below that number. An insane culture would overshoot carrying capacity and then consider itself superior because it (temporarily) supports more people per square mile.
But that’s not even the main lie, which is the absurd claim that “modern people enjoy a far richer diet.” Right now just three plants—rice, wheat, and millet—provide 60 percent of humans’ food energy intake, and fifteen plants provide 90 percent. Further, the provision of these foods is increasingly controlled by large corporations: four corporations control 75 percent of the world grain market. We can make similar statements about other food markets.
In contrast, the diet of hunter gatherers routinely included scores or hundreds of varieties of plants, plants not controlled by distant corporations. This is crucial, because if those in power can control a people’s food supply they can control their lives, which means they can force them to work for the elites: so much for the “freedom” of this new “remade” world.
And then there’s the fact that no one can anymore eat passenger pigeons, Eskimo curlews, great auks, or any of the other food staples this culture has caused to go extinct in its great remaking. And these days with the best tasting fish generally having been driven (at least commercially) extinct, increasingly corporations are selling what were once considered “trash fish” as luxuries. All of this is one reason the corporate press is increasingly praising insects as food: we’ve either destroyed or are destroying other foodstocks.
So it’s simply a lie to say modern diets are richer.
And finally, for the primary conceit of the Manifesto, which is that the world can be “remade” without destroying it. Let’s test their thesis. Name five biomes that have been managed for extraction—“remade,” to use their term—by this culture that have not been significantly harmed on their own terms.
Okay, let’s try four.
Three?
Two?
Okay, name one.
It can’t be done. Over the past several thousand years, this culture hasn’t managed for extraction a single biome without significantly harming it.
They say one sign of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns. How stupid must our claims to virtue make us if we cannot recognize this pattern, with an unbroken string of failures running several thousand years and at this point literally covering the entire planet, from the deserts of Iraq to the garbage patches in the oceans to the melting icecaps to the dammed and polluted rivers?
Of course if your goal is to “remake” the world to create luxuries for yourself, and if you don’t care that this “remaking” destroys life on the planet, then you might not consider this to be a consistent pattern of failure. You may consider this a great success. Which in and of itself is pretty stupid.
Out of the more than 450 dead zones in the oceans—caused by this culture’s “remaking” of the planet—only one has recovered. It’s in the Black Sea. It recovered not because humans “decoupled” themselves from the earth, but rather because humans were forced to “decouple” themselves from empire. The Soviet Union collapsed, and this collapse made it so agriculture was no longer economically feasible in the region. In other words, humans could no longer “remake” the world in that place. And the world, or rather, that one small part of the world, began to recover.
The authors of An Ecomodernist Manifesto have it completely backwards. For several thousand years this nature-hating culture has tried as hard as it can to define itself as other than nature. It has tried to separate itself from nature, to pretend it is not of nature. To pretend it is above nature, better than nature. That what it creates is more important than what nature creates. It has tried to pretend that it is not dependent on nature.
If we wish to continue to live on this planet, we need to recognize and remember that it is our only home and that we are dependent upon this planet, and that this dependence is a very good thing. Far from attempting to “decouple” our well-being from that of the planet—which this culture has been trying to do for a few thousand years now, to the detriment of everyone this culture encounters—we need to recognize and remember that our own well-being has always been intimately dependent on the health of the planet. And those of us who care about life on the planet must stop those who are currently remaking—read, killing—this planet that is our only home.
Indigenous custodians from Benin, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia have released a powerful new statement outlining the importance of sacred natural sites and governance systems.
Emerging out of a biocultural diversity revival movement that’s starting to build serious momentum across continental Africa, the statement forms the heart of a new report that builds the case for the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to do its part.
The new report, authored by The Gaia Foundation, African Biodiversity Network and human rights lawyer Roger Chennels, draws attention to the way that sacred natural sites and their community custodians have been systematically undermined and violated since the colonial era. Despite the official decolonization of Africa, this persecution continues today, say the authors, who have extensively documented the renewed scramble for Africa’s land, mineral, metal and fossil fuel wealth and its impact on Indigenous territories.
Sabella Kaguna, a sacred site custodian from Tharaka, Kenya, with a map of her ancestral territory and indigenous seeds (Photo: The Gaia Foundation)
Both the custodians and the report’s authors are now urging the African Commission to invoke the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (African Charter). and protect sacred sites, governance systems and custodians in a ‘decisive policy and legislative response’ to these threats.
SACRED NATURAL SITES
SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE, CULTURE AND LAW
According to the new report, sacred sites are “Places of ecological, cultural and spiritual importance, embedded in ancestral lands”. They also play an important role in community conflict resolution practices and other traditions central to the cultural life of Indigenous Peoples.In their statement custodians describe the centrality of sacred sites to their existence, writing that “Sacred natural sites are where we come from, the heart of life. They are our roots and our inspiration. We cannot live without our sacred natural sites, and we are responsible for protecting them.”
Sacred site custodians from Bale Ethiopia. (Photo :Tamara Korur)
The custodians go on to outline in detail how sacred natural sites are the primary source of their laws and customary governance systems. Drawing together a list of common customary laws, the custodians demonstrate how these governance systems enable Indigenous Peoples to both protect their territories and maintain their ways of life and identities.
Quoting Beninese custodian Ousso Lio Appolinaire on the relationship between nature and culture, the report’s authors emphasize that a priori laws based upon and derived from the laws of the Earth underpin the great diversity of laws and customs practiced by Indigenous Peoples worldwide.
