Editor’s note: “Protest alone, disconnected from more substantive action, is akin to screaming in the wind. Protest is not resistance. Protest, whether conscious to it or not, often reinforces the belief that the system is fundamentally sound, and that with reform it can resolve the issue that sparked the protest. We must confront the truth: our system of governance is fundamentally flawed. It is corrupt, hierarchical, unfair, and thoroughly infiltrated by corporate power and special interests.”
“It obviously should be concerning to activists that anything they do in their local area might be seen in this broad-brush way of being a federal issue of terrorism or come under the observation of the FBI and all of the powers that come with it,” said Andrew Ferguson, who studies surveillance technology at the American University Washington College of Law.
What do we do when protests and elections fail?
People deserve to be included in the processes of making political decisions about the places where they live. People deserve equal access to economic resources and opportunities. People deserve to have a say in environmental decisions that affect the health and well-being of their communities. People deserve to be able to govern their places in a way that maintains healthy, long-term relationships among humans, other living things, and the physical environment.
It is the final week of February 2024, and the City of London, the capital’s ancient financial district, where corporations cluster like woodland trees, is teeming with climate activists. For three days they march the streets, block the entrances, and infiltrate the lobbies of major insurance companies. They act as part of a global campaign by an alliance of groups, and their aim is simple: stop the insurers from underwriting new fossil fuel infrastructure. This protest will end up showcasing both the pruning of one type of climate activism, and the blossoming of another.
The first activists to be arrested are a five-strong Extinction Rebellion troupe dressed like 1940s washerwomen, complete with hair curlers, heavy makeup and rubber gloves. Known as the Dirty Scrubbers, their plan is to performatively clean some corporate entrances, and dye some fake money green in their ‘greenwashing machine’ – an old washing machine on bike wheels. The action encapsulates much of what made Extinction Rebellion a global phenomenon – fun, theatrical, eye-catching activism that still has a bit of bite. The police commander is informed by protest organisers and gives the performance the go ahead. But half an hour later, the police on the street have other ideas. Thirty officers surround the Dirty Scrubbers as they wheel their greenwashing machine into the protest zone, and arrest them for conspiring to cause criminal damage. Only some are handcuffed, but all are loaded into vans and held in police cells until the evening. Their greenwashing machine is impounded.
On the third and final day of the protest, in the early hours of the night, a previously unknown group makes its debut. Hooded activists wielding paint-filled fire extinguishers spray the entrances of three insurers and flee the scene before the police arrive. Rather than getting cleaned by the Dirty Scrubbers, the skyscrapers end up stained blood-red by anonymous members of Shut The System (STS).
The Dirty Scrubbers are led into police vans, City of London, February 27, 2024. Photo: Extinction Rebellion UK
In their online manifesto (now taken down), Shut The System promise to “shut down key actors in the fossil fuel economy” by waging an escalating “campaign of sabotage.” True to their word, their sabotage escalates. When they return to the streets four months later, this time to target Barclays bank in a joint action with Palestine Action, they don’t just spray-paint the bank’s glass fronted buildings, they smash them too. More than 20 branches are temporarily shut down across the UK to pressure the bank to divest from fossil fuels and Elbit Systems, Israel’s biggest weapons manufacturer. Weeks later, they return to the City of London to deface and smash insurance company windows.
Then in January of this year, Shut The System try a new, more sophisticated kind of sabotage – cutting fibre optics cables. First to be forced offline is a collection of climate-denying lobby groups housed a stone’s throw from the British Parliament. Two weeks later, Shut The System target those major insurers again, this time severing cables of firms not just in the City of London but also in Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield.
Most recently, they target the private homes of three Barclays executives. On the morning of the bank’s AGM, its CEO, global head of sustainable finance, and president find their luxury properties spray-painted with messages demanding an end to fossil fuel investments. Cables are also cut at Barclaycard’s UK headquarters, and more than 20 bank branches have their door locks and ATMs superglued shut.
The ‘campaign of sabotage’ quickly bears fruit. A week after its entrance is stained blood-red, the insurance company Probitas declares it will not insure two ‘carbon bomb’ projects singled out by protesters (the East African Crude Oil Pipeline and a proposed coal mine in North West England). Days after Shut The System and Palestine Action shatter Barclays bank branches, its CEO writes an op-ed in the Guardian renouncing the damage and voicing concern about the “overall suffering” in the Middle East. Four months later, the bank has sold all of its shares in Elbit Systems.
A long-term member of Shut The System, who required total anonymity to be interviewed, was happy to outline the strategy behind their ‘campaign of sabotage’: “We want to give the climate movement more teeth by training up people and getting them into these sorts of actions, mobilising further across Europe and the world,” they say. “So when fossil fuel companies are presented with demands by protesters, they can expect the tactics we provide. There’s power in that. These industries will know that we’re escalating, know that we care about this, and know that we’re not going away.”
In adopting and spreading sabotage, Shut The System doesn’t see itself as breaking away from the climate movement’s sustained adherence to non-violence. My contact instantly references the author of the manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline to explain: “I’m in complete agreement with Andreas Malm. Violence can be done to people, but not to buildings or infrastructure. We will not harm individuals.” Asked if they’d be willing to cut the cables of the home of, say, an oil company CEO, they don’t hesitate; “personally speaking, that’s within my limits. These people are killing people.”
But the use of sabotage does mark STS apart from the climate movement in other ways. The tactic necessitates a radically different culture to earlier organisations like Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil (JSO), one where the need for security, and the fear of infiltration, reshapes nearly everything else. Reaching a member of STS for interview required multiple approaches. Once contact was made, Signal had to be jettisoned for a more anonymous messaging app. The days of open meetings in community halls and welcoming spokespeople is long gone. It begs the question, if you want to be a part of STS, how do you join? “We grow through people who know people, reaching out through a chain of trust,” says my contact. To become a member, you must be vouched for by at least two current members of STS, and members with deep roots in the climate movement are encouraged to scour their contacts for candidates. “We often find that people we’ve reached out to have been seeking a route in for a long time.”
This chain of trust spreads right across the UK, but it is a patchwork quilt, not a uniform fabric. Nobody can know everybody in STS, and group meetings are deliberately avoided. “Someone could have their phone taken away by police or put on remand. One person’s security failure could take out a lot of people” says my contact. Instead, a central team of organisers will chat with local leaders to agree on targets and dates and times, as well as pass on tactical knowhow. When it comes to deciding the specifics of an action – who takes which target, who adopts what tactic – the group operate like a take-away restaurant. “A long menu of possible options is sent around, and local cells then decide what they want to do based on location recces and capacity.”
A Barclays bank branch in Bristol after a joint nationwide action by STS and Palestine Action, June 10, 2024. Photo: Martin Booth
Shut The System is a year old, and the menu system appears to be working. But it does raise issues around power distribution and decision-making. A typical STS activist will not know who writes the menu, nor have a say over what dishes are made available. Their experience of STS will rarely if ever breach the limits of their local cell. It’s a long way from the open strategy meetings of XR, or the large social soup nights of JSO, where power is mitigated and community fostered as much as possible. My contact accepts the criticism: “There are no elections right now for the central team, but questions are being asked about this. And we do want a system of feedback, but security is just so important.”
Questions are also being asked in the central team about money. Namely, how can supporters chip in so STS members can focus on action research and development full-time. “Applying for funding through the normal climate movement routes is very difficult,” confirms my source. “So far we’ve raised small amounts, mostly on the backs of individuals. We have plans afoot for many more types of sabotage, but the scope to try different things is dependent on finding funding.” Asked for possible solutions, my source can only say, “we’re working on it.”
The artistic side of the climate movement, so intrinsic to XR and offshoots like the Dirty Scrubbers, has also been sacrificed on the altar of security. The central team have little interest in branding, messaging, or media. “We do have a logo on Instagram,” points out my contact. “But our visual and social media content is minimal – a recognition that being in any kind of contact with our group holds risk. It’s not a philosophy, just a result of priorities. Our circle’s central concern is security.”
If STS is the vanguard of a new phase in the UK’s climate movement, this phase isn’t as accessible, transparent or fun as what came before. But my contact is sure that this self-described “darker, more serious wing” is needed. With a climate denier in the White House, Big Oil ripping up pledges to decarbonise, the planet heating faster than predicted, and climate scientists warning that cataclysmic tipping points could happen as soon as this year, it’s not surprising that some ecoactivists are ready to embrace more militant tactics. But when I ask my contact what drew them to sabotage, the worsening status quo, and the apparent failure of traditional protest tactics to reverse it, weren’t the only factors.
My contact first got involved in ecoactivism after the Covid pandemic, when a friend invited them to a local XR meeting. Impressed by the confident activists they found there, they started taking part in actions. As they spent more time in the movement, they learned about the global struggle for environmental justice, including brutal events like the Ogoni 9, where nine Nigerian activists opposing Shell’s drilling of the Niger delta were framed for murder and hanged in 1995. The UK-based oil giant was implicated in both their false charges and a long campaign of violence in the region. These corporate crimes fundamentally shifted how my contact saw XR’s activism: “What we were doing was engaging the public, but it started to feel too performative, like an illusion. We had this messaging of crisis, of lives being at risk, of needing to change right now! But we weren’t willing to really threaten the institutions most responsible.”
I put the criticism to Richard Ecclestone, an XR spokesperson and former police inspector. He is sympathetic: “I understand why they expressed those views. I’m horrified by the behaviour of companies like Shell, Barclays, Perenco (an Anglo-French oil company accused of ongoing ecocide in the DRC).” Ecclestone is also sympathetic towards their use of sabotage: “Personally, I don’t believe action against property is violent when you consider the harm being done by these companies to people and planet. A tiny amount of damage to their operations could be justified. That’s my take. Others within the movement will think different. We’re a broad church.”
But this doesn’t mean Ecclestone will be joining Shut The System anytime soon, nor that he would welcome their tactics in future XR campaigns. “Our actions need to stick to our principles and values, and one of those is that we are accountable,” he says, meaning XR activists must accept the repercussions of their actions, including arrest. “If there’s no firewall between accountable and nonaccountable actions, we expose our people to extra risk, and that will hurt marginalised groups who for one reason or another can’t take on that risk. We have to do our best to be a home for everyone in the UK who wants to express their right to protest.”
City of London insurance firms are again visited by STS overnight, July 24, 2024. Photo: Shut The System
Another factor that steered my STS contact towards unaccountable sabotage was the increasingly draconian punishments the British state was dishing out to peaceful protesters. “Just Stop Oil’s campaign of blocking roads and disrupting sports events really boosted the signal – put the words just-stop-oil in every mind in the country,” they enthuse. “But the prosecutions and prison sentences have been ridiculous. If I’m going to go down and do time, I want to cause the maximum amount of disruption in the time I have, and that means covert actions.”
Since the rise of groups like XR and JSO, the UK government has been introducing increasingly repressive anti-protest laws, at least some of which were drafted by an oil-funded lobby group targeted by STS cable-cutters. The latest legislation started being enforced by police last year. As a result, unprecedented numbers of nonviolent protesters, mostly members of JSO, have been either imprisoned for years or paralysed by bail conditions for years as they wait for the overwhelmed justice system to put them on trial. The new laws have been used for even mildly disruptive actions like slow-marching, and when activists do have their week in court, the new legislation allows judges to strip them of all legal defences and ban them from mentioning climate change to juries.
