In this excerpt, Samir offers an outline of the rationale for the harmful development of lithium mines. In parallel we are also offered an outline of the development of the protest camp. While we are happy that a popular outlet like Vice News is writing about our campaign, we do not agree with all of the author’s statements. DGR is strongly opposed to any kind of industrial processes like mining because they are inherently destructive to life on planet earth. Hence we do not believe that there can be a “greener” kind of industrial resource extraction.
A mining giant wants to extract lithium from the Nevada desert to power electric cars. But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without costs.
One of the largest known lithium deposits in the world has sat undisturbed under the Nevada desert for centuries. Now, a mining giant wants to extract the resource to power electric cars using a potentially harmful method.
Before bringing in its equipment, however, the company will have to go through a blockade of environmental protesters that have been camped out at the site since December.
“Like the wildlife, we hunker down when the weather gets very bad and wait for the storm to break,”
said Max Wilbert, who started the Protect Thacker Pass, the grassroots organization leading the occupation.
“But we’re not backing down. What is at stake here is the soul of the entire environmental movement.”
Right now, Thacker Pass, a section of public land stretching hundreds of acres in northern Nevada, is several environmental permits—and lawsuits—away from becoming a massive open-pit mining project run by Canada-based Lithium Americas. The metal excavated from the planned 18,000-acre site will be used to manufacture rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for electric cars.
But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without its costs:
The proposed mining process at Thacker Pass uses sulfuric acid, which could seep into the water supply. The operation also requires tapping into groundwater, which could decrease its availability. Both would impact the ecosystems of several at-risk species, like golden eagles, pronghorn antelope, and Nevada’s state fish, the Lahontan cutthroat trout.
In an effort to protect the land, dozens of protestors from across the country have posted up at the site in freezing nighttime temperatures with heated tents and portable mini-toilets. Local ranchers, concerned about the welfare of their land and water supply, have also joined the cause.
The original article can be read in full on Vice News.
Written by Manu Moudgil – India’s historic farmers movement has overcome regional, religious, gender and ideological differences to challenge corporate influence on government.
On Feb. 6, protesters blocked roads at an estimated 10,000 spots across India as part of the ongoing movement against the new farm laws enacted by the national government last year. For over two months, the most populous democracy in the world has witnessed what is being called one of the biggest protests in human history.
Hundreds of thousands of farmers have been rallying against three new laws that have thrown open the agriculture sector to private players. Protesters feel the legislation will allow a corporate takeover of crop production and trading, which would eventually impact their earnings and land ownership. They are camping on the roads connecting the national capital with major north Indian cities, braving harsh winters and smear campaigns from the mainstream media and ruling party supporters. Over 224 protesters have already lost their lives for various reasons, chief among them camping outdoors in the frigid weather.
The movement has overcome regional, religious, gender and ideological differences to build pressure.
Leftist farm unions, religious organizations and traditional caste-based brotherhoods called khaps, which make pronouncements on social issues, are working in tandem through resolute sit-ins and an aggressive boycott of politicians.
“We believe the laws have been framed at the direction of the private sector to directly benefit them. So, the protests have to target big businesses along with the government,”
said Jagmohan Singh, president of one of the farm unions representing protesting farmers. India’s right-wing government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, pushed the laws through the parliament in September, despite lacking a majority in the upper house and agriculture being in the jurisdiction of state governments. The protest is a response to the lack of respect for parliamentary democracy and federalism, but its main focus is the pervasive corporate influence on governance.
After limits on corporate contributions were removed and allowed to be made anonymously, $8.2 billion was spent on Indian parliamentary elections in 2019, which exceeded how much was spent on the U.S. election in 2016 by 26 percent. Most of this money came from corporations and the BJP was the primary recipient.
The political-corporate influence is also jeopardizing media’s independence in the country. India ranks 142nd out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index. Mainstream TV news channels often eulogize the government and Hindu right-wing ideology and smear voices of dissent and minorities. Farmers and their supporters have responded by boycotting media outlets, starting their own newsletters and promoting independent journalism. The movement has already received global attention on social media, with climate activist Greta Thunberg and pop star Rihana recently extending support to the protesters.
Farm crisis is the fuel
Farmers are a large electoral block in India, with half the population being engaged in agriculture. No political party can afford to offend them publicly even though policy makers have done little to increase farm incomes and address their indebtedness. Around 300,000 farmers died by suicide between 1995 and 2013, mostly due to financial stress. In 2019, another 10,281 farmers took their lives.
The Modi government came to power in 2014 on the promise of doubling farmer’s income. It claims the new laws will help fulfill that pledge by allowing for the sale of produce and contract farming outside the purview of state governments and remove of cap on stockholding of food items. Farmers, however, are not buying these arguments.
“The laws are tilted against the farmers and give a free hand to private companies by removing the safeguard of state market committees, which usually intervene in case of disputes with traders,” said Gurtej Singh, a farmer from Punjab. “The committee members are easily accessible even to small farmers, compared to the courts or district officials, which the new laws propose as regulatory authorities.”
Indian farms are mostly family-owned and land is a source of subsistence for millions. Around 86 percent of farmers, however, till less than five acres while the other 14 percent, mostly upper castes, own over half of the country’s 388 million acres of arable land.
Now they fear that the new laws will dismantle the government support system as well and further push them into poverty. “Laws are just the imminent trigger. The protest is actually a manifestation of anger about the constant decline in farming as a profitable occupation over the last few decades,” Singh said. “We have mostly been handed short term relief around election times.”Farmers in a few north Indian states were able to consolidate their holdings through increased incomes with the introduction of irrigation, modern seeds, fertilizers, machines, market infrastructure and guaranteed price support from the government during the Green Revolution in the 1960s. But rising input costs and climate crisis have adversely impacted the profits there as well. In Punjab, the most agriculturally-developed state, for instance, the input costs of electric motors, labor, fertilizer and fuel rose by 100 to 290 percent from 2000 to 2013, but the support price of wheat and rice rose by only 122 to 137 percent in the same period, according to a government report. Heavy use of chemicals, mono-cropping and farm mechanization have damaged the soil, affecting productivity and forcing farmers into debt.
