This is the first part of a series in which our friend Vince Emanuele gives valuable insights into a range of issues concerning political organizing.
In this episode, he examines the introduction to Jane McAlevey‘s book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. In this segment, Vince talks about the fundamental differences between three approaches to politics: Advocacy, Mobilizing, and Organizing. This is the sort of knowledge activists and organizers should learn from Day One. The fact that we’re not is a sign of the times and what must change.
#PARCMedia is a news and media project founded by two USMC veterans, Sergio Kochergin & Vince Emanuele. They give a working-class take on issues surrounding politics, ecology, community organizing, war, culture, and philosophy.
Indigenous peoples worldwide are the victims of the largest genocide in human history, which is ongoing. Wherever indigenous cultures have not been completely destroyed or assimilated, they stand as relentless defenders of the landbases and natural communities which are there ancestral homes. They also provide living proof that humans as a species are not inherently destructive, but a societal structure based on large scale monoculture, endless energy consumption, accumulation of wealth and power for a few elites, human supremacy and patriarchy (i.e. civilization) is. DGR stands in strong solidarity with indigenous peoples.
A small community of Brazilian Indians has won a land rights case at Brazil’s Supreme Court that could have major repercussions for indigenous people across the country.
The Court has ruled that a 2014 judicial decision canceling the return of some of their ancestral territory to the Guarani community of Guyra Roka must be revisited because the Guarani themselves were not involved in the process. Now, they must be given a fair hearing before the Court votes again on the return of their territory.
The ruling will potentially affect other communities whose lands have been stolen, but who hope to reclaim them.
However, the chances of the Guarani recovering their land any time soon are remote.
Most of the area has been taken over by a powerful politician and rancher, José Teixeira, who has been implicated in a series of attacks on the Guarani. One of the leaders of Guyra Roka, Ambrosio Vilhalva, who acted in the feature film Birdwatchers, was stabbed to death in 2013.
Vilhalva and others led a “re-occupation” in 2000 to recover a small parcel of their land from the rancher.
Tito Vilhalva, a religious leader of the Guyra Roka community, said: “I’m 99 years old now. [When I was young] Guyra Roka was forest – there was no road, no fences. It was just forest and Indians, monkeys and tapirs. There were no Brazilians then.”
The 2014 cancelation of the Guyra Roka’s territory was based on what campaigners have called the “Time Limit Trick” – a ploy by anti-indigenous politicians to manipulate the constitution and steal indigenous lands.
The Time Limit Trick says that unless indigenous peoples were living on their ancestral lands on October 5, 1988 [the day the Brazilian Constitution was adopted] they no longer have any right to them. If successful, this genocidal manoeuvre would put hundreds of indigenous territories and dozens of uncontacted tribes at grave risk.
The Supreme Court is due to rule in a separate case shortly concerning the Xokleng tribe that will set the definitive precedent for the Time Limit Trick. If it is upheld in that case, indigenous rights will be set back decades and many tribal peoples, and their lands, could be destroyed.
The indigenous lawyer Eloy Terena said: “Instead of protecting indigenous interests, [the state and its agents] worked with the region’s farmers to evict the indigenous people from their lands and to promote genocidal agribusiness.”
Survival’s Research & Advocacy Director Fiona Watson, who has visited the Guyra Roka community, said today: “This is a stunning victory for a group of people who have been relentlessly persecuted for decades but never stopped fighting to recover their land. The Guarani and their many allies around the world will fight for their land to be returned. The Guarani have endured a decades-long humanitarian crisis in which almost all their land has been stolen, their leaders murdered, and their means of survival destroyed. Like other tribal peoples across Brazil, they’re confronting a government whose policies and actions have the clear and genocidal aim of wiping them out.”
We in DGR do not believe that there are any technological solutions to climate change. Technocrats like Bill Gates represent the insanity and human supremacy of this culture, believing that they can play God and engineer the planet. We consider this a very dangerous approach. The only real solution to climate change is a large scale ecological restoration.
This article originally appeared on Counterpunch and Patrick Mazza’s substack blog The Raven.