After nearly 200 prison sentences, thousands of court cases, and the government adopting their core demand to stop new oil and gas, JSO has ended its three-year campaign. Their final action, a celebratory march through central London, took place last month. Mel Carrington, a JSO spokesperson, is bullish about the group’s achievements: “We won our demand, and we made the need to end new oil and gas a national talking point.” But she also acknowledges that the group failed to mobilise enough people to continue, and that the state crackdown on protest played its part in that: “To do street level actions you need a broad base of support. Since 2022, fewer and fewer people have mobilised, even for modest actions like slow marching. That’s the trend.”
While part of JSO will remain to support its many activists still trapped in the justice system, the bulk of the organisation will now metamorphosise into something new. And while Carrington is in dialogue with groups like Shut The System, and open-minded about their tactics, she is confident that JSO’s successor organisation will not adopt them. Again, the key issue with STS is their lack of accountability, and how that undermines JSO’s understanding of nonviolence. “Nonviolence uses disruption to create moments of tension and an emotional response, and accountability is an essential part of that,” she says. “As we don’t hide our faces or identities, we show that we are willing to stand up for what we believe in and to accept the legal consequences.” By ensuring actions are public displays of human vulnerability and courageous defiance, accountability is also a major catalyst for press attention. “Disruption, arrests and imprisonment are typically what drives our media coverage” continues Carrington.
While JSO and XR are both firmly wedded to accountability, they have very different takes on the virtues of disruption. On New Year’s Eve of 2022, XR renounced public disruption as a primary tactic, and started to prioritise attendance over arrests to stem waning participation post-pandemic. This led to ‘The Big One’ a few months later, a four-day rebellion outside the British parliament that was carefully marshalled by XR to minimise risk and maximise participation. And while The Big One did draw huge crowds, media interest was threadbare, the government ignored it, and it failed to match the impact of previous rebellions. Or as Carrington puts it: “XR got 90,000 onto the streets, but no one cared because it wasn’t challenging anything.”
Ecclestone gently refutes the idea that no one cared about The Big One, noting how XR collaborated with more than 200 organisations for the event, and how much hard work went into forging that grand alliance behind the scenes. For him, media coverage is not the only way to engage more of the population, and XR has no plans right now to go back to disrupting the public. “XR has remained consistent over the years. Our principles and values haven’t changed. We’ve always tried to be inclusive and accessible, and a home for everyone in the UK.”
What has changed for Ecclestone is police strategy. “In the 1990s, when I was policing protests against live animal exports, we had no interest in arresting the activists, or punishing them for blocking the trucks. We let them express their right to protest, and let the trucks get through with a minimum of fuss,” he says. “This new legislation is a way for police to abdicate their responsibility to enable peaceful protest. If you extinguish people’s right to protest, they’ll go to Shut The System to take it out on perpetrators directly rather than trying to persuade politicians.”
Although my STS contact will not be drawn into details, the group have big plans for this year, and they will not be alone in bringing sabotage to British streets. In February, another new climate group, Sabotage Oil for Survival, kicked off their campaign by drilling into the tyres of over 100 gas-guzzling SUVs across three Land Rover dealerships. Palestine Action will also continue to share knowledge and collaborate with Shut The System, and although there is no formal union between the two organisations, my contact describes the pro-Palestinian network as their “biggest inspiration.”
As for what this sabotage-filled future might mean for the rest of the climate movement, my STS contact focuses on the positives. They cite a recent academic study showing the “radical flank effect” of JSO, where that group’s disruptive actions made the moderate campaign of Friends of the Earth more popular. With global warming already exceeding 1.5°C, the Paris Agreement now a roadmap for a bygone era, and even the sober risk analysts of the insurance industry now warning that four billions lives could be lost by 2050, the belief that only moderate means can divert us from disaster feels increasingly delusional. If the climate movement adds sabotage to its arsenal, and breaking glass ends up breaking the political impasse, such actions should be seen not as sneaky sabotage, but heroic self-defence.
Berlin Blackout Attack On Industrial Park
It was “by no means our intention” to cut power to households, says communiqué, but to “turn off the juice to the military-industrial complex”
Anarchists have taken responsibility for a major power outage in southeast Berlin early Tuesday, after two high-voltage pylons were set on fire in Johannisthal, Treptow-Köpenick.
The attack, which began around 3.30am according to police, cut electricity to some 43,000 households and 3,000 businesses. Entire areas were left without power, public transport was paralysed, traffic lights went dark, and mobile police units with loudspeaker vans were deployed to inform residents.
The state security division of the Berlin criminal police has taken over the investigation. A police spokesperson said arson was suspected and that a political motive “could not be ruled out”.
Later, a lengthy statement appeared on Indymedia in which a group of anarchists claimed the action, which they say targeted Adlershof technology park. The authors apologised to local residents for the blackout in private homes, saying this was “by no means our intention”, but described the collateral damage as “acceptable compared with the destruction of nature and the often deadly subjugation of people” caused by the targeted industries.
The communiqué singled out several companies, including Atos, Jenoptik, Siemens, and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), accusing them of supplying militaries, enabling border surveillance and fuelling environmental destruction. “Their well-sounding slogans of innovation, sustainability and progress are nothing more than a manoeuvre on the battlefield of discourse, to cover up that they are actually building instruments that bring death and destruction”, the statement declared.
Tuesday’s fire is the most significant infrastructure sabotage in Berlin since a 2024 pylon attack cut power to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Grünheide.
In recent weeks there have also been attacks on vehicles and businesses linked to the landlord of Rigaer 94, a left-radical housing project which faces multiple court cases and eviction proceedings this month.
Editor’s note: This is a difficult concept to understand. The reason is because we have been taught the opposite all our lives. Taxes don’t fund spending. The spending must be done first so that taxes can be paid. So it is not tax and spend, it is spend and tax. Our taxes don’t fund anything. That is why nobody asks how are we going to fund the military. Money is a government issued tax credit. Its value is derived from the violence that may be necessary to collect the tax. The government creates money by giving it to people for goods and/or services(guns or butter). Which then gives those people the ability to pay the tax. People accept the money out of fear of that violence. The tax collector has to be paid or promised to be paid before they perpetuate that violence(police). The money must be created first so that people can pay their taxes with it. It is spent into existence. Taxes create the necessity for money. A “deficit” just keeps score of how much extra money the government paid to people but was not collected as taxes. Much like beyond a certain point, how much money you have is just keeping score. The government cannot run out of its own money. Just like a baseball game has no limit on the score. What a government spends(creates) its money for are political decisions which are only constrained by the physical “resources” of the living planet.
The government must raise funds through taxation or borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government spending is limited by its ability to tax or borrow.
With government deficits, we are leaving our debt burden to our children.
Government budget deficits take away savings.
Social Security is broken.
The trade deficit is an unsustainable imbalance that takes away jobs and output.
We need savings to provide the funds for investment.
It’s a bad thing that higher deficits today mean higher taxes tomorrow.
How does civilization collapse? First slowly, then suddenly. Civilizational complexity solves human problems. – (Joseph Tainter) Maybe that is a solution in search of a problem. Never asking, just because we can does not mean that we should, e.g., technology, splitting the atom, agriculture.
The pioneering research by one of the founders of economic anthropology is essential for understanding the social and institutional processes that gave rise to money as we know it.
The late 19th century saw economists, mainly German and Austrian, create a mythology of money’s origins that is still repeated in today’s textbooks. Money is said to have originated as just another commodity being bartered, with metal preferred because it is nonperishable (and hence amenable to being saved), supposedly standardized (despite fraud if not minted in temples), and thought to be easily divisible—as if silver could have been used for small marketplace exchanges, which was unrealistic given the rough character of ancient scales for weights of a few grams.[1]
This mythology does not recognize government as having played any role as a monetary innovator, sponsor, or regulator, or as giving money its value by accepting it as a vehicle to pay taxes, buy public services, or make religious contributions. Also downplayed is money’s function as a standard of value for denominating and paying debts.[2]
Although there is no empirical evidence for the commodity-barter origin myth, it has survived on purely hypothetical grounds because of its political bias that serves the anti-socialist Austrian school and subsequent “free market” creditor interests opposing government money creation.
Schurtz’s Treatment of Money as Part of the Overall Social System
As one of the founders of economic anthropology, Heinrich Schurtz approached the origins of money as being much more complex than the “economic” view that it emerged simply as a result of families going to the marketplace to barter. Surveying a wide range of Indigenous communities, his 1898 book, An Outline of the Origins of Money, described their trade and money in the context of the institutional system within which members sought status and wealth. Schurtz described these monetary systems as involving a wide array of social functions and dimensions, which today’s “economic” theorizing excludes as external to its analytic scope.
Placing money in the context of the community’s overall system of social organization, Schurtz warned that anyone who detaches “sociological and economic problems from the environment in which they emerged… their native land… only carries away a part of the whole organism and fails to understand the vital forces that have created and sustained it.”
Looking at Indigenous communities as having preserved presumably archaic traditions, Schurtz viewed trade with outsiders as leading wealth to take an increasingly monetary form that eroded the balance of internal social relations. Schurtz deemed the linkage between money, debt, and land tenure to lie beyond the area on which he focused, nor did he mention contributions to group feasts (which historian Bernard Laum suggested as the germ from which Greek obols and drachmas may have evolved).[3]
The paradigmatic forms of Indigenous wealth were jewelry and other items of personal adornment, decorations, and trophies, especially foreign exotic products in the form of shells and gemstones or items with a long and prestigious history that gave their wearers or owners status.
Thorstein Veblen would call the ownership and display of such items conspicuous consumption in his 1899 book, TheTheory of the Leisure Class. They had an exchange value, as they do today, but that did not make them monetary means of exchange. Schurtz saw many gray areas in their monetization: “Beads made of clay and stone are also crafted by Indigenous people and widely used as ornaments but rarely as money.”
At issue was how a money economy differs from barter and from the circulation and exchange of useful and valued items in a social economy. Was Indigenous exchange and wealth pre-monetary, an archaic seed that led to money’s “more ideal forms?”
Schurtz’s Distinction Between Inside-Money and Outside-Money
Exchange with outsiders was typically conducted by political leaders as the face of their communities to the outside world. Trade (and also payment of tribute) involved fiscal and social relations whose monetary functions differed from those of the domestic economy but ended up dovetailing with them to give money a hybrid character. Schurtz distinguished what he called outside-money from inside-money, with outside-money ultimately dominating the inside monetary system.
“The concept of money,” he wrote, originated “from two distinct sources: What functions as the foundation of wealth and measure of value for property and serves social ends within a tribe is, in its origins, something entirely different from the means of exchange that travels from tribe to tribe and eventually transforms itself, as a universally welcomed commodity, into a kind of currency.”
Inside-money was used within communities for their own exchange and wealth. Outside-money was derived from transactions with outsiders. And what was “outside” was a set of practices governing trade outside the jurisdiction of local governance.[4]
Schurtz’s distinction emphasized a characteristic of trade that has continued down through today’s world: the contrast between domestic payments subject to checks and balances to protect basic needs and navigating status hierarchies but (ideally) limiting sharp wealth disparities, and exchange with outsiders, often conducted on islands, quay areas, or other venues socially outside the community’s boundaries, subject to more impersonal standardized rules.