The new farm laws were enacted at a time when India had yet to recover from one of the most punitive lockdowns in the world imposed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which prevented large gatherings. However, the government lost the battle of perceptions from the very start. Since farming is the largest avenue of self-employment and subsistence in India, throwing the sector open to private players was bound to kindle fears that owners would lose autonomy over their lands.
Strength and strategy
Punjab saw widespread protests as soon as the laws were enacted. Farmers occupied railway tracks and toll plazas on major roads besides corporate-owned thermal plants, gas stations and shopping malls. Scores of subscribers left Jio, the telecom service owned by the top Indian businessman perceived to be close to Prime Minister Modi.
Farm unions also held regular sit-ins in front of the houses of prominent political leaders forcing an important regional party to leave the national government alliance. Several state leaders of the ruling party resigned from their posts as well. Similar scenes played out in the neighboring state of Haryana, where leaders were publicly shamed and the helicopter of the elected head of the government was prevented from landing for a public meeting after farmers dug up the helipad area.
In November, thousands of farmers drove their tractor trolleys towards the national capital as they played protest songs by celebrity singers. Stocked with rations, clothing, water and wood for months, they braved tear gas shells and water cannons used by the police along the way. Powerful tractors pushed heavy transport vehicles, concrete slabs and barbed wires that the administration had placed en route out of their way.
Stopping at the northern and western borders of New Delhi, the long cavalcades of tractor trolleys turned into encampments, and numerous community kitchens sprang up. Residents of nearby villages and towns chipped in by supplying milk and vegetables, and offering bathrooms in their houses, shops, gas stations and offices for use by protesters.
Open libraries and medical camps were set up and volunteers offered their skills, ranging from tailoring to tutoring children. Besides speeches by the farm leaders, cultural performances, film screenings and wrestling bouts became a regular feature. More farmers poured in with each passing day. Indians in the diaspora gave donations to farm unions and village councils, which offered money for fuel and other expenses to villagers who could not afford to visit the protest sites on their own. The resistance to the corporatization of agriculture has penetrated deep.
“These occupations are not just a reaction of wronged citizens who have set out to reform the Indian parliament or assert dissent. Rather, they form an important stage in a still-unfolding narrative of militant anti-capitalist struggle,”
wrote Aditya Bahl, a doctoral scholar at the John Hopkins University who is archiving the peasants’ revolts that took place in Punjab in the 1960s and ’70s.
The protests are not only targeting domestic companies and political figures.
Farmers have also burnt effigies of Uncle Sam, the World Trade Organization and IMF, signifying the influence of global trade over domestic agricultural policies. Developed countries have been pressuring India for last three decades to open up its agriculture sector to multinational players by slashing subsidies and reducing public procurement and distribution of food grains to the poor.The Indian Supreme Court suspended the implementation of laws and formed a four-member expert committee on Jan. 13 to look into the issue. Farmers have, however, refused to meet the committee members, alleging that many of them have already written or spoken in favor of the laws.
“Agricultural reforms and free markets have failed to help American farmers who are dying by suicide due to heavy debts,” explained food and trade policy expert Devinder Sharma. “Their farm incomes are in the negative, even though they have big landholdings and billions of dollars of income support from the government. How can the same model work for India, especially when it’s not even designed for our domestic conditions?”
Protesters are also seeking a legal right to sell their produce at a guaranteed price. The Indian government usually declares a minimum support price on various crops based on costs of their production, but only a fraction of the produce is procured at that rate. In the absence of government procurement facilities in their areas, most farmers have to settle for a lower price offered by private traders. A law would make it mandatory for private players to buy the produce at a declared price.
“If Indian farmers are able to get the law on guaranteed price passed through their current agitation, they will become a role model for farmers across the world living under heavy debts,” Sharma continued. “India should put its foot down at the WTO and create much-needed disruption in the world food trade policy for the benefit of the global agriculture sector.”
The movement grows
The BJP-led national government has faced numerous protests over the last six years of its rule, including by university students, workers and caste and religious minorities. With the help of media and security agencies, however, the government has always been able to frame dissent as being unpatriotic. The country has dropped 26 places in the Democracy Index’s global ranking since 2014 due to “erosion of civil liberties.”
This is the first time peasants have been galvanized in such large numbers against the government. The government has already held 11 rounds of negotiations with farmers’ representatives and offered to suspend the laws for one and a half years on Jan. 20. But farmers are not budging from their demand of the complete repeal of the laws and legal cover for the selling of their crops at a guaranteed price. The movement, initiated by Punjab’s farmers, has taken on a national character. On Jan. 26, which marks India’s Republic Day, 19 out of 28 states witnessed protests against the farm laws.
In Delhi, however, a plan to organize a farmers’ tractor march parallel to the official Republic Day function, went awry. A group of protesters clashed with police at multiple spots and stormed the iconic Red Fort, a traditional seat of power for the Mughals, where the colonial British and independent India’s prime ministers have also raised their flags.
The rural-urban divide became starker on the night of Jan. 27. While TV anchors and their captive urban audience smirked at visuals of a leader of the farmers’ movement crying as he faced imminent arrest, villages erupted in anger. Temple priests gave calls over public address systems, nightly meetings were arranged and thousands drove hundreds of miles through a foggy winter night to reach the protest site on eastern fringe of national capital New Delhi, compelling the administration to pull the police back and restart the water and power supply to the protest site.The protesters unfurled banners of the farm unions and Sikhs — one of the minority religious groups and the most prominent face of the protests. Mainstream media and ruling party supporters used the opportunity to blame the movement for desecration and religious terrorism. Security forces charged sleeping farmers with batons at one location, filed cases against movement leaders, allowed opponents to pelt campaigners with stones, arrested journalists and shut down the Internet.
