“Men understood what it is to be in a war and you gotta’ be armed. Women don’t have that knowledge.” – Phyllis Chesler.
. . .
“But humour, after all, in patriarchy, is just seeing the way things are, you don’t have to try.[…]Meanwhile rape increases out there, the destruction of the environment increases out there, in here, but women are dealing and dealing. And think of the consequence of the therapeutic[. W]hat happens is objectification of the speaker[. I]nstead of real passion, they offer plastic passion.[…]When I feel passion, I feel: Love, for example, Joy, Sorrow, Rage, Hope, Despair. These are passions that are real. I name them, they have an object; they have an agent or a cause, right? You enrage me[. H]e did this and I hate it; I’m enraged at him, at them, etcetera. You can name the agent with real passions. Now, consider the plastic passions of therapy. You know, I see them as floating blobs, sort of bubbles. There’s never any cause out there. If there’s any problem it’s you. You have to deal with it, this blob that’s floating around. For example depression: depression, I suggest, is a man-made passion. I don’t think we have it. I just think[: ‘]Oh, I’m feeling depressed today. You see, I had familia for breakfast and . . . and I just can’t seem to get my shit together.’” – Mary Daly
. . .
Part of being effective in an organization is knowing where you belong in it. What are you good at?
For my part, I cannot say my strength is organizing others, but spectacle and argument in the most political sense. That doesn’t let me off the hook for trying to organize, which I do also, it just means that trajectory is best served by interest and aptitude. Recently, it was pointed out that my interest in male violence and environmental destruction is concerning from the outside. How many hours a week do I spend investigating all the crazy? I didn’t know. Okay, 80 hours+ is an unhealthy lacks balance, maybe I can scale it back. My experience in Policy Debate, was seasoned by a life where argument was an impassioned, often dangerous risk. As far back as I can remember, any serious discussion, of any kind, has been accompanied by a body reaction wherein I shake and weep. It does not impair my ability to listen or argue, but it does happen every time; I know why, it is non-negotiable. My body can be understood and interpreted, but not overridden.
Coming into the tournament practice of three hour debates was something I had stamina for. Success was a direct benefit of being able to ‘spar’ in a way that risked so little as to allow for the development of skill. Now, I know how to be an effective agitator. Which brings me to twitter. Last year was my first to really experience a social-medial platform, largely where public policy and debate have moved. Although it has proven to be a uniquely valuable resource, it was designed to be addictive to its traumatized product: the users. It is enemy territory.
There are specific reasons for entering that are a danger to forget.
It was not a place to move my real friendships into; it was a place to find strangers; it’s a place where the ethos is: fight me. These are sparring partners. From the insulated attempts at consciousness raising done here spring the people we don’t know we deal with every day: who mandate the policy of our lived lives by each interaction. From the ethereal melting pots of YouTube, and now twitter, I found common allies with the natural world and moved those relationships into physical reality. So many organizations awaited, about which I would otherwise have no awareness. Glad is not the right word, but I do not regret the time I have spent there, learning about who we have become.
If debate taught me anything, it’s that the person with the most evidence wins; and here we get to the messy stuff. On what grounds is truth provable if not by the self-evident nature of itself? We try definitions. Sometimes that doesn’t work. Why not? Why does the power of naming need to be as individuated as experience? Does it? What power do I have to name if I am not bothering to brave the conversation with people I don’t agree with, in places I don’t like?
Usually, if I see unironic pronouns in someone’s bio, it doesn’t matter how hilarious their tweet was, I cannot bring myself to follow them. Nowhere on my list of things to do today is getting doxxed by a misogynist; I’m busy. Monika Lewinsky gets a pass, because the thing is, it does matter what happens to our collective minds. Bean Dad doesn’t have a name anymore. His life is different now, because of a collective of people. Someone had retweeted a particularly vile passage saying, “this is psychotic behavior.” I thought, “Oh yeah?” and read all the way down. All the comments. Down to the bottom.
It was impossible to look away because it was a spectacle.
Some childless fathers outed themselves and everyone else – including all the colourful pronoun people and the radical feminists and the right-wing housewives and the left-wing teachers – we all came together and said “no”. It felt good because, psychotic, evil, psychopathic or complicit, we all know what wrong is, but also because the platform is addictive and fighting is a rush. It is an affront to need to fight, to feel a boundary violated (as anger induction has brilliantly been identified). It feels good to make it stop, to make it right, to fight back. To say no.
But it feels better to say yes and mean it. Strife is complex. The complexity is ever compounded by the emergent nature of life and time. What is going on between the living planet and industrial civilization may not be rightly classified as war until effective resistance has been established to fight back. While it closely resembles many things termed ‘war’ in the recent past, it is industrial civilization acting upon: destroying the living planet, while the living planet continues to provide industrial civilization with the capacity to do so. What do we call this? I am not the first to appreciate the parallel here to battery. We are, as Earthlings, wild things, born into enemy territory.
Industrial civilization has changed every landscape.
There has to be some calm, radiant center from which no strife emerges, a source of real Joy, some benevolence in which to thrive for survival to be worth it. Retreat into the ethereal is one psychological strategy, when even the body is colonized. Retreat into identity politics or lifestyle activism or isolated, survivalist enclaves may serve, for those afforded it. Always, always this escape, this endless exploration of colonized frontiers to flee. What if we weren’t afraid to say that we have real, physical enemies that we could defeat? What would that change? Inside such a whirlwind, it can be difficult to negotiate all the feelings alone and impossible to relate, if thoughts and feelings are able to condense enough to crystallize, with so many of the necessary terms made forbidden as negative or even the ignorance with which we all come to new terrain.