Throughout the ancient world, we find offshore island entrepots wherever they are conveniently located for conducting trade with outsiders.
These islands kept foreign contact at arm’s length to prevent mercantile relations from disturbing the local economic balance. Egypt restricted foreign contacts to the Delta region where the Nile flowed into the Mediterranean. For the Etruscans, the island of Ischia/Pithekoussai became the base for Phoenician and Greek merchants to deal with the Italian mainland in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. North Germans seem to have conducted the Baltic amber trade through the sacred island of Helgoland.
“The emergence of specific internal monetary systems is always supported by the inclination to transform outside-money into inside-money, and to employ money not to facilitate external trade, as one might assume according to common theories, but rather to obstruct it,” Schurtz concluded. In his chapter, “Metal as Ornament and Money,” he pointed out that it was foreign trade that led metal to become the primary form of money. “While most varieties of ornament-money gradually lose their significance, one of them, metal-money, asserts its ground all the more and finally pushes its competitors out of the field.” He added that: “Metal-money made from noble metals is not a pure sign-money, it is at the same time a valuable commodity, the value of which depends on supply and demand. In its mature form, it therefore in itself embodies the fusion of inside-money with outside-money, of the sign of value and valuable property with the means of exchange.”[5]
This merging of inside- and outside-money is documented already in the third millennium BCE in the Near East. Silver-money was used for long-distance trade and came to be used for domestic enterprise as well, while grain remained the monetary vehicle for denominating agrarian production, taxes, and debt service on the land, and for distribution to dependent labor in Mesopotamia’s temples and palaces.
Schurtz also questioned whether the dominance of metallic money emerged spontaneously in many places or whether there was a diffusion from a singular origin, that is, “whether a cultural institution has grown in situ or whether it has been transferred from other regions through migration and contact between societies.” The diffusion of Mesopotamian weights is associated with silver points to its diffusion from that region, as does the spread of the region’s practice of setting interest rates simply for ease of calculation in terms of the local fractional arithmetic system (60ths in Mesopotamia for a shekel per mina a month, 10ths or percentages in decimalized Greece, and 12ths in Rome for a troy ounce per pound each year).
Checks and Balances to Prevent the Selfish Concentration of Wealth
What does seem to have developed spontaneously were social attitudes and policies to prevent the concentration of wealth from injuring economic balance. Wealth concentration, especially when achieved by depriving cultivators of their means of livelihood, would have violated the ethic of mutual aid that low-surplus economies need as a condition for their resilience.
Viewing money as part of the overall social context, Schurtz described “the social transformation brought about by wealth” as a result of monetizing trade and its commercial pursuit of profit, or “acquisitiveness”:
“[E]veryone is now compelled to join in the competition for property or he will be pulled into the vortex created by one of the newly emerging centers of power and property, where he will need to work hard to be able to live at all. For the property owner, no temporal limit constrains his view on the perpetual increase of his wealth.”
Schurtz characterized the economic mentality as a drive for “the unlimited accumulation of movable property,” to be passed on to one’s children, leading to the creation of a wealthy hereditary class. If archaic societies had this ethic, could ancient civilizations have taken off? How did they prevent the growth of wealth from fostering an oligarchy seeking to increase its wealth at the expense of the community at large and its resilience?
Schurtz reviewed how Indigenous communities typically avoided that fate by shaping a social value system that would steer wealth away from being used to achieve predatory power over others. He cited numerous examples in which “immense treasures often accumulate without reentering the transactions of daily life.” One widespread way to do this was simply to bury wealth. “The primitive man,” he wrote, “believes that he will have access to all the goods given to him in the grave, even in the afterlife. Thus, he too knows no bounds to acquisition.”
Taking his greed and wealth with him to use in the hereafter prevents hoarded wealth from being inherited “and growing into a dangerous instrument of power” by becoming dynastic; ultimately operating “on the belief that the deceased does not give up his rights of ownership but jealously guards over his property to ensure that no heir makes use of it.” A less destructive removal of wealth from its owners was to create an ethic of peer pressure in which individuals gained status and popular acclaim by accumulating wealth to give away. Schurtz wrote:
“[R]emnants of the ancient communism remain alive enough for a long time to effectively block attempts to amass as many assets as possible in a single hand. And in places without an actual system of debt and interest, the powerful individual, into whose house the tributes of the people flow, has indeed little choice but to ‘represent’ by way of his wealth: in other words, to allow the people to participate in his indulgences.”
Such an individual achieves philanthropic renown by generously distributing his possessions to “his friends and followers, winning their hearts and thereby establishing real power based on loyal devotion.” One widespread practice was to celebrate marriages, funerals, and other rites of passage by providing great feasts. This “extraordinary… destruction and squandering of valuable property, particularly livestock and food, during those grand festivals of the dead that evolved out of sacrifices and are, among some peoples, not only an effective obstacle to the accumulation of wealth but have turned into economic calamities” when families feel obliged to take on debt to host such extravagant displays.
Religious officials and temples often played a role in such rituals. Noting that “money, trade, and religion had a good relationship with one another in antiquity,” Schurtz cited the practice of donating wealth to temples or their priesthoods. But he recognized that this might enable them to “gain dominance through the ownership of money” under their control.
“The communist countermeasures against wealth generally do not endure,” Schurtz wrote. “Certain kinds of property seem to favor greed directly, especially cattle farming, which can literally turn into a hoarding addiction.” He described communalistic values of mutual aid as tending to break down as economies polarized with the increase in commercial wealth.
Schurtz also noted that the social checks on personal wealth-seeking did not apply to economies that developed a “system of debt and interest.” Wealth in the form of monetary claims on debtors was not buried and could hardly be redistributed to the population at large, whose members typically were debtors to the rising creditor interest.
The only way to prevent such debts from polarizing society was to cancel them. That is what Near Eastern rulers did, but Schurtz’s generation had no way of knowing about their Clean Slate proclamations.
Starting with the very outset of debt records c. 2500 BCE in Sumer, and continuing down through Babylonia, Assyria, to their neighbors, and on through the early first millennium BCE, rulers annulled financial claims on agrarian debtors. That prevented creditors from concentrating money and land in their own hands. One might say that these debt cancellations and land redistributions were the Near Eastern alternative to destroying material wealth to preserve balance. These royal acts did not destroy physical wealth but simply wiped out the debt overhead to maintain widespread land tenure and liberty for the population at large.
Canceling agrarian debt was politically feasible because most personal debts were owed to the palace sector and its temples or their officials. Royal Clean Slates seemed so unthinkable when they began to be translated around the turn of the last century that early readers hardly could believe that they actually were enforced in practice. François Thureau-Dangin’s French translation of the Sumerian ruler Enmetena’s (c. 2400 BCE) proclamation in 1905 was believed by many observers to be too utopian and socially disruptive to have been followed in practice, as was the Biblical Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25.[6]
But so many such proclamations have been found, extending so continuously over thousands of years—along with lawsuits in which judges upheld their increasing detail—that there is no doubt that these acts did indeed reconcile the accumulation of monetary wealth with social resilience by blocking the creation of predatory oligarchies such as those that would emerge in classical Greece and Rome and indeed survive into today’s world.
Monetary Innovations in the Bronze Age Near Eastern Palaces and Temples
Economic documentation in Schurtz’s day was able to trace monetary practice only as far back as classical Greece and Rome. There was a general belief that their practices must have evolved from Indigenous Indo-European speakers. Marcel Mauss would soon treat the gift exchange of the Kwakiutl tribe of the Canadian Pacific Northwest (with their competitive one-upmanship) as the prototype for the idea of charging interest. But monetary interest has a specific stipulated rate, with payments due on specific periodic dates set by written contracts. That practice stems from Sumer in the third millennium BCE, along with silver (and grain) money and related financial innovations in the economic big bang that has shaped subsequent Western economic evolution.
Money’s function as a standard of valuation did not play a big role in Schurtz’s survey. But subsequent archaeological research has revealed that money’s emergence as part of an overall institutional framework cannot be understood without reference to written account-keeping, denominating debt accruals, and fiscal relations. Money, credit/debt, and fiscal obligations have all gone together since the origins of written records in the ancient Near East.
Near Eastern fiscal and financial records describe a development of money, credit, and interest-bearing debt that neither the barter theory nor Schurtz’s ethnographic studies had imagined. Mesopotamia’s “more ideal” money evolved out of the fiscal organization of account-keeping and credit in the palaces and temples of Sumer, Babylonia, and their Bronze Age neighbors (3200–1200 BCE). These Near Eastern economies were larger in scale and much more complex and multilayered than most of the Indigenous communities surveyed by Schurtz.
In contrast to largely self-sufficient communities, southern Mesopotamia was obliged to engage in large-scale and long-distance trade because the region’s river-deposited soil lacked metal, stone, and even hardwood. The region’s need for raw materials was far different from the trade and “monetization” of luxuries by the relatively small-scale and self-sufficient communities studied by Schurtz and hypothesized by economists imagining individuals bartering at their local market. In these communities, he noted: “The amount of metal shaped into ornaments almost always far outweighs the amount transformed into practical tools.” Mesopotamia’s trade had to go far beyond personal decorative luxuries and prestige commodities or trophy items.
An entrepreneurial merchant class was needed to obtain these raw materials, along with a specialized labor force, which was employed by the temples and palaces that produced most export handicrafts, provisioned corvée labor to work on public infrastructure, served as mints and overseers of weights and measures, and mediated most monetary wealth and debt. This required forward planning and account-keeping to feed and supply labor (war widows, orphans, and slaves) in their weaving and other handicraft workshops and to consign their output to merchants for export. Calculating the cost of distributing food and raw materials within these large institutions and valuing their consignment of goods to merchants required designing standard weights and measures as the basis for this forward planning. Selecting monetary units was part of this standardization of measuring costs and value.
This made possible the calculation of expected rental income or shortfalls, along with profit-and-loss statements and balance sheets. The typical commodity to be distributed was grain, which served as a standard of value for agrarian transactions and credit balances that mounted up during the crop year for advances to sharecroppers, consumption such as beer from ale-women, and payments to priests for performing ceremonial functions. Their value in grain was to be paid at harvest time.
The calculation of food rations for distribution to the various grades of labor (male, female, and children) enabled the costs to be expressed in grain or in workday equivalents.
Schurtz would have called this grain “inside-money,” and regarded as “outside-money” the silver minted by temples for dealing with foreign trade and as the basic measure of value for business transactions with the palace economy and for settling commercial obligations. A mina (60 shekels) of silver was set as equal to a corresponding unit of grain as measured on the threshing floor. That enabled accounts to be kept simultaneously in silver and grain.
The result was a bi-monetary grain-silver standard reflecting the bifurcation of early Mesopotamian economies between the agrarian families on the land (using grain as “inside-money”) and the palatial economy with its workshops, foreign trade, and associated commercial enterprise (using silver as “outside-money”).
Prices for market transactions with outsiders might vary, but prices for debt payments, taxes, and other transactions with large institutions were fixed.
Schurtz’s conclusion that the rising dominance of commercial money tended to break down domestic checks and balances protecting the Indigenous communities that he studied is indeed what happened when commercial debt practices were brought from the Near East to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands around the eighth century BCE.