The attacks, therefore, ended up lifting the flagging morale of the farmers and helped the movement gain even more supporters, who shunned the government and media narrative. Massive community gatherings of khaps were organized at multiple places over next few days, extending their support to the protests and issuing a boycott call for the BJP and its political allies.
Smear campaigns to depict Sikh farmers as terrorists, a reference to an armed movement in the 1980s and ’90s for a separate homeland, found no resonance beyond the right-wing echo chamber. Sikh protesters draw inspiration from the religious tenets of community service, equality and the fight against injustice. Community kitchens run by Sikh organizations have served through many humanitarian crisis, like the ongoing civil war in Syria and movements like Black Lives Matter. Sikhs in India have remained steadfastly egalitarian, ready to support other religious minorities in times of need.
Mending fault lines
The movement has also been able to overcome regional and gender divisions, and is trying to address caste divides. The states of Haryana and Punjab are often at loggerheads on the issue of sharing of river waters. Haryana was carved out of Punjab on linguistic lines in 1966, but most of the rivers flow through the current Punjab state. Haryana has been seeking a greater amount of water for use by its farmers, while Punjab’s farmers oppose the demand, citing reduced water flow in the rivers over the years. The current protests have united farmers for a common cause, helping them understand each other even though opponents have made attempts revive the water issue.
Women have also been participating in the protests in large numbers. They are either occupying roads on Delhi’s borders or managing homes and farms in the absence of men, while taking part in protest marches in villages.
“Earlier, we were able to rally only 8,000-10,000 women for a protest. Today that number has swelled to 25,000-30,000, as they recognized the threats posed by the new laws to the livelihoods of their families,” said Harinder Bindu, who leads the women’s wing of the largest farm union in Punjab. “For many women this is the first time they are participating in a protest, which is a big change because they were earlier confined to household work. Men are getting used to seeing women participate and recognizing the value they bring to a movement.”
The union first encouraged the male leaders to include the women in their families with the cause to set an example for other members as well. “This helped inculcate the habit of sharing responsibilities,” Bindu said. “When women members participate in sit-ins, men manage the house. I feel this movement will bring greater focus on women’s issues within the farming community — one of which is the need to support widows of farmers who died by suicide due to financial constraints.”
In Punjab, less than four percent of private farm land belongs to Dalits, the lowest caste in the traditional social hierarchy of India, even though they constitute 32 percent of the state’s population. They often earn their livelihoods through farm work or daily wage labor. Even though Dalits have a legal right to till village common land, attempts to assert that right often lead to violent clashes with upper caste landlords who want to keep it for themselves.
“It’s not easy to overcome caste barriers. The acceptance and understanding evident in the leaders of the farmers’ unions is yet to percolate among their cadre.”
Dalits are waging similar battles across India. Researchers recorded 31 land conflicts involving 92,000 Dalits in 2019. A few of the farmers’ unions have supported and raised funds for Dalit agitations in the past. This has ensured the participation of farm workers in the current movement, but it has largely remained a farmers’ campaign.
“Dalits do understand that the new laws will impact them. Initially some of the workers did join the protests but they can’t afford to lose daily wages and also lack resources to travel long distance,” said Gurmukh Singh, a social activist working with Dalits to claim their right to cultivate village common land in Punjab. “But it’s not easy to overcome caste barriers. The acceptance and understanding evident in the leaders of the farmers’ unions is yet to percolate among their cadre.”
The movement is gradually encompassing other rural issues beyond the farm laws. In the state of Maharashtra, for instance, thousands of tribal people traveled to the capital Mumbai on Jan. 23 to extend support to the farmers. They also asserted their own long pending demand for land titles under the Forest Rights Act, which recognizes traditional rights of scheduled tribes and other forest dwellers on the use of land and other forest resources.
Starting from Punjab, the epicenter of protests has now extended to Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state of India, and leaders are planning to muster more support from central India.
The persistent protests also forced the government to hold an extensive debate on the issue in the parliament at the beginning of February, even though it did not lead to any resolution. The UK parliament may also consider debating the farmers’ protests and press freedom in India after an online petition on its website gathered the required number of signatures. Farmers’ leaders, meanwhile, have reaffirmed their stand to stay put on the roads for the long haul and have now decided to block railway tracks across the country for four hours on Feb. 18.
This article was first published in wagingnonviolence.org on February 16, 2021, you can read the original here
Upon completion of forty days of launching a protest camp in the proposed site for lithium mining in Thacker Pass, Max delves into the history of the area.
Forty days ago, my friend Will Falk and I launched a protest camp here at Thacker Pass.
Situated between the Montana Mountains and Double H Mountains in northern Nevada, Thacker Pass is part of the “sagebrush ocean.” Big sagebrush plants, the keystone species here, roll away to the south and east of the camp. Stars light up the night sky. Often, the only sound we can hear is the wind, the chirping of birds, the yips of coyotes.
The seasons are unfolding. When we arrived, the mountains were auburn in the evening sun. Now, they shimmer bright white after winter storms. Cliffs and sagebrush protrude through the snow and provide habitat for wildlife: bobcats, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, sage-grouse, pygmy rabbits, burrowing owls, and countless others.
We are here in the bitter cold wind to oppose the destruction of this place. Lithium Americas Corporation, and their subsidiary Lithium Nevada Corporation, plan to blow up this pass, extract millions of tons of stone, and build an array of infrastructure to process this into lithium with harsh chemicals like sulfuric acid. Along the way, they will build vast mountains of toxic tailings, leaching heavy metals and uranium into what groundwater will still remain after they pump nearly 1.5 billion gallons per year into their industrial machinery.
For weeks now, I have been researching the true history of this place. I have struggled with how to tell these stories. There are many perspectives on Thacker Pass, and many ways the story can be told.
Where to begin? There are no true beginnings or endings here, where water cycles endlessly from sky to mountain to soil to river to sky, and back again; where human existence passes as fading footprint in the soil, as bones sinking into land, as a whisper on the `breeze. Only stories upon stories, legends and myths, layers of soil and stone. But there is a beginning.