Featured image: The Sami flag (public domain)
The first ever stratospheric test of geoengineering technology, funded by Bill Gates, has been suspended under pressure from the indigenous people over whose heads it would take place, the Saami of northern Scandinavia. It may be moved back to the United States.
At the recommendation of the project’s Advisory Committee, the scheduled June test has been called off. That became public March 31.
When Bill Gates $4.5 million investment in geoengineering research came to light in 2010, one of the scientists he put in charge of the project, Ken Caldeira, said the money was not funding any field experiments. But as the project has grown and moved to Harvard, that line was crossed. In a first-of-a-kind test of geoengineering technologies in the stratosphere, the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment – SCoPEx for short – intends to release around a kilogram of calcium carbonate, essentially chalk dust, from a propelled balloon-gondola rig 12 miles up. Particles would cover the equivalent of 11 football fields and test the material’s potential to block a portion of solar radiation, countering the heat-trapping effects of carbon dioxide. The June test would not have released any particles, only tried out the rig’s technologies.
Last December SCoPEx announced it was moving the rig test to Sweden because of the pandemic. It was to have been in Arizona and New Mexico. The new test site was to be Swedish Space Corporation’s launch center at Kiruna near the Arctic Circle, the Saami homeland. Trouble was, nobody had talked to the Saami or anyone else in Sweden.
The Saami Council, which defends the rights of the reindeer-herding people from Norway to Russia, on Feb. 24 sent a letter to the SCoPEx Advisory Committee opposing not only the experiment, but the entire premise of geoengineering research outside an international consensus. It was co-signed by leaders of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, Friends of the Earth Sweden and Greenpeace Sweden. Environmental groups had previously weighed in on their own.
The Saami have reason to be concerned about what’s flying over their heads. Winds from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster dumped radiation on their villages and reindeer grazing lands. Thousands of animals had to be slaughtered, and decades later reindeer meat must still be tested for radiation. The Saami have also taken an active stance on climate, persuading Norway’s second largest pension fund to divest from fossil fuels. And they showed up at Standing Rock in 2017 to support tribes resisting the oil-carrying Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River.
HAZARDS MORAL AND OTHERWISE
The letter from the Saami and their allies economically summarizes the fundamental contradiction of the Harvard research and geoengineering experiments in general – private governing bodies assuming powers and making decisions of such immense potential impacts that democratic accountability is required.
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI), write the Saami and environmentalists, “entails risks of catastrophic consequences including . . . uncontrolled termination . . . ” – If it was stopped, the heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide would kick back in and cause sudden heating, like a junkie having withdrawals from addiction – “and irreversible sociopolitical effects that could compromise the world’s necessary efforts to achieve zero-carbon societies.” In other words, geoengineering would provide an excuse for powerful interests to continue burning the fossil fuels that add to atmospheric CO2. By offering protection from risks it would reduce the incentive to eliminate them. This is known as moral hazard. “There are therefore no acceptable reasons for allowing the SCoPEx project to be conducted either in Sweden or elsewhere.”
The ways research creates moral hazard is illustrated by Alex Lenferma, a South African climate analyst writing for the Carnegie Council. “David Keith (a lead in the Harvard project whom Gates tapped to help distribute his 2010 funding) tells us that geoengineering could be very inexpensive. According to him, it would cost just $10 billion (annually), or one ten-thousandth of global GDP, whereas its benefits could be more than 1 percent of global GDP—a return one thousand times greater than its cost. While Keith warns that solar geoengineering does not spare us the need to reduce emissions, other team members do not seem so convinced.
“Fellow Harvard teammate Richard Zeckhauser tells us that ‘solar geoengineering is the most promising technology we have today.’ It is so promising that Zeckhauser says he would be fine if we redirected some of our efforts from greenhouse gas emission reduction to geoengineering, a statement that borders on encouraging moral hazard . . . “
Research illustrates the dangers of moving ahead in a Wild West atmosphere of independent initiatives taken outside a global governance structure. Releasing solar shielding particles in the northern hemisphere alone could increase droughts in India and the Sahel of Africa even as it benefits the north. Jacob Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Geoengineering Governance Initiative, told Carbon Brief, “If one country decided to put its own interests first – say the leader of that country thought ‘our country needs cooling down, let’s do some regional solar geoengineering’ – that could have potentially catastrophic effects in other parts of the world.”