Having no tradition of royal debt cancellations as had existed in the Near East ever since the formative period of interest-bearing debt, the resulting decontextualization of credit practices fostered financial oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome. After early debt cancellations and land redistribution by populist “tyrants” in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the ensuing classical oligarchies resisted popular revolts demanding a revival of such policies.
The dynamics of interest-bearing debt and the pro-creditor debt laws of classical antiquity’s creditor oligarchies caused economic polarization that led to five centuries of civil warfare. These upheavals were not the result of the coinage that began to be minted around the eighth century BCE, as many 19th-century observers believed, mistakenly thinking that Aegean coinage was the first metallic money. Silver-money had been the norm for two millennia throughout the Near East, without causing disruption like that experienced by classical antiquity. What polarized classical antiquity’s economies were pro-creditor debt laws backed by political violence, not money.
Conclusion and Discussion
Schurtz’s starting point was how communities organized the laws of motion governing their distribution of wealth and property. He viewed money as emerging from this institutional function with a basically communalistic ethic. A key characteristic of Indigenous economic resilience was social pressure expecting the wealthy to contribute to social support. That was the condition set by unwritten customs for letting some individuals and their families become rich.
Schurtz and subsequent ethnologists found a universal solution for reconciling wealth-seeking with community-wide prosperity to be social pressure for wealthy families (that was the basic unit, not individuals) to distribute their wealth to the citizenry by reciprocal exchange, gift-giving, mutual aid, and other forms of redistribution, and providing large feasts, especially for rites of passage.
This was a much broader view than the individualistic economic assumption that personal gain-seeking and, indeed, selfishness were the driving forces of overall prosperity. The idea of monetizing economic life under communalistic mutual aid or palace direction was and remains anathema to mainstream economists, reflecting the worldview of modern creditors and financial elites. Schurtz recognized that mercantile wealth-seeking required checks and balances to prevent economies from impoverishing their members.
The problem for any successfully growing society to solve was how to prevent the undue concentration of wealth obtained by exploitative means that impaired overall welfare and the ability of community members to be self-supporting. Otherwise, economic polarization and dependency would lead members to flee from the community, or perhaps it simply would shrink and end up being defeated by outsiders who sustained themselves by more successful mutual aid.
As noted above, Schurtz treated the monetization of wealth in the form of creditor claims on debtors as too post-archaic to be a characteristic of his ethnographic subjects. But what shaped the context for monetization and led “outside-money” to take priority over inside-money were wealth accumulation by moneylending and the fiscal and military uses of money. Schurtz correctly rejected Bruno Hildebrand’s characterization of money as developing in stages, from small-scale barter to monetized economies becoming more sophisticated as they evolved into financialized credit economies.[7]
And, in fact, the actual historical sequence was the reverse. From Mesopotamia to medieval Europe, agrarian economies operated on credit during the crop year. Monetary payment occurred at harvest time to settle the obligations that had accumulated since the last harvest and to pay taxes. This need to pay debts was a major factor requiring money’s development in the first place. Barter became antiquity’s final monetary “stage” as Rome’s economy collapsed after its creditor oligarchy imposed debt bondage and took control of the land.
When emperors were unable to tax this oligarchy, they debased the coinage, and life throughout the empire devolved into local subsistence production and quasi-barter. Foreign trade was mainly for luxuries brought by Arabs and other Near Easterners. The optimistic sequence that Hildebrand imagined not only mistakenly adopted the barter myth of monetary origins but also failed to take debt polarization into account as economies became monetarized and financialized.
Schurtz described how the aim of preventing the maldistribution of wealth was at the heart of Indigenous social structuring. But it broke down for various reasons. Economies in which family wealth took the form of cattle, he found, tended to become increasingly oppressive to maintain the polarizing inequality that developed. The same might be said of credit economies under the rising burden of interest-bearing debt. Schurtz noted the practice of charging debtors double the loan value—and any rate of interest indeed involves an implicit doubling time.
That exponential dynamic is what polarizes financialized economies. In contrast to Schurtz, mainstream economists of his generation avoided dealing with the effect of monetary innovation and debt on the distribution of wealth. The tendency was to treat money as merely a “veil” of price changes for goods and services, without analyzing how credit polarizes the economy’s balance sheet of assets and debt liabilities. Yet, the distinguishing feature of credit economies was the use of moneylending as a lever to enrich creditors by impoverishing debtors. That was more than just a monetary problem. It was a political creditor/debtor problem and, ultimately, a public/private problem.
The issue was whether a ruler or civic public checks would steer the rise in monetary wealth in ways that avoided the creation of creditor oligarchies.
Most 19th-century and even subsequent economic writers shied away from confronting this political context, leaving the most glaring gap in modern economic analysis. It was left to the discovery of cuneiform documentation to understand how money first became institutionalized as a vehicle to pay debts. This monetization was accompanied by remarkable success in sustaining rising wealth while preventing its concentration in the hands of a hereditary oligarchy. That Near Eastern success highlights what the smaller and more anarchic Western economies failed to achieve when interest-bearing debt practices were brought to the Mediterranean lands without being checked by the tradition of regular cancellation of personal nonbusiness debt.
Credit and monetary wealth were privatized in the hands of what became an increasingly self-destructive set of classical oligarchies culminating in that of Rome, which fought for centuries against popular revolts seeking protection from impoverishing economic polarization.
The devastating effects of transplanting Near Eastern debt practices into the Mediterranean world’s less communalistic groupings show the need to discuss the political, fiscal, and social-moral context for money and debt. Schurtz placed monetary analysis in the context of society’s political institutions and moral values and explained how money is a product of this context and, indeed, how monetization tends to transform it—in a way that tends to break down social protection. His book has remained relatively unknown over the last century, largely because his institutional anthropological perspective is too broad for an economics discipline that has been narrowed by pro-creditor ideologues who have applauded the “free market” destruction of social regulation aimed at protecting the interests of debtors.
That attitude avoids recognizing the challenges that led the Indigenous communities studied by Schurtz, and also the formative Bronze Age Near East, to protect their resilience against the concentration of wealth, a phenomenon that has plagued economies ever since classical antiquity’s decontextualization of Near Eastern debt practices.
Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine in Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, but for nearly five years several local Indigenous tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. Six land defenders, known as the “Thacker Pass 6,” are currently being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and have been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with two members of the “Thacker Pass 6,” Will Falk and Max Wilbert, about the charges against them and the current state of the struggle over the construction of the Thacker Pass mine.
Will Falk is a Colorado-based poet, community organizer, and pro-bono attorney for regional tribes who co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass. Max Wilbert is an Oregon-based writer, organizer, wilderness guide, and co-author of the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It; he co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass.
In September of 2023, TRNN teamed up with award-winning Indigenous multimedia journalist Brandi Morin, documentary filmmaker Geordie Day, and Canadian independent media outlets Ricochet Media and IndigiNews to produce a powerful documentary report on the Indigenous resisters putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. Watch the report, “Mining the Sacred: Indigenous nations fight lithium gold rush at Thacker Pass,” here.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us in Nevada’s remote. Thacker Pass. A fight for our future is playing out between local indigenous tribes and powerful state and corporate entities held bent on mining the lithium beneath their land. Vancouver based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass. But for nearly five years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. In September of 2023, the Real News Network teamed up with award-winning indigenous multimedia journalist Brandi Morin, documentary filmmaker Geordie Day and Canadian Independent Media outlets, ricochet Media and Indigenous News to produce a powerful documentary report on the indigenous resistors putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. Here’s a clip from that report,
Brandi Morin:
Rugged Serene, a vast stretch of parch desert and so-called Northern Nevada captivates the senses I’ve been trying to get down here for over a year because this beautiful landscape is about to be gutted. One valley here contains white gold, lithium, and lots of it. The new commodity the world is racing to grab to try to save itself from the ravages of climate change. Vancouver based lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine, which will operate for the next 41 years. The company is backed by the Biden administration, andout, its General Motors as its biggest investor, 650 million to be exact, but for more than two years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action BC says the mine will desecrate the spiritual connection she has with her traditional territories. And she spoken out to protected at the mine site. Now Lithium Americas is suing her and six other land and water protectors in civil court over allegations of civil conspiracy, trespassing and tortious interference. The suit seeks to ban them from accessing the mining area and make them financially compensate the company. So I just wanted to ask you about the charges that you’re facing. What are they? And when did you find out? Oh, oh man,
Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu:
I don’t even remember. Is it civil? Something trespassing and something about disobedience? I dunno. I didn’t really, I didn’t read the papers. I just threw them in a drawer. Honestly, I don’t think we’re going to be able to stop. There’s 500 lithium mines coming. I just wanted my descent on record as an indigenous mother.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now the last voice that you heard there was Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu, one of the six land defenders known as the Thacker past six who are being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and had been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. Today on the Real News podcast, we are joined by two other members of the Thacker. Past six will Falk a Colorado based poet, community organizer, and pro bono attorney for regional tribes who co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass. And we are also joined by Max Wilbert, an organ-based writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. Max is the co-author of the book, bright Green Lies, how the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It. And he also co-founded Protect Thacker Pass. Max will thank you both so much for joining us today on the Real News Network.
Over the next half hour, we’re going to do our best to give listeners an update on the struggle at Thacker Pass, where things stand now and what people can do to help, because this is a critical story that our audience has gotten invested in through Brandy Morin and Jordy day’s. Brilliant reporting. But before we dig into the legal battle that y’all are embroiled in with Lithium Nevada Corporation, I want to start by asking if you could introduce yourselves and just tell us a little bit more about who you are, the work that you do and the path that led you to Thacker Pass.
Will Falk:
Yeah, I’ll start. This is Will Falk like you introduced me. I’m a poet, community organizer and attorney. I think my involvement in this kind of work started in my early twenties. I had some severe mental health issues and I found that going out into the natural world and listening to the natural world was the best medicine that I could find for those mental health issues. And while experiencing that, I realized that the natural world is consistently saving my life through offering me that medicine. And of course the natural world has given me and everyone I love their lives. So at that time, feeling the gratitude from that, I decided that I would devote my life to trying to protect as much of the natural world’s life as I possibly could. That has taken me to many frontline land defense campaigns and it’s often put me in allyship with Native Americans and other indigenous peoples who are resisting the destruction of their land.
So I got involved specifically with Thacker Pass after Max explained to me what was going on there. We both have spent a lot of time in the Great Basin and it’s an ecotype and a region that we both love very much. So when we found out that they were going to put this massive lithium mine on top of a beautiful mountain pass in northern Nevada, we decided we were going to try and stop it. So we went out to Thacker Pass on the very day that the federal government issued the last major permits for the mine, and we set up a protest camp right in the middle of where they were going to blow up the land to extract lithium. And we sort of had two goals. One, we wanted to stop the mine, but two, we wanted to force a bigger conversation about whether this transition to so-called green energy was actually green and whether we can really save the natural world by destroying more of the natural world, which is what it will take to manufacture things like electric cars and electric car batteries. But my involvement in this campaign is very much based in my love for the natural world and my recognition that everyone’s wellbeing is tied up in the wellbeing of the natural world. And this new wave of extraction for so-called green energy is just going to be another wave of destruction.