Nineteen million years ago, a column of magma deep within the mantle of the planet arose under the continental plate. Heat and pressure built through miles of stone, liquifying it. Superheated water forced its way to the surface, and geysers appeared. Pressure kept building, and one day, the first volcanic eruption tore open the crust, spewing ash across half the continent.
This was the birth of the Yellowstone Hotspot, an upwelling of heat from deep inside the planet that even now, after migrating hundreds of miles northeast, powers the geysers of Yellowstone National Park.
After a time, the magma was spent. Vast chambers once filled with magma, miles underground, were now empty, and the weight of the stone overhead pressed down. Soon, the ground itself collapsed across an area of more than 600 square miles, and the McDermitt Caldera, of which Thacker Pass is a part, was formed.
The new caldera attracted water. Rain fell and flowed downhill. With wind and water and ice, rich volcanic stones became pebbles, then sand, then clay. Sediments gathered in lake basins, and one element in particular — lithium — was concentrated there.
In one version of the story of Thacker Pass — the version told by Lithium Americas — geologic conditions created a stockpile of valuable lithium that can be extracted for billions of dollars in profits. In this version of the story, Thacker Pass is a place that exists to fuel human convenience and industry — to store power for the wealthy, the consumers of gadgets and smartphones and electric cars, for the grid operators.
In this story, the lithium in the soil at Thacker Pass does not belong to the land, or to the sagebrush, or to the water trickling down past roots and stones to join ancient aquifers. It belongs to the mining company which has filed the proper mining claim under the 1872 mining law, which still governs today.
In another version of this story, this land called “Thacker Pass” is part of the Northern Paiute ancestral homeland. I do not know the Paviotso name for this place. Wilson Wewa, a Northern Paiute elder, says that “the world began at the base of Steens Mountain,” a hundred miles north-northwest of here. Wewa tells that the people emerged from Malheur Cave, a 3,000-foot-deep lava tube near the modern town of Burns.
Northern Paiute have lived on these lands since time immemorial. Scientists have dated nearby petroglyphs as perhaps 15,000 years old — the oldest in North America. Obsidian from Thacker Pass has been gathered, worked into tools sharper than the finest modern scalpel, and traded across the region for thousands of years. There are even burial sites in the caves nearby, directly adjacent to the mine site, according to a Bureau of Land Management Ranger who visited us at camp this week.
I am told that Sentinel Rock, which stands over the Quinn River Valley at the eastern end of Thacker Pass, was an important site for prayer historically. If the mine is built, Lithium Americas’ water pipeline will skirt Sentinel Rock, pumping out billions of gallons of water. I cannot help but think: how much more can the colonizers take?
I cannot tell the story of the history of this place from the perspective of the Northern Paiute, but it would be wrong to not at least summarize what I know. Too often, the invasion of these lands by European settler-colonialists is ignored. When we ignore or minimize genocide, we make future genocide easier. As the Czech writer Milan Kundera said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
In the 1850’s, colonization of these lands began in earnest. The coming of the white colonizers and their cattle meant the overgrazing of the grasslands and the cutting of the Pinyon Pine trees; the damming of the creeks and rivers; the trapping of the beavers and the killing of the wolves.
In 1859, the discovery of the Comstock lode marked the beginning of the mining explosion. Thousands of people flocked to Nevada, and their axes and cattle and saws devastated the land. Smelting the ore from the mines required every bushel of firewood that could be found.
Ronald Lanner, in his book The Piñon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History, writes that “the furnaces of Eureka [Nevada], working at capacity, could in a single day devour over 530 cords of piñon, the produce of over 50 acres… After one year of major activity, the hills around Eureka were bare of trees for ten miles in every direction… by 1878 the woodland was nowhere closer than fifty miles from Eureka, every acre having been picked clean… The significance of the deforestation around Eureka can be appreciated by realizing that a fifty-mile radius from that town approaches to within a few miles of Ely to the east and of Austin to the west. Both of these towns were also important mining centers with large populations, and their demands for woodland products probably rivaled those of Eureka itself.”
Lanner continues: “The deforestation of their hills and the destruction of their nut groves often brought Indians into conflict with white settlers and miners. As early as 1860, Paiutes gathered at Pyramid Lake to decide how to cope with the white men who were encroaching on their lands, killing their game, and cutting down what the settlers derisively referred to as the Indians’ ‘orchards.’”
My friend Myron Dewey, who lives on the Walker River Paiute Reservation, told me the piñon pine are to his people as the buffalo are to the nations of the Great Plains: a sacred relative, source of life, an elder being.
Wilson Wewa also tells of how European colonization dispossessed the Northern Paiute. “Pretty soon our people were having to compete with miners and settlers for food. They were killing all the deer, and the antelope, and their cattle were chomping up and destroying all the root digging grounds we relied on for food.”
The scale of ecological devastation unleashed on Nevada by the mining industry is hard to comprehend. With forests gone, soils eroded, biodiversity collapsed, and streams dried up. The damming of creeks and mass trapping of beavers were another nail in the coffin of the hydrological cycle. From the north to south, east to west, colonization destroyed the waters of the region. And what are people to do when their source of life is destroyed? This devastation played a large role in the Paiute War in 1860, the Snake War of 1864-8, the 1865 Mud Lake massacre, the Modoc War of 1872-3, the Bannock War in 1878, the Spring Valley massacres of the 1860’s and 1897, and many other conflicts.
To this day, the results of this destruction are still playing out, from Winnemucca Lake — once a wildlife refuge, home to the previously mentioned oldest petroglyphs in North America, now dry — to Walker Lake, the level of which has fallen more than 181 feet over the last 139 years, causing the extirpation of the Lahontan cutthroat trout. The nearby Walker River Paiute tribe — the Agai-Dicutta Numu, trout eaters — can no longer fish for their namesake.