Keith was the co-author of a 2020 modeling study that downplayed the danger. Previous studies showed solar shielding worsening climate impacts over 9% of the Earth’s land area. But if shielding aimed to reduce just half of warming it “would only exacerbate change over 1.3% of the land area,” said co-author Peter Irvine. “Our results suggest that when used at the right dose and alongside reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, stratospheric aerosol geoengineering could be useful for managing the impacts of climate change.”
“There is a real potential, maybe a significant potential, to reduce the risks of climate change this century – by a lot,” Keith said.
Research showing geoengineering could be cheap, reduce climate damage and have minimal impacts in “the right dose” has the appearance of making a case for geoengineering. Even though the scientists acknowledge uncertainty, such research at least entertains moral hazard. This is particularly so absent a framework of global governance or democratic accountability.
THE SAAMI CALL OUT HARVARD
The Saami and their allies took direct aim at the accountability issue and the Harvard-appointed Advisory Committee. It is worth quoting at length. There are “serious problems in terms of governance and decision-making in relation to SCoPEx. We find it remarkable that the project has gone so far as to establish an agreement with SSC (Swedish Space Corporation) on test flying without, as we understand, having applied for any permits or entered into any dialogue with either the Swedish government, its authorities, the Swedish research community, Swedish civil society, or the Saami people, despite the controversial nature of SCoPEx . . . “
“It is noteworthy that Harvard University considers it reasonable for a committee whose role it is to decide whether this controversial project should go ahead, to not have any representation from the intended host country, Sweden. Instead, the committee is composed of almost exclusively US citizens and/or residents. We note that SCoPEx ‘independent’ Advisory Committee appears to be extremely homogeneous, is far from representative and appointed through Harvard itself, without any inclusion of affected groups and without directly critical and non-US voices. (Members are listed here.)
“The SCoPEx project’s comment on its Advisory Committee’s draft ‘Engagement Process for SCoPEx’ highlights core issues and shows the project’s problematic approach to ethics, responsibility and decision making. The SCoPEx project states that no one research project should have to answer questions such as ‘Does solar geoengineering research or deployment pose a moral hazard? Is it ethical to deploy solar geoengineering, and who should decide? Can solar geoengineering deployment be governed, and can we trust that governance? Is research a slippery slope to deployment?’. The SCoPEx project states that under such requirements research would have to halt, and complains that this has not been the case for other areas of research, and therefore ‘should not be the burden for solar geoengineering research.’
“We state that precisely because of the extraordinary and particular risks associated with SAI, this technology and SCoPEx cannot be treated like other research. The type of key issues cited above must be considered first, and in forums that are significantly more representative and inclusive than the SCopEx Advisory Committee. Experimentation and technology development through projects such as SCoPEx must therefore be halted.
“We call on the SCoPEx Advisory Committee as well as SSC to recognise these shortcomings, and to cancel the planned test flight in Kiruna. The SCoPEx plans for Kiruna constitute a real moral hazard . . . Stratospheric Aerosol Injection research and technology development have implications for the whole world, and must not be advanced in the absence of full, global consensus on its acceptability.”
HARVARD RETREATS
Indigenous and environmental opposition has backed SSC and Advisory Committee down. On March 31, MIT Technology review reported that the SSC had withdrawn from the project, and the committee in “an unexpected move” advised suspending the June test. The group said it has begun a public engagement process to “help the committee understand Swedish and Indigenous perspectives and make an informed and responsive recommendation about the equipment test flights in Sweden.” SCoPEx principal investigator Frank Keutsch said flights will be suspended until the committee can make a recommendation “based on robust public engagement in Sweden that is broadly inclusive of indigenous populations . . . “
It is likely tests will not be conducted before 2022 and not in Sweden. With the pandemic abating the tests may return to the U.S.