Max Wilbert:
Great to be on the show, max. Thanks for having us. I’ve been following the real news for years, so it’s great to finally have a chance to speak with you. I first became aware that there was a major problem in the environmental movement around 2006, 2005 when I went to an environmental fair in Washington state where I grew up and I came across a biodiesel Hummer out in the parking lot amidst all these organizations promoting protecting salmon and protecting forests and so on. And this was in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the midst of this age where the whole nation, the whole world is grappling with empire and imperialism and war for oil. And to me, the problem with a Hummer goes far beyond the oil that’s in its tank. The problem gets to the minerals that are mine to create the Hummer, the mindset behind that that says that we need these massive individual vehicles to get around the world, the mindset of militarism and consumerism sort of wedding together in this conspicuous symbol of consumption. And so I knew at that point that there was a major problem in the environmental movement. I was just a teenager at the time. And so over the years I started to explore this more and more and started to question some of the orthodoxies around green technology as a solution to the global warming crisis and the broader environmental crisis.
I believe that these are very real and serious crises. It’s kind of unavoidable unarguable if you look at the way of the evidence and even just what we see and experience with our own eyes. But green technology as a solution is something that I really think is a problem. It emerges out of this mindset of industrial products, like things that come out of factories that you buy as the solution. And to me, I’m much more interested and I tend to gravitate towards simpler ways of living, lighter ways of living in relationship to the land that have emerged over many thousands of years in all kinds of different cultures around the world where people have had good relationships with the planet and the water and the other life around them. So when I heard about Thacker Pass, I decided to go out and take a look at what was happening out there.
So I drove down, this was in the fall of 2020. I drove down there out into the middle of the outback in northern Nevada and spent a night or two camping up at Thacker Pass. And I just fell in love with the place the sun went down and the stars came out and the Milky Way shining bright across the sky and there are coyotes howling and bats flying around, and you can’t see a single light of a building or a city or anything for miles in every direction as far as the eye can see, which is a long way from the side of a mountain in Nevada where there’s no trees. There’s nothing blocking your view. And I felt like if I don’t try and fight for this place, then nobody else is going to because we’ve seen the mainstream environmental movement get very infatuated with these ideas that technology is going to solve all our environmental problems, that it’s going to lead us into some sort of utopian future. And so none of mainstream environmental groups have really challenged the rising threat of lithium mining and similar issues. That’s when I decided, you know what, we got to do something about this. I called up Will who was one of the few people who I know who I thought might be crazy enough to join me in the middle of the winter at a mile above sea level on the side of a mountain in Nevada to protest a mine. And he said, great, when do we start?
Maximillian Alvarez:
And can you just say a little more about when and how your efforts synced up with those of people living there, the members of the local tribes who’ve come together as part of this effort to stop the Thacker Pass Mining operation?
Will Falk:
Yeah. We had been up there in Thacker Pass trying to make as much noise as we could for I think six or eight weeks when some native folks from the closest reservation to the mine, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Reservation came up and had seen some of the stuff that we put online and wanted to learn more about what the mine would do. And when they came up, that’s when we learned that Thacker Pass is a very sacred place to local native folks. It is known as Beha in the local Paiute dialect that translates to Rotten Moon in English. And the place name has contains some of the reason why Peehee Mu’huh or Thacker Pass is so sacred. And there’s oral history that the Paiutes carry that talks about a massacre, a pre-European massacre that happened in Thacker Pass where some hunters were often in the next valley hunting and some people from a different tribe came and massacred the people there.
And when the hunters came back, they found their intestines actually strung out along the sage brush, and that created such a bad smell. And the past, if you’re looking at it from lower down in the basin floor, it looks like a crescent moon. So they named it ham. We also learned through Paiute oral history and confirmed it through documents that the Bureau of Land Management themselves possessed, that there was a massacre of at least 31 Paiute men, women and children in Thacker Pass on September 12th, 1865. This was a massacre that took place as part of what’s called the Snake War. This is a war that was fought primarily between settlers and minors, encroaching on PayU and Shoshone land in the 1860s. It’s been called the bloodiest Indian War west of the Mississippi. But I’ve always found it to be incredibly ironic that there was this massacre, the American government massacred Paiute people while they were resisting mining encroachments on their land.
And that was back in 1865. Now in 2025, the American government has issued permits to a mining company to erase the evidence of that massacre by destroying the site. There we realized that no one was making arguments on behalf of Native Americans in the litigation that had been filed against the Bureau of Land Management for permitting the mine. And so no one was telling the court about all of this sacredness and the permitting process that the Bureau of Land Management used was expedited under the Trump administration. This really isn’t a Democrat or Republic can issue because Biden took credit for that expedited process shortly after he came into office. But by expediting the process, they had not actually consulted with any regional tribes about the mine. And so many native folks in the area were just finding out about the mine months after it had been permitted by seeing stuff that we were generating from Thacker Pass. But I ended up agreeing to represent a few tribes to try and insert that perspective into the litigation to explain how sacred this place was, to explain how bad the government’s tribal consultation process was and to make sure people understood that this mine, that everybody wants to be so green is actually destroying native culture.
Max Wilbert:
So there we were on the mountain side at this point. This is June of 2021 and will begins to represent one and then two of the local native tribes, the Reno Sparks Indian Colony and the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe and is filing legal briefs from his laptop working inside his car and sleeping at night in the tent out on the mountainside, very difficult conditions to work in and doing it all pro bono, basically living on almost nothing as this is just a grassroots effort. And that’s what we went into it with the mindset. This is all during Covid. It’s very hard to get ahold of people, very hard to have public meetings or events and so on. So when we went out there, we didn’t know any of the indigenous people from the area. I had some other native friends from further east in Nevada and further south in different places and called them up and said, Hey, do you know anything about Pass and what’s going on there?
But they weren’t really local people from exactly that area. And so they said, no, sorry. So we just went out and we expected that we were going to connect with local people through the process of being out in the community and on the land. And that’s exactly what happened. We were able to build a really fruitful collaboration between the fact that Thacker Pass had the initial massacre, the Bema hub massacre, then the massacre that the US Army perpetrated the cavalry in 1865, and the fact that the place was occupied by native people for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. All kinds of campsites and archeological evidence of people’s occupation on the land there. Very significant sites, places where people hunt and gather wild foods and a place where people go to this day, well, I would say to this day, but you’re no longer allowed to go there because there’s a fence that’s been built. There’s bulldozers rolling and the land is being destroyed. So all the deer have been driven away. The pronghorn antelope, the Marmot, all the wildlife that people have relied on and had these relationships with for many generations, all the plants and herbal medicines and so on are being crushed or bulldozed out of the way as well. So it’s ultimately been a pretty heartbreaking fight as well. But it’s not unusual. It’s something that we’ve seen over and over again across what’s now the United States.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So let’s talk about the Thacker Pass six and Lithium Nevada Corporation’s lawsuit against you and four other land defenders, including some of the folks that our audience saw in Brandy Morton’s documentary. So you both Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu, Bethany Sam, Dean Barlese and Paul Cienfuegos are being charged with civil conspiracy, nuisance trespass, tortuous interference with contractual relations, tortuous interference with perspective economic advantage. So what can you tell us about the substance of these charges and about how you’re all fighting them in court?
Will Falk:
Yeah, so I think one of the first things to understand is that on, we have to go back to an actual foundational law in American extractive industries, and that’s what’s called the 1872 General Mining Law, which was a law that was passed in 1872. It was passed partially to provide cheap leases to miners as a way to pay off the Civil War debt. And what that law did was it essentially said that mining is the highest and best use of American public lands, and that’s the way it’s been interpreted since 1872. So what this means is when a corporation locates valuable minerals on American public land, and I think the United States is something like 61% public land, if a corporation finds valuable minerals on that land, the 1872 mining law gives them an automatic right to mine those minerals to destroy the land where those minerals are, to extract those minerals.
The government does not have discretion to deny permits for these kinds of mines. It doesn’t matter if the place that they’re destroying is the most sacred place in the world to native folks. So what that means is that the lawsuits that we filed that we just talked about through the tribes with the tribes, those lawsuits that we filed, they never had the capability to stop the mine definitively stop the mine. All they had the capability to do was to force the government to go back and redo some part of the permitting process like tribal consultation. In other words, there is no legal way to stop public lands mines once corporations have found valuable minerals on that land. So that meant that once the lawsuits that we had filed against the Bureau of Land Management had failed and we had exhausted ways to try and force them to go back and redo that permitting process, the only real choice that we had left to try and protect Thacker Pass and all of the sacredness there was to engage in civil disobedience. So in 2023, we went out to peacefully protest, prayerfully protest the mine, and we did in fact interfere with some of the construction. We blocked some construction equipment from coming up some roads, and we apparently Lithium Nevada decided to move its employees to work on other parts of the mine that we weren’t at. And then we were sued for those actions.
It didn’t quite meet the legal definition of what they call a slap suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation. But it very much worked in the same way we engaged in free speech, we engaged in our first amendment rights to protest our first amendment rights to petition the government for redress. But because we delayed some of the construction equipment from accessing the site, lithium Nevada sued us and was successful at achieving what’s called a preliminary injunction against us from returning to the mine site whatsoever. And it’s really important to understand that Max and I are not native, but we were sued with four other native folks. And those native folks, they descend from people who were killed in that 1865 massacre. And this means that they can’t go back to Thacker Pass to pray for their ancestors that were killed there. They’re not allowed to go back to their own homelands to mourn what has happened to Thacker Pass, but also when you’re sued like this in civil court, mainly what they call damages, if we lose the case, what we could owe is hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what a judge might order.
So Lithium Nevada was accusing us of things like that tortious interference stuff that you just listed out that’s a lot about, we were depriving them of fulfilling contracts with their contractors to come in and do the construction. We were forcing them to cause to spend money. These are the allegations to spend money that they wouldn’t have had to spend if we didn’t do that. So they’re asking a judge to get that money from us. But I think it, it’s really important to understand that there really is no legal recourse for fighting public lands mines. And it’s really insane where if you give mining corporations an automatic right to mine public lands and destroy sacred native land, and then the legal system also gives a corporation the power to file lawsuits against us that could cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. You’re really talking about very thoroughly quieting any descent to these kinds of projects.
Max Wilbert:
Yep. It’s a little bit of double jeopardy. And we’ve talked about this all along. We were on a phone call with BC this morning who was in the video that Brandy did, and there’s a continuum between what happened in 1865 and what’s happening today, what was happening between 1864 and 1868 was a war that the US government waged on indigenous people of Thacker Pass and the surrounding Great Basin region in order to secure access to the resources of that region for settler, colonialists and corporate interests. And that process is continuing today. Now, when people in 1865 when people tried to protect Thacker Pass from soldiers, they were massacred on mass. And today when indigenous people, descendants of those people who are massacred try to protect Thacker Pass, they’re, they’re either arrested, they’re fined, they’re barred by courts from going back to the land. And this is inherently a violent process because if those orders are ignored, then what happens is men with guns will show up and either take these people to jail or possess their assets and so on.
So this is an extended process of land seizure enclosure of what was formerly common land among those indigenous communities. It’s a process of the commodification of these landscapes. And now with the Trump administration will mention that this has been a bipartisan push that Trump in his first term streamlined the permitting for the Thacker Pass mine. So he pushed it through very quickly. Biden then claimed credit for it and decided to loan over 2 billion to the mining company and supported in all kinds of ways, including defending the project in court. And then Trump is now continuing that process. We’re seeing the removal of things like public comment periods being struck down, the environmental review process for future mining projects, which was already a very inadequate anti-democratic process that amounted to tell us what you think about this project and then we’re going to do whatever the hell we want.