The piñon pine are still being destroyed, too — this time under the guise of “restoration.” Myron Dewey, who I mentioned earlier, and many others, have long been fighting to protect the “tubape” pine nut trees.
And the war footing remains as well. The largest ammunition depot in the word, the Hawthorne Army Depot, sprawls across 226 square miles just south of Walker Lake.
Back here at Thacker Pass, the same Lahontan cutthroat trout (a federally listed threatened species) hang on in nearby Pole Creek. Will they survive the mine? Or will their creek shrink smaller and smaller as the water table drops, eventually leaving them with nothing? I cannot help but feel there are similarities between the experience of the Paiutes — land stolen, waters destroyed, marched to reservations — and the trout. Perhaps Wewa would agree with a Dakota friend, who told me “I am part of the land; what happens to the land happens to me.”
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The 1872 mining law is law under which Lithium Americas Corp. has “claimed” the land here Thacker Pass, under which they have been permitted to destroy this place. A one hundred- and fifty-year-old law, a legal justification for colonial extraction, a law created to make extraction orderly. That is the legal authority which Lithium Americas claims.
In September of 2019, the Inter-Tribal Council of Nevada, which is made up of 27 tribal, band, and community councils from the Western Shoshone, Goshute, Washoe, and Northern and Southern Paiute nations passed a resolution, which called for reform of the 1872 mining law. The resolution states that “the Great Basin tribes believe the 1872 Mining Law poses a serious threat to the Great Basin tribes land, water, cultural resources, traditional properties, and lifeways.”
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I circle back to that name: Thacker Pass. “Who was Thacker,” I wonder, watching the first Dark-eyed Junco of the spring migration flit from sagebrush to ground.
Basic research found nothing, so I called the Nevada Historical Society and the Humboldt County Museum, and started combing through archives looking for prominent people named ‘Thacker’ in the history of the state and of Humboldt County. Digging through old copies of the Reno Evening Gazette, I find a match: John N. Thacker, who was elected sheriff of Humboldt County on November 3rd, 1868, and held the post for many years before becoming the head of the detective service for the Southern Pacific Company and Wells Fargo express through the 1870’s and into the 1880’s.
Thacker was an enforcer and lawman in the Wild West of train robberies and outlaws hiding in canyons — and the laws he enforced were in large part designed to protect the mining industry. Throughout the late 1800’s, Nevada mines produced an incredible amount of wealth – the equivalent of billions of dollars annually. Gold and silver from the mines were transported by stagecoach and train by well-paid mining and banking employees, and this made a tempting target for thieves. Thacker had at least one shootout with bandits who had absconded into the hills.
In other words, Thacker acted as a protector of mining revenues and an economy based on colonial mining. He worked for the state, the bankers, and the railroad company – the trifecta of institutions creating the conditions for mining to thrive, financing mining projects, and moving ore and raw materials to bigger markets. And, of course, profiting handsomely.
Many people forget the importance of railroads in this era before paved roads. The first transcontinental railroad passed through Winnemucca, operated by Southern Pacific. As Richard White writes in his book Railroaded, the massive land grants given to railroad companies — a total of more than 175 million acres between 1850 to 1871, more than 10 percent of the land mass of the United States — and easy transportation of both people and goods kicked off a massive influx of settler-colonialism to the interior of the American west.
Railroad companies were notorious in this period for corruption, environmental devastation, and mistreatment of workers. Interestingly, Southern Pacific was the defendant in a landmark 1886 Supreme Court case that massively extended the power of corporations in the United States. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, Thacker’s employer successfully argued that the Fourteenth Amendment – originally established to protect formerly enslaved people in the aftermath of the Civil War – also applied to so-called “corporate persons,” striking down various regulations that would have reigned in their power in the West.
Since this unanimous decision, corporations have relied heavily on the Fourteenth Amendment for protection from the public. As my friend and attorney Will Falk writes, “between 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and 1912, the Supreme Court ruled on only 28 cases involving the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases on the rights of corporations, it is easy to conclude that the Fourteenth Amendment has done a better job protecting the rights of corporations than that of African Americans.”
Dana Toth at the Humboldt County Museum helps solve the rest of the mystery: an 1871 newspaper shows that John Thacker owned a 160-acre ranch in the King’s River Valley, just to the west of Thacker Pass. That is most likely the origin of the name Thacker Pass.
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A cold north wind has been blowing all morning at Thacker Pass. It was 16 degrees this morning, without the wind chill. The frigid air bites my fingertips and my nose. Our banners flap in the breeze.
And at the headquarters of Lithium Americas Corporation at 300-900 West Hastings Street in Vancouver, Canada, men and women plan how to blow this place up, to shatter the mountainside, to crush the wild integrity of this place under churning bulldozer treads, and turn it into money.
I look out across a landscape named after a man named John Thacker, a man who worked to protect mining industry profits for decades, and I cannot help but feel that not much has changed. Like in the 1850’s and 1860’s, men with explosives, backed by the armed power of the state, are coming to destroy the mountains, the sagebrush steppe, the grasslands, and the waters of Thacker Pass.
What value is there in history, except in guiding our thoughts and actions in the present? As Barbara Ehrenreich writes, “To know our history is to begin to see how to take up the struggle again.”
A beautfiul description of Thacker Pass by Will Falk | Feb 7, 2021
If you look across Thacker Pass from the shoulders of the Montana mountains, the land looks like a quilt the Double-H mountains in the south pulled up to their chin to keep warm during the cold winter nights. The hills that roll towards the valley floor are checkered with patterns. Much of the quilt, where the old-growth sagebrush persists, is an unbroken viridescent pattern. On the edges of the sagebrush, flaxen, rectangular patches of invasive grasses have sprung up from the wreckage created by the Bureau of Land Management’s clear-cutting chains. Separating the green and yellow patches, are lines of muddy brown where dirt roads have been built.
In places – my favorite places – the quilt bunches up into folds.