It took the Saami and environmental allies calling out the Harvard project and the Advisory Committee to begin a consultation process. That it came as an afterthought underscores the basic point. In geoengineering as with so many crucial issues, private institutions and individuals are acting as de facto governments, making decisions potentially affecting billions of people without democratic accountability. Harvard, the premier university in the U.S. and the world, is a preeminent case in point. Resistant to campaigns for fossil fuel divestment, it is researching technologies that could diminish the drive to end fossil fuel burning. A poster for moral hazard. To move toward the first stratospheric experiment of highly controversial geoengineering technology in a foreign country without thinking to consult the country’s civil society, let alone indigenous people over whose lands you will conduct that experiment, evidences a certain HAA-VUD “we-know-better-than-you” arrogance. It is the essence of private government over democratic accountability.
SHOULD SCIENTISTS LEAD?
Announcement of the suspension came only days after release of a National Academy of Sciences report calling for a program of geoengineering research.
“This proposal is dangerous,” wrote Frank Bierrman, Utrecht University professor of global governance and founder of the Earth System Governance Project. “Solar geoengineering technologies remain speculative and assume a level of understanding of the planetary system that does not exist. Numerous studies have pointed to the risks especially for developing countries and vulnerable populations if anything goes wrong with ‘hacking the climate’. Most importantly, the governance challenges of solar geoengineering are unsurmountable in today’s global political system.”
“The NAS report’s vision for global governance is clear: it is the United States that should lead the way, at least for now. Other countries are invited to join, but there is no indication that the NAS authors envision to place geoengineering technology under global control with a binding veto power for those countries in the Global South that are most vulnerable . . . Instead, the vision of the NAS report seems to be that scientists should lead, especially US scientists. Based on that, a global network of experts could autonomously govern research. It is widely known, however – and acknowledged by the NAS report itself – that this global research community is vastly skewed in favour of a few industrialized countries. Research governance by experts is governance by the Global North, with some ‘consultation’ of others on the side. It is, as I argued earlier, a ‘rich man’s solution’.”
Penn State Climatologist Michael Mann, a member of the NAS, issued his own concerns. “A report like this is as much about the policy message it conveys as it is about the scientific assessment, for it will be used immediately by policy advocates. And here I’m honestly troubled at the fodder it provides for mis-framing of the risks . . . the report itself, in my view, really puts a thumb on the scales. It falls victim to the moral hazard that I warn about in The New Climate War . . . “
Mann quotes from the widely acclaimed new book, “A fundamental problem with geoengineering is that it presents what is known as a moral hazard, namely, a scenario in which one party (e.g., the fossil fuel industry) promotes actions that are risky for another party (e.g., the rest of us), but seemingly advantageous to itself. Geoengineering provides a potential crutch for beneficiaries of our continued dependence on fossil fuels. Why threaten our economy with draconian regulations on carbon when we have a cheap alternative? The two main problems with that argument are that (1) climate change poses a far greater threat to our economy than decarbonization, and (2) geoengineering is hardly cheap – it comes with great potential harm.”
GATES: ENGINEERING OVER POLITICS
Gates has made several other geoengineering plays. He joined with Microsoft’s old chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, and his company, Intellectual Ventures, in which Gates is an investor, on a 2008 geoengineering patent application that envisions using cold sea water to tamp down hurricane intensities. In 2010 he announced an investment in Sea Spray, a company researching a technology that would spray seawater into the atmosphere to seed sunlight-reflecting white clouds. Gates also funded David Keith to create a company that captures CO2 directly from the atmosphere. Carbon Engineering has built a plant in British Columbia and plans another with partner Occidental Petroleum in the Permian Basin of Texas, one of the fracking centers of the continent. CO2’s current market is for enhancing oil recovery by pumping it into wells. Chevron and BHP are other oil company investors in Carbon Engineering, as is Alberta tar sands financier N. Murray Edwards.