Anyway, even that sort of truncated toxic mimic of a real democratic consensual process of community engagement is being completely undercut. And that’s what we’re facing in the future. Backer passes, passes being built right now. There’s literally thousands of mining claims for lithium across the state of Nevada and many more across the whole country. And we’re seeing a big expansion in rare earth mining, copper mining, iron ore mining, all kinds of different mining as well as the boom in fossil fuel extraction that we’re seeing. So it’s kind of an all fronts assault on the planet right now, and people who get in the way, endangered species who get in the way, the plan is just sweep them aside using whatever means are necessary.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and that really leads into the somber next question I had for you both and it really building off what you just said, max, this is absolutely a bipartisan effort, not just in terms of ramping up domestic mining, oil extraction use of public lands, bulldozing like the very concept of indigenous sovereignty, which is as American as apple pie, I suppose. But on top of that, we also have the closing in of the state on efforts to oppose this and closing in on and repressing the methods of resistance from Jessica Reznicek to y’all in Thacker Pass to students protesting US backed genocide in Palestine. These are being categorized as domestic terrorism. So I wanted to ask, in this sort of hellish climate, what is the status of the fight over Thacker Pass and the fight for sovereignty on indigenous lands and the environmental justice effort to halt the worst effects of the climate crisis? What does that all look like today under the shadow of a second Trump administration?
Will Falk:
Things are pretty desperate right now. I think that as you were just saying, the Trump administration especially, but I think from here on out, I think each administration is going to figure out how to silence dissent, especially around anyone who is trying to interfere with the government or corporate access to the raw materials of industry like lithium, like copper, like iron ore, like aluminum. All these things that have to be ripped from the earth to create so many things, especially the weapons and war technologies that the United States uses. That’s a connection that I think really needs to be made. If the United States is going to continue sending weapons to Israel to conduct genocide and Palestine, there’s going to be a lot of public lands resources that are used to construct those weapons. If the United States does something like ramps up for war with Iran, it’s going to be a lot of public lands that are destroyed to create the weapons that are needed to fight that war.
And so I think that as American consumption continues to grow, as resources become harder and harder to come by and consumption intensifies, every administration is going to work to silence any interference with access to those kinds of things, that is absolutely not a reason to give up. It is a reason though for us to start to talk about our tactics and whether things like lawsuits and whether politely asking our senators to change their minds about things, whether this is really going to protect what’s left of the natural world. And while it is incredibly, incredibly hard work, we have to fight, there’s really no moral, there’s no other thing to do that allows us to keep our good conscience without fighting. And the truth is, if we fight, we might lose. We probably will lose. But if we don’t fight, we have no chance of winning, and we must fight to slow as much of this destruction as we possibly can.
Max Wilbert:
Yeah, well said, will. There’s a direct relationship between the destruction of the planet and the genocide and war that we’re seeing around the world. The links that I made earlier between the Hummer, for example, the military industrial complex, mass consumerism and resource extraction, and how that plays into imperialism and the exploitation of people all around the world, whether we’re talking about in the Congo or we’re talking about here in the United States, in these sort of rural hinterland, places like Thacker Pass where people get screwed over in a completely different way, but with similarities to what we see in Serbia, in Tibet, in all of these, in Mongolia, in all of these resource extraction districts around the world. And I think that we really need to break our allegiance to industrial capitalism to this way of living, this type of economy that we’re so used to right now, it’s really difficult because my food is in the fridge right over here. I’m reliant on the system. So many of us are. But the truth is that system is killing the planet and it’s killing all of us in the end. So I think the story of Thacker Pass for us is really about a transformation away from an industrial economy that is destroying everything to something that is much simpler and more sustainable.
It is been on my mind lately that during the fight against apartheid in South Africa, that fight was being conducted through legal means with community organizing and rallies and so on. And at a certain point, the apartheid state outlawed those forms of legal above ground organizing and the movement was forced for its very survival to go underground, to become clandestine and illegal. We’re not quite there yet, but we certainly seem to be headed there rapidly in this country where even what has previously been sort of well accepted means of protest and public dissent are being criminalized. And ultimately, I don’t know where that will take us, but I think too of the old JFK quote, which wasn’t about any situation like this, but he said, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And there is a sense in which this sort of authoritarianism that we’re seeing, it leads only in one inevitable direction, which is that people will continue to fight back and resist. And we need to try and do that effectively because it’s not just principles or ideology or ideas that are at stake. It’s people’s lives. It’s our grandchildren’s future, our children’s future. It’s clean water, it’s access to the basic necessities of life, basic human dignity. All this is at stake right now and it’s imperative that we do something about it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And we here at The Real News will continue to cover that fight. And in that vein, max will, I know I got to let you guys go in a moment here, but with the remaining minutes that we have together, I just wanted to round out by asking how you and the other defendants are doing faring through all of this and what your message is to listeners out there about what they can do to help.
Will Falk:
Thank you for asking that about how we’re doing. Yeah, it’s been really scary dealing with the lawsuit and having the threat of hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines issued against us. And that’s a really scary thing, and that’s a heavy thing. It’s also, I think any sort of effective resistance is going to require us to make sacrifices, to put ourselves, our individual wellbeing at risk. And we absolutely have to do that in smart ways. But I think that it’s really important that people understand that we’re not going to save the planet without taking on big risks to ourselves and to our own wellbeing. And we can’t do this in a completely safe manner. And it’s not that we are the ones creating the unsafe conditions, but if we get effective, those in power are going to respond harshly. They’re going to respond violently. And I think this is kind of a deep, deep way to think about your question.
What can people do to help? I think one thing people can do to help is start to get clear in their own minds that no one’s coming to save us. No one’s coming to swoop in and stop the destruction of the planet. Just stop the destruction of communities. And we’re going to have to learn how protect ourselves and to create the change that we know is so massively needed. And I think that if we can really start to develop a culture, a larger group of people that understand this and don’t quit when the inevitable repression and retaliation from the government and corporations come, then we’ll have a bigger community of people that can keep doing this kind of work and the sort of loneliness that often comes with activism and social justice work. If there’s more of us who understand what that’s like, what it actually feels like to put yourself in those kinds of positions, then we’re going to be much more resilient as a resistance community. We’re going to be much stronger together. And so, yeah, my biggest thing, what can people do? Consider thinking about the fact that we are the ones that have to stand up for ourselves. Get your mind right, get your soul right to understand that it’s not going to be an easy path. We don’t get to do it and stay completely safe, but it’s absolutely something that we must do. And the more of us that can see things like that, the more we can all support each other and the more effective we can ultimately be.
Max Wilbert:
I can’t say it any better than that. Courage. If folks want to learn more about what’s happening at Thacker Pass, follow our legal case, donate to our legal support fund. You can find all that information@protectthackerpass.org. And we’re gearing up there too for the next mine, the next project. And as this legal case hopefully comes to a conclusion one way or another in coming months and years, we’ve got more work to do. And so we’re just going to be pivoting straight to that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to thank our guests Will Falk and Max Wilbert, co-founders of the group Protect Thacker Pass, and two members of the group of Land Defenders known as the Thacker Pass, six who are being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation for protesting the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. We’ve included reference links in the show notes for this episode so you can learn more about the Thacker Pass six and the ongoing struggle there in Nevada. And before you go, I want to remind y’all that the Real News Network is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never ever put our reporting behind paywalls, but we cannot continue to do this work without your support. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this from the front lines of struggle, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News. Now. We’re in the middle of our spring fundraiser right now, and with these wildly uncertain times politically and economically, we are falling short of our goal and we need your help. Please go to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. If you want to hear more conversations and get more on the ground coverage just like this for our whole crew at the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.
The Deep Green Resistance Annual Conference will make its East Coast debut this year in Philadelphia. This is an opportunity to build our movement with activists who may have been unable to attend our previous conferences on the West Coast. Your conference ticket includes all meals, overnight accommodations (beds are limited, so some people may be on couches or floors), great workshops and discussions, and a chance to talk to Derrick Jensen in an intimate setting.
Friday will include dinner and some fun ice-breaker activities. Saturday programming will begin in the morning with a presentation by Lierre Keith and continue through Sunday with talks and workshops by active DGR members, supporters, and board members. Presentations will be live-streamed when possible.
The weekend’s focus will be on:
Deeper strategic thinking and analysis about the health and progress of our movement.
Next steps for DGR’s organizing and educational efforts.
Envisioning yourself as an active participant in DGR’s essential work.
We’ll also have nightly campfires with songs, stories, and snacks.
We cannot extend our stay in the main space past Monday morning August 4th, but if you want to stay an additional day, you can be accommodated in a camping area nearby. Bring your camping gear if that sounds fun!
Tickets are on a sliding scale. Our real costs per participant will be about $200/person. No one is turned away for lack of funds. Please consider paying a bit more if you are in an upper-income bracket, and a bit less if you are in a lower income bracket.
In this society, we tend to forget that lower income people have much less disposable income for extras of any kind than do higher income people. So what ends up happening is that lower income people actually end up subsidizing the participation of higher income people at events where everyone pays the same price to attend.
Suggested amounts are listed by income, but you are the best judge of what you can afford. Please pay what you can, and if you can’t pay, you are very much still welcome to attend.
If you want to support this event, please consider making a Donation in either your name or a loved one’s honor. We have people who want to attend but need help.
Editor’s note: Brownsville, Texas – “Element Fuels has received the necessary permitting to construct and operate a refinery capable of producing in excess of 160,000 barrels, or approximately 6.7 million gallons, per day of finished gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel,” said Founder and Co-CEO John Calce. “A permit for a greenfield refinery of this size, scope, and functionality has not been granted in the United States since the 1970’s. This speaks to the innovative approaches we are taking to address climate and sustainability concerns in cleaner, greener ways that are new to the refinery space.”
Though Marathon was built in 1976, it is considered the last significant oil refinery built in the United States.
That’s partly because of community opposition to new refineries, a position that people in Garyville understood well last month.
“It’s hard to explain the mixed emotions that come with living in the conditions that we have been forced to live in here,” said Robert Taylor, who lives in the vicinity of the plant, in the community of Reserve. “Why are we designated as a sacrifice zone?”
“Though Marathon was built in 1976, it is considered the last significant oil refinery built in the United States.
That’s partly because of community opposition to new refineries, a position that people in Garyville understood well last month.
“It’s hard to explain the mixed emotions that come with living in the conditions that we have been forced to live in here,” said Robert Taylor, who lives in the vicinity of the plant, in the community of Reserve. “Why are we designated as a sacrifice zone?”
Taylor grew up among the sugarcane fields of this part of St. John the Baptist Parish. The sugar mill where his parents worked once stood on the very spot where the Marathon Refinery was built.
During Taylor’s lifetime, the entire area switched focus, from cane to crude.
For decades now, he has fought the petrochemical plants here, in what’s become known as Cancer Alley. In 2015, Taylor founded the Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish, after a National Air Toxics Assessment revealed that residents of the parish have the highest lifetime cancer risk in the nation because of emissions of chloroprene and ethylene oxide from nearby plants.