Those folds conceal nooks, crannies, alcoves, and cubbyholes where pygmy rabbits hide from prairie falcons, pronghorn antelope hide from rifle scopes, and I hide from the wind, sun, and the near-impossibility of stopping Lithium Americas’ open pit lithium mine.
Max and I received a second 24-hour notice to vacate Thacker Pass from BLM and the other lawyers we’ve been working with strongly advised us to heed this notice. They warned us that, if we were arrested, a federal judge would likely only release us from jail on the condition that we not return to Thacker Pass. If a judge released us on these conditions, to return to Thacker Pass would risk another arrest and more criminal charges filed against us. If we were arrested a second time, a judge would likely keep us incarcerated until the criminal charges filed against us were resolved.
We decided that being arrested when construction was not immediately imminent was not strategic – especially if it meant keeping us permanently away from Thacker Pass. Meanwhile, reinforcements had arrived who could hold down the occupation site and ensure a continuous presence at Thacker Pass. So, we decided it would be a good time to take a few days to shower and do some laundry.
The afternoon before we had to leave, I wandered down into Thacker Pass’ deepest refuge, into the rolling sagebrush hills that form the warmest section of the quilt – the same rolling hills, the same section of the quilt that will be ripped out for an open pit mine if Lithium Americas has its way.
But, I found no refuge there.
I took a dirt road still covered with the kind of old snow that preserves animal tracks the best. Rabbits, mice, kangaroo rats, sage grouses, red foxes, and coyotes had all found this dirt road useful before me. Seeing my clumsy, heavy boot tracks next to the artwork these creatures created with their feet embarrassed me. Every twenty yards or so, I stopped to study the tracks and to visualize the animal who had left them. When I saw rabbit and coyote tracks converge in the crimson of blood spilled over the cream of snow, the voices of coyotes a few hills away protested my voyeurism. Sacred predation, they insisted, is an intimate thing.
As I wandered, I tried to imagine what it would feel like if a member of each of the species represented by the tracks in the snow walked with me – shoulder to shoulder – to a grand, interspecies council organized to discuss how to stop the mine.
I came at last to the edge of an area that had been cleared for one of Lithium Americas’ exploratory water wells. The tracks disappeared before the clearing surrounding the well. The sagebrush seemed suspicious. The mud that squelched under my boots, upon determining the species my track belonged to, was eager to spit my feet out. I couldn’t blame the sagebrush or the mud. The last humans who had walked here were probably the same humans who bored a hole deep into the earth to learn how much water they could pump up from the earth and how many poisons they could pump down from the mine.
As I faced the sagebrush, they appeared to expect something from me. At first, I did not know what. Then, the harsh sounds of a heavy truck straining to haul a back-hoe up Highway 293, about a quarter-mile from where I stood, shattered the silence. The sage branches quivered. They trembled with fear.
It made me wonder: If sagebrush fear the trucks, do they know what Lithium Americas plans to do?
I began to narrate my premonitions. I saw a future where a line of trucks stretched for miles from Thacker Pass down Highway 293, east towards Orovada. The trucks screamed and screeched as they heaved back-hoes, excavators, tractors, and loads of the sulfuric acid needed to burn lithium from the earth. The air was thick with diesel exhaust. The ground shook as the machines thundered over the hills. Rabbits, mice, and rats scampered west out of the Pass through sagebrush roots only to find a new land already cleared for the hay fields in King’s Valley.
The activity so stressed a golden eagle mother that the eggshell surrounding her baby cracked prematurely because it was too thinly formed. Sage grouse awkwardly leapt from the valley floor towards the foothills, but they starved to death when they could not find enough habitat on the heights. Local coyotes – ever the survivors – howled at the horror of it all, tucked their tails, and, slunk over the ridgelines wondering when the new, pale humans would learn to listen to their trickster lessons.
The vision faded and I was left looking at the sagebrush that had gathered around me to listen to the terror I predicted. I second-guessed my decision to tell them. Perhaps it would have been best to let them enjoy the time they have left, I thought. Ignorance is bliss, after all.
As I faced those plants who I had just warned about the destruction that was coming, I wanted to run all the way back up the road to where my car was parked and drive as far away from Thacker Pass and the likelihood of her destruction as possible.
But, I didn’t run. I couldn’t run.
I don’t know if it was my own sense of honor or the mud sucking my feet into Thacker Pass that prevented me from fleeing. Finally, I asked aloud: “What do you need me to do?”
In response, my body turned wooden. My limbs became rigid. The hair on my arms and legs stood up like leaves drinking in the sun. I felt the machines through my roots first. My toes and fingers clinched at clumps of twitching soil. I felt vibrations through the bark that became my skin. Something big – bigger than anything I knew existed – was coming my way.
Then, I tasted the screams of my relatives on the breeze and through the root networks. They came as chemical messages – what scientists call “the release of volatile organic compounds” – that my sagebrush kin send through their communities when they are wounded. The screams were distant – just a trickle, at first. I started drinking different minerals to try to change my chemical composition to make myself displeasing to whoever was eating my family. But, then the shrieks saturated my surroundings. I frantically searched for new minerals, dug for deeper waters, and synthesized as much light as I could to create the strongest terpenoid compounds and volatile oils that I had used to protect myself before.
The chemical screams were being drowned out by the approaching, mechanical thunder.
I wished I was as fast as the pronghorn who sometimes browsed my branches. There was a moment when the thunder was strongest, the wind stopped, and the sun failed.
My legs cracked, my arms snapped, and the ripping began. My insides tore apart in a series of pops. I tried to grip the earth with the roots I had left but the dirt slipped through my grasp. With one final pop, everything went blank. There were no more minerals to taste. No sunlight to absorb. No water to drink. And, the chemical screams fell silent.
Back in my human body and soaking with sweat despite the cold temperature, I found myself clawing at my own guts as if they really had been torn out. When the wind mercifully blew this horror away, I found myself face-to-face again with the sagebrush.
In this latest video from Thacker Pass, Max explains why he is protesting against lithium mining for the so called green energy.