“In the beginning there was Nature; culture and indigenous knowledge come from Nature. Nature cannot be protected in a sustainable way without the culture of that place. The erosion of culture leads to the destruction of Nature. It is critical to conserve the culture and knowledge of our ancestors for good ecological governance in service of Nature”, says Appolinaire.
The custodians’ are calling for the African Commission to recognize and protect sacred natural sites on the basis that they are the foundations of the governance systems, cultures and values celebrated and enshrined in the African Charter.
The report discusses at length the commitment the African Charter makes to recognizing Africa’s legal plurality, including Indigenous People’s customary governance systems. Laying out a broad vision for an Africa free of colonialism, Articles 17, 18 and 61 of the Charter promote plurality and the traditional cultural values that, for custodian communities, are intimately tied to the existence and health of sacred natural sites.
In order to safeguard these rights, sacred natural sites must be protected, and the customary governance systems connected to them honored, argues the report.
LOSING LAND AND MEMORY
SACRED SITES UNDER THREAT
The custodian’s statement intimates a critical need to protect sacred natural sites in accordance with the African Charter due to the interconnected crises of disappearing knowledge and increasingly devastated ecosystems.
VhaVenda community members and their ecological calendar in Venda Limpopo. (Photo: Will Baxter)
“We are deeply concerned about our Earth because she is suffering from increasing destruction despite all the discussions, international meetings, facts and figures and warning signs from Earth… the future of our children and the children of all the species of Earth are threatened. When this last generation of elders dies, we will lose the memory of how to live respectfully on the planet, if we do not learn from them now,” say the custodians.
As remedy, the custodians describe a litany of destructive and disrespectful practices that sacred natural sites ought to be legally protected from. These include unwanted tourism, research and documentation, the use of non-indigenous seeds, land grabbing and financial speculation.
Special attention is given to the problem of extractivism, with custodians declaring sacred natural sites to be ‘No Go Areas’ for mining and other forms of destructive ‘development’. They write that “Sacred natural sites are not for making money. Our children need a healthy planet with clean air, water and food from healthy soils. They cannot eat money as food or breathe money or drink money. If there is no water, there is no life.”
“In my country sacred sites are holy places, they are not a place for infrastructural development. Those sites are kept by the community”, says Sabella Kaguna, a custodian from Tharaka in Kenya and one of the statement’s authors.
In order to ensure custodian communities are empowered to protect sacred sites on their own terms, the custodians are seeking legal parity. They write that they have observed how the dominant legal system in their home nations is operationalized to legitimize the destruction of sacred natural sites in contravention of their own laws and customs.
This trend has been recognized by the African Commission’s own Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations. In a 2010 report the group described how “Indigenous communities in Kenya, like most others in Africa, often rely on their African customary law. However, Kenya’s legal framework subjugates African customary law to written laws. […] African customary law is placed at the bottom of the applicable laws”.
The report draws attention to examples of ‘multi-juridicial’ legal systems from around the world as examples of how indigenous legal traditions can be given greater parity. Describing the African Charter as ‘replete’ with references with legal pluralism and the need to respect ancestral legal systems, it makes the case for more wide-ranging and robust protection of these systems in African nations under the Charter.
A REVIVAL GATHERS PACE
Though the custodians’ statement calls for new actions from the African Commission and member states, at the grassroots level Indigenous custodian communities have been taking active steps to protect sacred natural sites for a number of years.
The report shares a number of case studies that showcase the success Indigenous communities have had in protecting sacred sites so far.
Meeting of sacred site custodians at Lake Langano, Ethiopia 2015 (Photo: The Gaia Foundation)
Benin is home to a network of sacred natural sites, known as Vodun zun, including over 2,940 sacred forests. In 2012, due in large part to the work of Indigenous-led organization GRABE-Benin, Benin set a new precedent by creating a ‘sacred forest law’ (Interministerial Order No.0121). The law formally protects sacred forests, recognizing their importance for biodiversity and ethno-cultural traditions.
Since that time GRABE-Benin has accompanied communities to apply for registration and legal recognition of their sacred forests as protected areas, as well as recognition of the communities’ rights to govern and protect them. By the end of 2013, a total of nine sacred forests had been formally protected.
Sheka Forest (Photo: Will Baxter)
In the Sheka region of Southern Ethiopia, a region famous for rare afromontane forests, Shekacho communities have made great strides to protect the area’s 200+ sacred natural sites from threats such as deforestation.
With assistance from MELCA-Ethiopia, a local NGO, the communities have begun to revitalize their traditional culture, and clans have united to seek protection for sacred sites. As a result of these efforts, Sheka Forest was recognized as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2012. Since then, the regional government has issued a regulation for the protection of the Sheka forest Biosphere Reserve.
These successes are part of a wider process of Indigenous cultural revival under way across Africa. The report describes how communities such as those in Sheka and Benin are coming together to rebuild their cultural identities and customary governance systems. In doing so, they are challenging dominant legal systems that continue in the colonial vein of legitimizing eco-cultural destruction, rather than preventing it.
A new film from the report’s authors provides greater insight into this ongoing revival. In the film, Method Gundidza of the Mupo Foundation (South Africa) describes the critical importance of customary governance at a time of multiple eco-social crises:
“We are saying that law should derive from nature. And if law should derive from nature, customary governance systems are the law. This is where it (law) should come from. These are the (Indigenous) people whose day-to-day lives reflect how to live with nature and how to care for nature.”
The custodians and their supporters now hope their statement will impress this key insight upon the African Commission and inspire them to action. In the meantime, they will continue with their quiet revolution.