Before Marathon opened 47 years ago, Taylor said, a small community called Lions stood on that plot of land. Townspeople would gather on Sundays at Zion Travelers Baptist Church, which had its own tidy little cemetery.
But in the mid-1970s, after a whir of pounded beams and sky-high metal towers, tied together by a maze of pipes, Marathon took over the grounds and built what became the nation’s second-largest refinery.”
California losing another refinery, impacting AZ and NV; fuel shortages possible
Promotional material from the Husky Friends campaign. (Modest Proposals)
“We were wondering if Mayor Paine is available?” I asked. My words were muffled by the dog mascot costume I was wearing. Next to me was a canvasser and the two camera operators filming us. We were at City Hall in Superior, Wisconsin on April 25 to spread the word about Husky Friends — the name we’d given to a so-called community outreach initiative from Husky Energy, owner of the local refinery that exploded in 2018 and triggered an evacuation of much of the city. With the refinery possibly reopening, Husky Friends was there to “assuage residents’ concerns.”
“Oh sure! Let me see if he has a moment,” the receptionist responded.
Wait, what!? This wasn’t supposed to be happening. We thought it’d be interesting to get footage of a dog mascot trying to meet the mayor, but we never thought he’d actually come out and talk with us.
He stepped out of his office, and we haltingly introduced Husky Friends, explaining that we were there to “address some of the community concerns about the use of hydrogen fluoride,” or HF — a lethal chemical used in oil refining that was almost released during the 2018 explosion, putting the entire populations of both Superior and nearby Duluth, Minnesota at grave risk. Cenovus Energy, which recently acquired Husky Energy, is rebuilding the refinery and intends to continue using the chemical.
Mayor Paine took a pamphlet, thanked us for coming and went back into his office.
The footage of this meeting would later show up on evening news segments on the local CBS and NBC affiliates in Duluth. However, by this time, the truth about Husky Friends had been exposed. The news correctly reported that it was actually just an elaborate satire — concocted by my activist group, Modest Proposals, in collaboration with local residents in an attempt to draw attention to the danger of the Superior Refinery.
The day before our hoax was exposed, thousands of postcards were distributed to residents living close to the refinery. They advertised Husky Friends and directed them to a website where anyone in the “friend zone” could sign up to receive a text warning 15 minutes after any HF release (while noting the real danger was within 10 minutes of a leak). The website also described a “neighbor compassion kit” featuring a burn cream for a chemical that can more-or-less kill on contact and a “Kid’s Room Gas Detector” that would play nursery rhymes if it detected HF.
We announced Husky Friends in a press release the following day, the anniversary of the explosion, and stayed in character until inevitably being exposed. Local TV stations, Wisconsin Public Radio, and numerous smaller newspapers all ran stories. We then capitalized further by sending repeated rounds of postcards on subsequent days which finally goaded Cenovus into circulating their own mailer to Superior residents denouncing our “inappropriate tactics” and reassuring them that the refinery was safe — essentially re-broadcasting our message for us.
“Gibraltar Explosion” by Josh13770 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
A wider problem and opportunity
Husky Friends was a locally-targeted action that re-animated a pressing issue long since faded from local headlines — thereby giving residents against the re-opening an opportunity to take advantage of its publicity. Not every city needs a dog mascot to talk to their mayor, but dedicating resources to local organizing efforts aimed at closing down oil refineries is something the climate movement should prioritize. There are huge opportunities to address the poisonous injustice of refineries’ sacrifice zones, and to strike a critical blow against the oil industry in the midst of the climate emergency.
Husky Friends may have used humor, but its message about the danger refineries pose was deadly serious — and by no means exclusive to Superior and Duluth. Approximately a third of refineries in the United States currently use hydrogen fluoride, many of them near population centers. Several have even had near-miss accidents in the past few years. Refineries also spew carcinogens, neurotoxins and hazardous metals onto surrounding communities, leading to a litany of health problems, including cancer, chronic respiratory illness and birth defects. All this pollution creates sacrifice zones, with people living around them frequently being low income, BIPOC communities — many of whom lack the resources to move. The danger refineries pose has been exacerbated in recent years, as many of them are aging facilities with decaying equipment in dire need of expensive repairs that can take years. More accidents are “just a matter of time,” according to the U.S. chemical safety board.
Despite its urgent need, funding has been hard for the refining industry to come by since many investors don’t see a long-term market for fossil fuels. According to energy economist Ed Hirs from the University of Houston, “Just getting the equipment you need could take three years. Electric vehicles might already make up 20 percent of the car market by then. You could find yourself investing a bunch of cash to rebuild a refinery that may not be needed for long.” Investor hesitancy naturally translates into a lack of funding for building any new refineries. There has not been a new refinery with significant capacity built since 1977, and even the CEO of Chevron has stated that “I don’t think you are ever going to see a refinery built again in this country.”
In the midst of the climate emergency, we need to look for the most effective use of movement resources to end fossil fuels as quickly as possible. The wariness of investors to finance necessary repairs make refineries a critical strategic vulnerability. Every refinery closed will likely never reopen. Every refinery closed can be an end to part of the vast fossil fuel apparatus destroying our planet.
How we get there
Any successful campaign needs to be specific about how it achieves its goals. A mentor of mine has a useful metaphor to break down campaigning specifics: If a campaign is a war, it needs an air war, and a ground war. Air war is about seizing or changing the narrative — much like Husky Friends did. Ground war is building power through relational organizing and grassroots base building. Air war creates the initiative and the ground war utilizes it to build organizations capable of wielding power. Successful campaigning needs both.
The air war gets waged using society’s means of information distribution, and its mediums are the tools of any political campaign: postcards, lawn signs, PR and perhaps most importantly advertising. The fossil fuel industry understands the impact of these tools and uses these tactics to garner local support. Enbridge Energy ran a plethora of ads in local newspapers for years to shape the narrative toward supporting its Line 3 oil sands pipeline in Northern Minnesota. Looking at these ads, you’d think that the pipeline had the support of local Indigenous tribes and was a boon for local jobs and the economy — when in fact many tribes fiercely resisted the pipeline, most of the workers came from out of state, and the pipeline brought an influx of harassment, violence and sex trafficking.
Environmental groups who opposed the pipeline had trouble getting enough resources to counter with their own message, which had the result of allowing Enbridge to monopolize critical channels of information distribution and opportunities to shape public perception. Even in heavily Trump-supporting Northern Minnesota such messaging could have had an effect. Citizens of Park Rapids cared enough about their water to take their city council to task over selling Enbridge water for Line 3 construction in the middle of 2021’s historic drought. If information about the threat that Line 3 poses to their water, and Enbridge’s abysmal safety record was more widely disseminated, it’s not hard to imagine more local residents joining the struggle.
None of this, however, is to fault the Indigenous leadership and brave frontline activists who fought Line 3. Instead, it’s a call to consider what they might have accomplished if they had more resources at their disposal to use the same local channels of information distribution that their opponents effectively weaponized against them.
Building power
As anyone who has been part of a volunteer based organization can tell you, there is always too much to do, never enough time and never enough people to do it. That’s why we need to find a way to send help in the form of others who can devote their time and labor to these groups.
Such help could take shape in a variety of ways, depending on the status of local efforts. If local organizations are already well developed, sending people to do canvassing, phone calls and the endless clerical minutiae involved in advocacy can free up critical time resources for frontline activists. If they need more of a boost, experienced organizers can be sent in as well to advise and facilitate residents actualizing power with grassroots base building, identifying and developing leaders, and all the nuts and bolts of community organizing.
Organizing and directing community power is a skill — and like all skills, experience is the best teacher. Frontline communities should be able to benefit from and utilize the knowledge accumulated by other successful frontline organizers and activists. People living in sacrifice zones deserve a livable environment and deserve assistance in building the power necessary to create that livable environment.
However, when sending personnel to frontline communities, organizers must always understand that they are a facilitator for collective needs — not a leader — and therefore act accordingly. The climate movement has been historically staffed by people with privilege, but by dedicating financing and personnel to disadvantaged communities, they can bring more voices, especially the voices of people oppressed by the fossil fuel industry, into the larger struggle.
Targeting the right decision maker
Every refinery in the United States is operating under an air quality permit mandated by Title 5 of the Clean Air Act. These permits are required by the federal government, but are administered at the state or local level, and are supposed to come up for renewal every five years. There are two possible decision makers to pressure. One of them is state and local governments, who can be pressured not to renew, or to outright revoke the permits. The other is the EPA, which holds veto power over any Title 5 permit. The Biden administration has pledged to incorporate environmental justice into its policy decisions, and whatever its shortcomings on climate action may be, at the end of the day they are movable on environmental issues.
Whether the best pressure point is federal, state or local governments will depend on which is most effective for each campaign. For example, the people around the oil refinery in Tacoma, Washington may want to pressure Jay Inslee, their climate conscious governor. Residents living around Exxon’s Baytown Refinery in Baytown, Texas may want to pressure a more pliable federal government, rather than their conservative state government.
The financial vulnerability of oil refineries opens the door to another pressure point the environmental movement can exploit, and one in which national and larger organizations can take a larger role. Defunding and divestment campaigns have been previously directed at specific fossil fuel infrastructure projects, notably the Dakota Access Pipeline, Line 3 and the ongoing campaign against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. With so many refineries in need of expensive, time-consuming repairs — as well as banks being hesitant to fund them — campaigns can direct their attention toward pressuring financial institutions to withhold funding or drop their support.
Frontline communities with powerful and resilient community organizations will also be better equipped to take ownership of a hopefully fossil free future, rather than being left behind when the refineries inevitably close. The economic devastation left in the wake of coal’s decline is a telling example of what can happen to workers and communities who are dependent on a fading industry. With these organizations they will be better equipped to push for equitable and sustainable economic development, as well as public investment policies from the municipal, state or federal government. They will also be better positioned to receive grant money from nonprofits and foundations. By helping build these organizations, the environmental movement can facilitate a just transition from below — with empowered local communities taking ownership of a fossil free future.
Jim Haugen (pen name) got his start in activism campaigning against tech companies with Extinction Rebellion NYC. He then co-founded Modest Proposals, an activist collective that uses satire, humor and other creative tactics to create positive change.
As a private university expands its footprint and threatens the amphibian’s habitat, residents are voicing their opposition and searching for another way forward.
By Lee Hedgepeth
April 10, 2025
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
HOMEWOOD, Ala.—Ellen McLaughlin said she wasn’t speaking for herself.
“I speak for the salamanders,” she told those gathered at a community meeting in late March.
McLaughlin, a retired Samford University biology professor, was one of dozens who showed up at the Homewood Senior Center to express their frustration over a proposed “town square” development that will threaten the habitat of spotted salamanders in the Birmingham suburb.
Flanked by oil paintings of wildflower fields and a waterfall, she made her views well known.
“They require a certain habitat, and to destroy that habitat is going to destroy that population of salamanders,” she told those in attendance, including representatives of Landmark Development, the company overseeing the project on behalf of the university. “So it’s imperative that we keep that.”
McLaughlin wasn’t alone in her concerns. Again and again, residents and other stakeholders present at the community meeting hosted by the development company brought up the plight of the amphibian that has, over time, become part of the character of Homewood, home of a salamander festival held annually for two decades.