Featured image: Pygmy rabbit by Travis London
The small Pygmy rabbit is Thacker pass and Thacker Pass is Pygmy rabbits. This small rabbit is a target of many predators at Thacker Pass. The rabbits find their refuge in the form of the sagebrush plant or in the burrows that it makes in deep, soft soil. Much like the sage grouse, the pygmy rabbit relies on sagebrush not only for protection but for more than 90%. of its diet. The pygmy rabbit requires large expanses of uninterrupted shrub-steppe habitat. Unfortunately, right now the pygmy rabbit faces many threats. Conversion of indispensable sagebrush meadows for agriculture and development for oil and natural gas extraction, and now the lithium boom, are depleting an already fragile ecosystem. One more reason to resist.
For the past 25 days, there has been a protest camp set up behind me, right out here. This place is called Thacker Pass, in Northern Nevada, traditional territory of the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshoni.
This area here is the proposed site of an open pit lithium mine, a massive strip mine that will turn everything into a heavily industrialized zone.
This site, right now, is an incredibly biodiverse Sagebrush habitat. There are Sagebrush plants over a hundred years olds, cause it’s oldgrowth Sage. There’s Sage-Grouse. This is part of the most important Sage-Grouse population left in the entire state, Around 5-8 percent of the entire global population of Sage-Grouse live right here.
This is a migratory corridor of Pronghorn. One of the members of the occupation saw about 55 Pronghorns in an area that would be destroyed for the open pit mine.
There are Golden Eagles here, multiple nesting pairs. We’ve seen them circling over head. We’ve seen their mating flights, getting ready to lay their eggs in the spring.
There are Pygmy Rabbits here. There are Burrowing Owls. There are Gopher Snakes and Rattle Snakes. There’s Rabbit Brush. There’s Jack Rabbit.
There’s Paragon Falcon, or actually the desert variant of the Paragon Falcon, what’s known as the Prairie Falcon.
There are Mule Deer. We see them feeding up on these hills. There are Ringtail living behind this cliff behind me. There are Red Foxes. There are Kangaroo Mice. There are an incredible variety of creatures that live here. Many of whom I don’t know their names.
All this is under threat to create to create an open pit mine for lithium. To mine lithium for electric car batteries, and for grid energy storage to power these “green energy” transitions.
I’m not a fan of fossil fuels.
I’m not a promoter of fossil fuels. I’ve taken direct action for many years against fossil fuels. I’ve fought tarsands in Canada. I’ve fought tarsands pipelines in the US. I’ve fought natural gas pipelines, methane pipelines. I’ve stood on front of heavy equipment to block tar sands and fossil fuel mining in Utah. I’ve stood in front of coal trains to stop them from moving forward, to try and blockade the industry. I’ve fought the fossil fuel industry for many many years and will continue to do so.
What we need to recognize that the so called green energy transition that is being promoted is not a real solution. That’s why we’re out on the land. This is the place that is at stake right now. This is the place that is up to be sacrificed for the sake of this so-called green energy.
It was about a 175 years ago that the colonization of this region really began in earnest. That was when the first European settlers started coming across in Nevada. really setting up shops out here, in the mid-1800s. They mostly came for mineral wealth. They came for the gold, the silver. They came for mining. Nevada has been a mining state from the very beginning, and mining still controls the state.
I’ve spoken with some of my Shoshoni friends, my Goshute friends about the history of this: the invasion for mining. What happened was, the settlers came and they forced the indigenous population onto reservation. And they cut down the Juniper trees and the Pinyon pine trees. These were the main sources of medicine and food for many of the Great Basin Indigenous Peoples. I’ve heard it said that the Pinyon pines were like the Buffaloes to the Indigenous People out here.
Just like in the Great Plains, the settlers destroyed the food supply of the indigenous people. They forced them to participate into colonial economy using this violence. They forced them to participate in the capitalist system, in the mining system, in the ranching system. People were going to starve otherwise.
What happened in the mid 1800s was that men with guns came for the mountains. They started digging them out, blowing them up, turning mountains into money, carding that money away, and leaving behind a wasteland. That’s what’s been happening in Nevada ever since. It hasn’t stopped. That’s what we’re gonna see here unless it’s stopped.
The Lithium Americas Corporation, Canadian mining company that wants to build this mine: they raised 400 million dollars in one day a few weeks ago to try and build this mine.
Meanwhile the grassroots struggles to raise a few hundred dollars to help support people coming out here, camping, getting supplies, getting things we need, the travel to get people here. The camp is about a mile or mile and a half from here. There’s about seven or eight people out there.
We need more people to come out to camp. We need people to join us, to draw the line, to hold the line against this mining project.
It’s not just about this project here. I was at a panel discussion recently with some folks from the Andean Altiplano, what’s called the lithium triangle in South America. Argentina, Bolivia and Chile have this high desert region where the three countries meet. It contains about half the world’s lithium reserves. Lithium mining has been going on there for decades and it’s left behind a wasteland.
Indigenous People have been kicked out of their land. They’ve been dispossessed. Their lands have been poisoned. Their water has been taken.
Water usage is one of the major issues there, because it’s an extremely dry place, just like here. Nevada is the driest state in the US. And they wanna pump 1.4 billion gallons of water and use it to refine the lithium into its final product. 1.4 billion gallons a year.
The Queen River in the valley is already dry. The water’s already being overused.
You go back 200 years and there would be water there. There would be beaver dams. There would be fish. There would be wildlife in abundance.
This land is already in an degraded state compared to where it used to be, compared to where it needs to be.
The atrocities associated with this mine go on and on. This is an important cultural site for the Indigenous People of this region. This has been a travel corridor, through what’s now called Thacker Pass for thousands and thousands of years, an important gathering side. If you walk across this land, there’s obsidian everywhere across the ground. There’s all kind of flakes on the other sides of valleys, where indigenous people would gather obsidian and use it to make tools
This has been an important place for thousands of years.
Shoshoni signed a treaty, but they never ceded their land to the United States.