Criticism of Gates’ investments ranges well beyond geoengineering to the disproportionate influence his foundation exerts in global health and development as well as education policy. The foundation’s support for industrialized agriculture models in Africa and the teach-to-test-oriented “Common Core” plan for U.S. education have come under scrutiny. Critical reviews of his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, have called out his focus on technology as opposed to political solutions.
Wrote climate activist Bill McKibben in his New York Times review, “ . . . politics . . . is where Gates really wears blinders. ‘I think more like an engineer than a political scientist,’ he says proudly — but that means he can write an entire book about the ‘climate disaster’ without discussing the role that the fossil fuel industry played, and continues to play, in preventing action . . . That’s why we’ve wasted almost three decades of scientific warning. ‘I don’t have a solution to the politics of climate change,’ Gates writes, but in fact he does: He founded, and his foundation is a shareholder in, a company that has donated money to exactly the politicians who are in the pocket of big oil. A Bloomberg analysis last fall found that Microsoft had given only a third of its contributions to ‘climate-friendly’ politicians.”
NOBODY’S SMART ENOUGH ON THEIR OWN
In today’s world, money and power are being super-concentrated, aggregating to massive corporations, wealthy individuals such as Gates, and influential institutions such as Harvard. There is a tendency, especially among the successful, to believe their success translates into broad insight on how the world should be managed. With their money, resources and prestige, they speak with the loudest voices, often drowning out others.
But no matter how brilliant or even well intentioned we may be, each one of us human beings is limited by our own perspectives. We all have blind spots. We all make mistakes. The greater our reach, the more injurious the potential impact. That is the downfall of the private governance structures becoming ever more powerful in the world. Inclusive frameworks of democratic accountability are required to gain the widest range of knowledge and insights, reflect the broadest interests, and avoid pitfalls.
The Saami, speaking with the growing moral authority of the indigenous, along with their environmental allies, have brought a crucial voice to the geoengineering table. That they were not asked their views, but had to raise their voice, says everything about the flawed assumptions of private government. This is true for the range of challenges confronting our world. It is nowhere truer than in a field with such global and potentially catastrophic impacts as geoengineering.
This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s substack blog The Raven.
While research is important, it should be absolutely clear to anybody with a sane mind that the use of agrochemicals and the extermination of insects is an abysmal stupidity. By applying poisons to a closed system like planet earth we are poisoning ourselves. A worldwide ban of all pesticides would be a reasonable first step in harm reduction.
There are over 20,000 bee species and together they help pollinate more than 75% of the world’s leading food crops. Honeybees tend to hog the limelight, but few realise how important diversity is to this process. Having lots of different species of pollinating insects on farmland can lead to better crop yields, while crops attended by fewer species tend to set less fruit and produce fewer seeds.
For food systems to maintain a stable output each year, farms need pollinator numbers to remain stable too. But the abundance of these insects can fluctuate from one year to the next, so what’s needed to keep them relatively constant? With so much of the world’s food production dependent on the pollinating work of insects, this question is very important.
We wanted to find out more, so my colleagues and I researched 21 different crops across 12 countries. We looked at intensively managed almond, apple and pear orchards and oil seed rape fields in North America, South America and Europe. But we also studied less intensive mixed cropping systems growing aubergine, pumpkin and other gourds in India, as well as mangoes in South Africa, turnips in China and Kiwifruit and avocados in New Zealand.
Most of the world’s bees are solitary and don’t live in hives. Deepa Senapathi, Author provided
We found that more diverse communities of crop pollinating insects – comprised of a greater number of different species – had more stable numbers from one year to the next. If you imagine one field with 100 bees belonging to just two species, and another field with 100 bees made up of ten species, the latter is more likely to keep stable pollinator numbers over time.
A pollinator insurance policy
Providing ample opportunities for a diverse range of insects to nest and forage on farms over long periods of time could make pollinator communities more diverse and abundant. It may help keep pollination stable over several years too. That could mean mowing grass or pruning hedgerows less often and planting wildflower strips alongside crops. Since many pollinators, particularly bees, nest in soil, allowing room for bare ground and dead wood and limiting the use of agrochemicals could also make farmland habitats more attractive to a wide range of species.