Bob Dunn, CEO of Landmark Development, said in an interview that he understands residents’ concerns but that he can’t promise that there will be no impact to the spotted salamanders and the vernal pools where they lay their eggs each year.
“Could we encroach on portions of the habitat? As you look at the plan, there are areas where there’s some encroachment,” he said. “But we think the mitigating opportunities will more than compensate for the type of encroachment we’re talking about.”
Residents, biologists and members of the university community interviewed by Inside Climate News largely disagree. Currently proposed plans don’t leave room for changes that would protect the salamanders’ current habitat, they argue, putting at risk the survival of a population that’s called the city home for generations.
A Salamander’s Tale
The spotted salamander has long been a unique part of Homewood’s history.
Since at least the 1960s, and likely much longer, experts say, the amphibians have spent much of their time burrowing on the slopes of Shades Mountain, making their homes beneath the fallen leaves and limbs of the forest.
Once a year, as temperatures in Alabama begin to climb, the amphibians migrate from the mountain’s slopes across South Lakeshore Drive, a two-lane road, to the springtime, “vernal” pools located in a narrow patch of woods adjacent to existing sports fields that line Shades Creek.
The trek is not always simple. Most often, the salamanders embark on their journey at night, and typically in heavy rains—likely as a way to keep wet and avoid predators.
James Seay Brown Jr., a retired folklorist and natural historian who worked at Samford, wrote about Homewood’s relationship with the spotted salamander in his book, “Distracted by Alabama: Tangled Threads of Natural History, Local History and Folklore.”
When Brown arrived at Samford in 1971, the university’s environmental community was already tracking the salamanders and their annual migration. Brown quickly became obsessed with their yearly trek, and the fixation rubbed off on others over time.
Soon, Brown recruited his wife Michelle to serve as a sort of salamander Paul Revere—tasked with calling a list of interested locals when her husband had confirmed that the amphibians were on the move.
In 2002, Brown awoke to a heavy rain around three in the morning, traveled down to the migration site and confirmed the annual journey had begun. He alerted Michelle, who he said became nervous about calling one person in particular on the list—a Samford executive—so late at night. The executive’s wife answered, surprised by a woman’s voice on the other end of the line, but awkwardly agreed to share the news with her husband. The executive soon showed up for the crossing. So did his wife.
“And here were highly placed administrators of [University of Alabama at Birmingham] and Samford, plus otherwise upstanding businesspeople, professionals, and good family folks, all willing to risk their reputations by such behavior—though I might note some brought children as an excuse,” Brown wrote. “My wife later remarked drily that the ranks of insanity were growing. This may also have been the reaction of Homewood’s mayor at that time, Barry McCulley, when he first heard about it from some police report about flashlights in the woods near the high school at eleven o’clock at night and suspicious answers to straightforward police questions.”
By 2003, the excitement and intrigue over the annual salamander crossing had reached its peak, and city officials in April of that year officially designated a nearly half-mile stretch of South Lakeshore Drive as a salamander crossing—painted crosswalks and street signs included.
By the next year, the city hosted the first Salamander Festival, a tradition that’s continued to this day. In 2024, more than 900 attendees flocked to Homewood for the event, according to organizers.
In 2008, the city of Homewood took another step that aided the salamander—designating around 65 acres of land along South Lakeshore Drive, opposite the breeding pools, as a protected natural area: Homewood Nature Preserve.
Now, though, residents of Homewood fear the worst—that the desire for development will outweigh the need for environmental stewardship of the amphibians’ habitat. That’s why residents like Ellen McLaughlin say they will speak for the salamander.
A Creekside Development
March’s community meeting at the Homewood Senior Center was partly a result of the city’s planning commission encouraging Landmark Development to more deeply engage with citizens over their concerns, according to city officials.
The development, called Creekside, is billed by the developer as a “dynamic, walkable, livable town square environment” that will feature everything from “trendy shops to delightful eateries.”
The project is part of Samford University’s “Samford Horizons” initiative, which the university touts as “a visionary master plan to ensure Samford remains among the world’s most respected Christ-centered universities.”
Samford, founded by the Alabama Baptist State Convention in 1841 as Howard College, has increased enrollment for the past 16 years in a row. University officials have said the proposed Creekside development will help to accommodate that growth, providing additional housing, retail options and sport facilities.
At the March meeting, members of the public were vocal about their opposition to the project. No one expressed support for the developer’s proposal.
Of particular concern to residents is a proposed 10-story hotel—which would be the tallest building in the city—and the implications for traffic, stormwater management and environmental stewardship as it relates to the spotted salamander.
Historically, the university has often found itself in tension with city officials and residents over development. Echoes of that tension surfaced in the community meeting.
“Samford wants to do this to us,” Becky Smith, a Homewood resident, said in a deep Southern drawl. “We don’t want you coming down here to tell us what you’re going to do to us.”
The framing of the new development as providing a new “town square” for Homewood belies Samford’s claims that it wants to develop a closer relationship with the city, she argued.
“Samford has said they want to be more a part of Homewood,” Smith said. “This is trying to make Homewood more a part of Samford.”
After those comments, Colin Coyne, Samford’s vice president for finance, business affairs and strategy, spoke up, telling community members that the university’s past friction with the community that surrounds it is not lost on him.
“I acknowledge the fact that we’ve not always been the best neighbors,” Coyne said. “But we have to start somewhere. This is our best attempt.”
Dunn, who spoke on behalf of Landmark at the meeting, said that the developer would do its best to mitigate the impact of the Creekside project on the spotted salamander’s springtime habitat. Landmark would certainly not be able to guarantee, however, that its engineering fixes would solve every problem, he said.
“It’s about really elevating issues that we have to stay focused on to continue to work to find good solutions that balance out all of the issues that go into a development,” he said. “We solve over here for the salamanders, and it creates an issue somewhere else. You’ve just got to find a balance.”
A Threat to the Salamander
The day after the meeting, Megan Gibbons put on her boots and waded into a place she feels at home, and where the salamanders do, too: the vernal pools just north of South Lakeshore Drive. There, she carefully reached into the water again and again, searching for the salamander egg masses she’s fighting to protect.
It’s here, in the shadow of Shades Mountain, near the shores of Shades Creek, where Gibbons, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has done some of her best teaching. It’s here, in the stagnant springtime pools, shaded by the trees overhead, where she’s sparked the passions of students from across the country. And it’s not just for their benefit that she wants these salamanders to survive. It’s for the next generation of salamanders, too.
It doesn’t take Gibbons long to find an egg mass. She smiles as she holds out the jelly-like blob that can contain between 10 and 100 eggs. Through the translucent membranes, you can see the tiny salamanders beginning to take shape— amphibians that will soon hatch and make their first journey over to the slopes of Shades Mountain.
“This one’s pretty far along,” she says of the egg mass, pointing out the various points of interest. “You can see its little body, and you can see its little fluffy gills coming out the side of its head.”
In this environment, Gibbons is doing what she loves best—teaching. It had been the same the evening before, when Gibbons—not then in her wading boots—had stood studiously along one wall of the meeting room, an educational poster about the salamander habitat at her side. One by one, she spoke to residents who approached her, explaining the risks posed by the impending development.
A day later, as she stood holding the egg mass, she weighed again what was at risk. It’s about balance, Dunn had said at the meeting. Balance in favor of what, Gibbons wondered.
“They’re going to make a lot of money from this,” Gibbons said of the developer. “What do we get out of this? What do the salamanders get out of this? I get to see the animal I love destroyed. That’s what I get.”
Soon, Gibbons had carefully replaced the egg mass into the vernal pool and climbed back to the adjacent roadway. A passerby, a retiree named Barbara Koehler, stopped to ask if Gibbons was looking for salamanders. She’d been at the meeting with the developer, too, she said, and didn’t like much of what she heard.
“I think the guy from Landmark was smooth,” she said. “He was good at glossing over the issue. He knows exactly what he should say to get people to think he’s not going to do exactly what he knows he’s going to do.”
“What do we get out of this? What do the salamanders get out of this? I get to see the animal I love destroyed. That’s what I get.”
— Megan Gibbons, University of Alabama at Birmingham biologist
Throughout the meeting, Dunn had emphasized that direct community engagement was not technically a required part of development in Homewood, Koehler recalled. Any construction could move forward simply with the necessary approvals from the Homewood City Council. Engagement would be ideal, Dunn said, but was not a mandate. To Koehler and Gibbons, that felt like a threat—an insinuation that meaningful community engagement could stop at any time if it suited the developer.
Koehler, a self-described birder and naturalist, said she’s opposed to the development.
“It’s just not a good idea,” she said. Her gaze soon pointed to the skyline, darting from tree to tree as birds chirped eagerly in the daylight sun. “This is worth protecting.”
Finding a Way Forward
What Dunn said about a lack of required input from residents is largely true.
On April 1, Dunn attended a meeting of the planning commission, a body required to recommend either approval or denial of the development plan by the Homewood City Council. Only Dunn—no residents or other stakeholders—was allowed to speak, according to a Homewood recording of the session. The CEO characterized the feedback he’d received from residents as “overwhelmingly positive.”
During the presentation, however, Dunn announced the publication of a report containing potential adjustments to the original development plan based on comments from residents. Ninety-two percent of written comments were about environmental stewardship, according to the developer’s own numbers.
The adjustments in the updated document include potential consideration of a “repositioning” of proposed sports fields that were slated to cover nearly the entire area from Shades Creek to South Lakeshore Drive, though representatives at the March meeting had noted that reducing the fields’ size wouldn’t be feasible given NCAA requirements for field dimensions. Plans for at least two salamander tunnels under South Lakeshore are also outlined in the updated plan—a potential pathway for the amphibians to cross the road without the risk of crossing traffic above ground.
Gibbons said in an interview that she’s not convinced that such slight adjustments will protect a species that has continually been left behind by commercial and residential development, not just in Homewood, but across the state and country. The risk of harming the species outweighs what’s to be gained by more and more development, she said.
Winslow Armstead, a member of the planning commission, pushed Dunn on providing more complete responses to residents’ questions and concerns, particularly when construction on the project could begin as early as this fall.
“I’m still sort of at a loss for the answers on some of those questions,” he told Dunn.
But ultimately, the planning commission recommended approval of the developer’s plan. It is set to be considered by the Homewood City Council in the coming weeks.
Continued engagement with Landmark Development is the best option for influencing what happens beside Shades Creek and Shades Mountain, particularly in today’s political climate, said David Butler, executive director of Cahaba Riverkeeper.
“There’s been a lot of hope that some federal or state agency would come in to help, but all of our environmental protections have been eroded,” he said. “All of the regulatory frameworks we’ve relied on have been broken down, and so we’re really going to have to go through and do a lot of that protection work on our own.”
That work, Butler said, can include direct discussions with developers—emphasizing to those proposing new growth that environmental stewardship must be a firm commitment from the beginning.
When it comes to Landmark and the Homewood project, Butler said he’s optimistic. Landmark reached out to Cahaba Riverkeeper, an environmental nonprofit, even before the first planning meeting, he said.
“I’m encouraged,” Butler said. “We would prefer no development, but that’s not a realistic position to take here. Development is going to happen. But at least we’re at the table. At least we have input.”