This is unceded land.
The Western Shoshoni never gave away their land. The US does not have legal title to this land. And the US government rejects that. They have appropriated something like a 175 million dollars, and set it aside to give it to the Western Shoshoni, if they will agree that the land was given to the United States. The Western Shoshoni has said “No. We won’t take your money. We want the land.” They have been fighting this fight for decades.
This is unceded territory. This land does not belong to the Bureau of Land Management. This land does not belong to the federal government.
This land belongs to the inhabitants of this land, people whose ancestors are in the soil. I don’t just mean humans. This land belongs to the Sagebrush, and the Pygmy Rabbits, and all those who have
Why don’t their voices get a say? Why don’t we take their preferences into account? What do you think they would say if we ask them, “Can we blow this place up?”
If Lithium America showed up and sincerely asked the Burrowing Owls, and the Sage-Grouse, and the Coyotes, and the Pronghorn Antelopes, “Can we blow up your home? Can we blow it up? Can we turn it into dust? Can we bathe the ground in sulfuric acid to extract this lithium which we’ll take away and make people rich, leaving behind a wasteland? Do we have your permission to do this?”
What do you think the land will say? What do you think the inhabitants will say? Do you think they will say it’s green? Do you think they’ll say:
“This is how you save the planet, by destroying our home?”
I think this is an important issue, not just because of what’s happening here, but because of what it means. Because of what it symbolizes.
When I was a young person, I was very concerned about what was happening to the planet. I was very concerned about the ecological crisis: the rainforest being chopped down, global warming, ocean acidification, the hole in the ozone layer.
I care about these things. I’ve cared about them ever since I was a little kid.
It’s hard to be a human being and have a heart, and not care about it unless you’re broken in some way.
I wanted to figure out what could be done. So I started reading about these issues. And of course what I was taught from a very young age was that solar panels and electric cars were going to save the world. That’s what I learned. That’s what the green media taught me. They taught me implicitly it’s okay to sacrifice places like this. They taught me it’s okay to sacrifice places like this if it means we can have electric cars instead of fossil fuel cars.
We don’t need cars at all. That’s the thing. And this is a hard message for people to hear because people don’t want to be told No. We’re not used to being told No in this culture. You can’t have that. It’s not okay for us to continue in this way.
We’re not used to this message. We’re used to getting whatever we want, whenever we want it.
That’s for the most part across the board. The average person in the American society lives with the energy equivalent of a hundred slaves. We live a life of luxury, like we had a hundred slaves working for us for twenty four hours.
That’s what the fossil fuel has brought to the modern era. That’s what this energy glut has brought to us. This mindset that we could have whatever we want, whenever we want. That’s something we need to get over. That’s something we need to change.
For the past five or six years, I was working on a book called Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost It’s Way and What We Can Do About It. My co-authors and I, in this book, really dive into these problems with details of the so-called green technology in great details. Things like solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, energy storage, batteries.
Not only these things, but a lots of the other “solutions” that are accepted as dogma in the environmental movement, like dense urbanization. We debunk these things in the book. These things are not going to save this planet. We can’t get around the problems we have found ourselves in.
We’re in a conundrum. This culture has dug itself into a very deep hole.
A lot is going to need to change, before we find ourselves in any resemblance of sustainability, of sanity, of justice, of living in a good way.
Earlier, I came around the corner in the mountains, and it felt like a punch in the gut because I had the premonition of no longer seeing this swab, this rolling expanse of old-growth Sagebrush, but of seeing an open pit. Seeing a mountain of tailings, of minewaste, of toxified soil. I had the premonition of seeing a gigantic sulfuric acid plant and processing facilities all through what is now wild. Where the Foxes run, where the Snakes slither between the Sagebrush, where the Golden Eagles wheel overhead.
That’s why I’m here to fight. I don’t want to see this turn into an industrial wasteland.
I don’t think many of us do. I think a lot of people are befuddled and confused by all these bright green lies. A lot of people buy into this crap. But a lot of people don’t. A lot of people understand that we need to scale down. A lot of people understand that we need to reduce our energy consumption, that we need to degrow the economy. That the latest and greatest industrial technology isn’t going to save us, magically.
This isn’t a tooth fairy situation, where electric cars will appear under our pillows and save the day. A lot of people understand this. That’s why for me, a big part of the battle is not education. A big part of the battle is power. A big part of the battle is actually stopping them.
First Voices Indigenous Radio host Tiokasin Ghosthorse interviewed Max Wilbert about the occupation of a proposed mine in northern Nevada. Lithium Americas corporation plans to rip open 5,000 acres of this land to extract lithium for consumer products.
Campers are hiking and gathering around a fire. Some visit with Cody and Cloud the wolf brothers. I again sing the wolf song. I spoke to Blackfeet Holy Man on the phone. Blackfeet had the largest traditional home range in this side of Turtle Island even larger than the Paiute. I am Blackfeet on my father’s side. The Holy Man reminded me that our spiritual efforts to protect bears and wolves are becoming law in some places.
Change? Efforts to appease us? Progress? Crumbs.
We’re going all the way. Even beyond sovereignty. Decolonization.
I am “police” warrior society and we will have to ultimately enforce those Ideals that become law such as the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 because nobody else will enforce it. We may have to enforce indigenous law with the war club again one day. Will we get grizzly bears reintroduced into the northern cascades and other places?
How wild can we get?
Sitting here in what would have been wolf habitat before colonists made them extinct in 1953 watching the sun reflect brilliantly off the side of a mountain. Later I sing a peyote song. Focus. Healing. Waiting for the descendants of Chief Paulina the renegade chief to rise up again. But they were decimated to 38 members. Waiting for root and bannock people. Bison n rice people posted up a little longer. Tobacco is placed on the alter near the golden eagle carving.
A.I.M WE’RE STILL HERE! Golden Eagles > lithium mines. Until we have #RedPower and control over our own destinies on our own land we will have to watch everything we love die.
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