Providing food and habitat for wild insects can nurture a more diverse community of pollinators. Emjay Smith/Shutterstock
We also found that if a particular species of solitary bee, bumblebee or honeybee was the most numerous on a patch of farmland throughout all the years of the study, the overall number of pollinators was more stable too. A previous study found that a small minority of dominant species often carries out the majority of crop pollination.
So, a short-term fix might be supporting the same dominant species from one year to the next. This could be achieved using managed pollinators, such as honeybees or bumblebees. But this isn’t a sustainable solution. In the long term, farms with just a handful of pollinator species should focus on boosting the diversity of their pollinator community.
Relying on a few species can keep pollination stable for a while – but it’s risky in the long run. Try_my_best
While a few dominant species play an important role in pollinating crops at present, rebuilding the diversity of wild pollinators offers insurance against future changes in the environment. If one dominant pollinator struggled to cope with rising temperatures or a disease outbreak, a diverse community of other species could take over and prevent a collapse in crop pollination.
Editor’s note: We are grateful to present this wonderful article by our appreciated guardian Trinity La Fey today. Original writing by DGR cadre, guardians and supporters makes the most powerful articles because it genuinely reflects our spirit, the deep empathy and love for the natural world that keeps us grassroots activists going, and gives insight into our struggles.
When, concerned for our safety, my husband pressured me to either censor or disguise myself online, I replied, “You keep talking at me like I don’t know what kind of world this is and I am asking you: what kind of a world do you want to live in?”
I-search papers annoy me and I try not to write them, but in this, there can be no dispassionate analysis. Without relating the experience, how can this story be told? If Rebecca Wildbear, who recounted, “Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has caused the loss of 80% of wild mammals and 50% of plants. 90% of large fish, 50% of coral reefs and 40% of plankton have been wiped out. Of all the mammals now on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans. Only 4% are wild mammals.” couldn’t convince you, or at least pique your curiosity, I doubt I will either. There are already exceptional writers and reciters of numbers and names of species. That is not what I am and that is not what this article will be.
This is about where we live.
When I hear about dams, mining, logging, drilling, fracking and industrial production, I hear about it in numbers and names: this many of that species eradicated (to use the euphemism); this much money for that company; this many jobs for which community; how many years of what material; this many of that habitat displaced.
Are these the questions we really want the answers to?
I live in my body. When I eat too much or not enough, when I’m ill dressed for the weather, when I’m careless with my movements in relation to my environment, pain and discomfort tell me, in no uncertain terms, what is wrong.
Derrick Jensen once said, “Before you laugh and say a river is just a container through which water flows and happens to be filled with other beings, let me ask you: when was the last time you had a drink of water; and let me ask you: when is the next time you’re gonna’ pee?[ L]et me remind you that more than 90% of the cells in your body don’t contain your DNA . . .”
I can tell you the kind of world I don’t want to live in and the kind of person I don’t want to be. That is a world in which dams, mines, drills, deforesters and trawlers go unfettered in their genocidal quests, the kind of person that is complicit in those atrocities by default.
If I were a rich man, maybe it would embarrass me to hear arguments to the effect that environmentalism is a luxury of the privileged. Maybe, if I didn’t know that Bangladesh is one-third under water, I could be spoken over about how, “There’s no point in trying to ‘save the planet,’ how arrogant and self-righteous it is when everything is doomed and Earth has gone through plenty of extinctions. What’s one more event?”
But I am not a rich man and I live in a country that has displaced more people than water has, so far, in Bangladesh. Will Falk once said, “Don’t ask, ‘What can I do?’ but, ‘What needs to be done?’”
So I went to Thacker Pass and asked him.
Except it wasn’t as simple as that. Before Thacker Pass, since September of 2015, my husband and I have spent but one night apart. We’re the kind of couple that really leans into the whole ‘interdependency’ concept. Though I have been a passenger near and far, being a late-blooming driver, until Thacker Pass, I’d never myself travelled more than two hours away from my home. Thacker Pass was two, eight-hour days of driving away from my responsibilities and loves, where I work for a living. As I told everyone who came to the camp, I cried all the way to Laramie. I bored everyone else to tears talking them up about him. All five of us.
Surreal doesn’t touch it. I had to rent a car, reserve an out of state hotel, two ways, with a card. I am not a rich man luxuriating in ideology. I’m at ground level out here, seeing and feeling the dire effects of pollution and poverty. Both of those acts were things I’d never done before. They were alien and beyond expensive. They are things I want gone: emblematic of a way of life that as Max Wilbert so eloquently said, “ . . .we don’t get to vote on . . . .”
Before I left, I kept thinking: this is my ‘real’ car insurance money this year.
Do I really care about the planet, or do I care about the people that I personally know?
This is my tuition for that class I have to take.
Do I really care about the environment, or do I care about my life today?
Am I betraying my relationships by leaving to do this?
Do I really care about the Earth? What do I care about?
What if something happens to one of us? I am on my little flippy phone; no use out there in the boonies.
I can barely bring myself to leave the house for work or groceries. How the hell am I going to leave my life, with my husband, in our apartment and stay away for fifteen days?
I cried
all
the way
to Laramie.
I wasn’t out there because I so much enjoy winter camping. I wasn’t out there for my good health. I had to go because I couldn’t live with not going. It was an emotional allegiance I could either live up to or shrivel. I didn’t want to leave at all. My husband had to encourage me to go because I had convinced him with my initial determination and it was too late to back out now. In one of his videos, Max spoke about native people who rejected horse riding because it moved your body faster than your soul could travel and it took time to catch up.
That is my experience also.
As soon as I got there, I wanted to go back home. Principle had made me some kind of fool to bring me out in the middle of this beautiful nowhere when I needed to be saving up and hunkering down. I set up a little calendar to count down the days. It was February 16th. At that time, there were three of us.
It would be inappropriate to speak about the others, by name, who, like me, came and stayed and left. I will say that true-blue environmentalists are some of the most attractive people it has been my pleasure to meet. They were an easy crowd to be around, easy on the eyes, easy to fall in love with. We made coffee and dreamed dreams and walked around and waited for our souls to catch up with us.
The expectation felt was that we should write some great thing to make us not euphemise genocide and then stop committing it. I’m a writer. I write. So, I know how this works. You can’t effectively write about what you don’t feel. If I wanted to be able to listen to the place, I’d have to get all the other stuff out of the way. I wrote love letters to my husband like it was some bygone wartime. I wrote every day, sometimes all day. There was much to get out.
Finally, the walks started yielding phrases and poem snippits. Then themes from our conversations and firelight stories gave me some language of place. I started writing love letters of parting to my fellow campers.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time outside in wild, half-wild and deadly domesticated places. I would describe Thacker Pass as half-wild. Cattle move through there; we were camped under a weather tower; roads, fences and power-lines are visible in the day; city and ranch house lights are visible at night. We were completely surrounded by mountains. From a mountainous place, I didn’t expect the desertous Nevada I remembered to have such landscapes. It really was a wonderful consolation against the cold and wind and waking up alone to piss in the cold wind to be in such a beautiful place, surrounded by so many impressive kindred. Everywhere life was teeming around us, in the ice and wind. Every night the coyotes sang from the valley below. Every day the ravens cawed and swooped down from the cliffs above. The kangaroo mice left their tracks and teeth marks on everything. I made friends with a rat. The sage was very patient with us. The rabbit brush was like the sage’s lover. These others weren’t names on a list. These are family members in a shared landscape. Once my soul caught up with me and I got all my stuff out, there wasn’t too much I missed. The number-one reason I don’t recreate in the mountains of my home is that it is Earth-expensive, but a close second is that it hurts so much to come back. The longest I’d been out before was a week. After two weeks at Thacker Pass, I was half-wild again too. Coming back is some bullshit.
There are good things. I wept with a soldier’s relief to see my husband again. Having running water, with soap, next to a toilet is amazing. Showers.
But.
What does it cost?
Do we want to live in ugly places?
Why are the places we reside and rely on made ugly and despoiled?
Lierre Keith noted, “Right now, we are losing 200 species every single day. So, all the prairies, all the forests, anyplace that you could grow those crops, has been taken over. It’s quite grim when you think about it: 99% of the forests are gone and 99% of the original prairies are gone.” What could I possibly write to convince one who would rationalize or justify? The Lorax has already been written. It’s all there. No need for an argument about numbers as ratio or names as technicality. There is only: the last one. Then: none.
Where I live, there is a beer manufacturer polluting the river; a steel refinery, a meat packing plant and a pet food company poisoning the air. You can tell which way the wind is blowing by them. There are fracking rigs everywhere. Really. Everywhere. Deserted oil derricks, mine pits, clear cuts: those are mostly in the half-wild places.
Why did I go to Nevada when there’s plenty of work to do here? Because I can’t face down a sea of denial in all human relationships. I can’t fight this alone, just like Max and Will put out the call for others to come join them: because they understood that it would take the people living in and around Thacker Pass; it would take Canadians holding Lithium Americas to account and it would take total strangers willing to sacrifice, in solidarity, to stop the mine from going through.
What if we worked together to stop all the mines?
What if we invented life insurance?
What if we stopped industrial agriculture?
What if we invented credit cards and rental cars?
What if we ended rape?
What if we charged people to live in endless toil?
What if we murdered every species until they were all driven to extinction?
What if we don’t do that?
That is the only thing that concerns me now. This is not a passive extinction event, wrought about by the inevitable breaths of algae or touch of comets. We are doing this, as one species, to every other. Rather, some humans, with names and addresses, are profiting enormously (short term, of course) from massive social inequality among humans and human indifference or contempt for our only home and fellow Earthlings. This is not a series of accidents. These are devastating acts, deliberated over and intentionally carried out by people for whom they have been structurally incentivized.
What if we restructured?
I’ve been back now for longer than I was gone and still, I am not acclimated back into my normalized civilian life, because it is unnatural. I can’t unpack. I just walk around in my camping clothes, waiting to go back.
Even in the half-wild, even without my better half, even sometimes feeling pain and discomfort, re-wilding happened effortlessly. My stance widened. I grew two inches back from my working years. It felt good to do a hard, right thing: to put my time and money and body where my mouth was. My speech grew free and bold among new friends. I had a good time.
What if we were mammals inexorably bound to and interdependent with a larger, encompassing body?
What if, instead of quantifying, justifying, rationalizing, minimizing or qualifying global genocide, we stopped being genocidal?
What if we continue being genocidal?
What if we call the abuse of women and girls ‘sex’ and feed the footage of it to the limbic systems of men and boys for a few generations?
What will happen?
What has happened?
The expectation is that I should write something to make it stop.
You make it stop.
The Lorax has already been written.
Rebecca, Derrick, Will, Max, Lierre and I are part of an organization trying to do together what we cannot do alone. We need your help. In every way, we have to stop extracting and start re-wilding. There is no effective isolationist approach. We cannot buy into or out of it. We cannot escape from civilization anymore than we can the climate. We have to change.
We have mutilated ourselves into whatever kind of cyborgs we are now. Certainly, we can do something else instead, perhaps extending some humble curiosity toward the other species who do not destroy all life on the planet as a matter of course, but contribute to the possibility and furtherance of life, or our human ancestors who did the same.
I’m not feeling numbers and names when I feel the pull back to the half-wild place, but the same pang of love that is concerning one’s self with another. Not one inch of that place is appropriate to sacrifice further. Not one of our kindred species is it okay to push closer to the euphemism.
I don’t want to be the kind of person that says, “I tried to stop the mine at Thacker Pass. I spent two weeks there, but I had a life and couldn’t afford to go back.”
I want to be the kind of person who can say, “There aren’t mines anymore. We made sure of it.”
That takes living in the kind of world where you’re prepared to make sure of it too.