Why not start with hate? Who hasn’t heard that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it is indifference? Bullshit. Men don’t make torture porn of appliances. Love has never been required for the avalanche of revulsion and Rage that I understand as the experience of hating someone. They are not a food that just hasn’t grown on me. I don’t merely dislike them. It most often precluded any chance of love. How can I – why should I pretend to anyone that I have not felt this way, that, if so confronted with a gross boundary violation, I should not feel this way? What does it mean when someone hates back? Is it speak-able? Is it different somehow? How? I think about what it has taken for me to be able to say, “fight me,” and not mean ‘I hate you’: for disagreement to be a reason to engage, rather than refuse to listen or share, to neither presume to be the final arbiter of reality, nor assume bad faith, but to risk a little; or, to say, “hate me,” and mean it: to be able to withstand someone. Practice helps.
Better yet, Rage.
I think the reason Rage is so vilified is that, like Fear, it is no longer a personal experience, but a collective, spiritual, chemical one. The Fear. The Rage. Possessions of a sort: coming from somewhere, there for a reason and eventually something else’s food. When I feel Rage, I feel it overtake me. Often, I lose vision, or it darkens and pinpoints. I say things in a loud, clear voice that I do not remember after. I cannot hear the voices of strangers. When it breaks, it is like a disrupted spell. I shake afterwards. Rage has done heroic things through me, but with a steep tax.
Much like Fear, it is not because, in my subconscious, I am my own oppressor and I just need to love myself enough to love others. It is about pain aversion, death aversion; it is because our inner, ancient brain has signaled that there is a legitimate threat it does not find itself capable of matching right off. It is my amygdala saying “get out now”. That is not to suggest these states are incapable of being distorted into paralysis or unjudicious application, or that they are without their own character and momentum.
Rage can be blind, and has done less than heroic things through me.
Having an enemy is a hard thing to admit when the stronger urge is to give as the Earth does, to love as mothers do, but that doesn’t stop them from existing. Mothers know what to do when their children are threatened. The Earth becomes less generous daily. Having an enemy does change you; it draws out characteristics capable of matching the things our amygdala tells us are scary. That biology developed to address periodic threats, but not to run all day every day; we are supposed to change back. To resist, to truly stand our ground, we must know where we are. Not who we think, but what is functional, where we physically are. That is in our bodies, as part of the land. That is the territory from which we can no longer afford to retreat. Our visions of ourselves will change as arguments move through us. Truth, the singular, is something we will catch glimpses of and try to piece together. Doing that as a collective is language.
We cannot be punished out of or persuaded into what we observe. We can only listen as we are able and share with those who’ll listen. Conversationally. Physically, to resist takes good health: strength, endurance and flexibility. Fighting is a tough one. Having been in fights, I don’t get ideological about this. Being in a fight is a physical experience, different than sparring, horsing around, different from heated discourse. Once in a fight, verbal or physical, it’s almost got its own world. Inter-dimensionality makes so much sense in fights. Everything is distorted, sharp and slow. Waves of fight wash in an ebb, leaving tired, heaving creatures who want to slink off and lick wounds but aren’t sure if it’s done yet. It is very important to pick your enemies and your battles. I say this because I need to hear it. Who is really prepared to have a conversation about something, and who is a drone? Who is a dangerous drone: know when to walk away; know when to run. Practice helps, but practice sucks and is expensive.
When I think about The Sorrow of war, and of warriors, I do not pathologize it.
Sorrow is not a sickness or a pastime of the feeble. Sorrow is the reasonable expression of experiencing loss and pain. To be forbidden the experience of our own grieving stifles our health and ability to heal. You feel your own real feelings all day. I say to me. Being emotionally resilient cannot mean repression, which only putrefies whatever is being buried, but a capacity to be uncomfortable, to reflect and change.
In the service of making Sorrow an illness, the language of ‘internalization versus externalization’ and of ‘self-esteem’ or ‘self-loathing’ has emerged to replace the terms ‘oppressed versus oppressor’ and ‘trust in others to listen’ or ‘desire to cease pain’. Fuck ‘em. Do you. Healing requires a nurturing environment, with the cause of harm removed, wherein you are not forced to react to villainy. That is not universally afforded to everyone. To whatever extent you can, balance between the work against and the work for. That ‘for’ is you too: your Joy, your Love, which all dies with you, or before, if it is not nurtured, lived and shared. Once hurt, healing takes time and can hurt more than the injury. Take your time. Feel your pain. Heal. Remember.
When The Bards used satire, they deposed kings.
They would only ever use satire for this reason and only when absolutely necessary. What kind of power is that? The remaining shadow of this tradition, in lore, is the Jester: the only court member who can get away with telling the truth. What kind of power is it when the king doesn’t get your jokes, but the rest of the court does and they do nothing? When Machiavelli wrote The Prince, he did it as a work of satire. Today his name is synonymous with authoritarianism as a ruling strategy. What power is it when no one gets your jokes? Theory is important, but action more so. As our actions are stifled, so our thoughts about potential actions. How to get free? Together. While spectacle might hold attention, only collaborative, permeable theory has the strength to make action inevitable, even desirable by far over the alternative: that we will continue to degenerate into increasingly stratified cybernetic zombies until we drive to extinction every last Earthly biome. What power?
Unfortunately, the sociopathic and necrophilic are better at war; unclouded and unbothered by the ramifications, those traits are designed to win wars. Clinical psychopathy was previously thought to be rare. Now, the very structure of modernity demands sociopathy as a baseline business model while the vast, common traumas of peoples’ personal lives are made unspeakable and left to fester. That is a recipe for a populace physically incapable of empathy on a massive scale.
So, back to being part of something worthwhile:
can there be legitimate honour in some twitter feeding frenzy? Where does honorable conduct live? What does empathy feel like when the person across from you has none? Are they an enemy? How to keep from catching? How to know? Without the capacity to feel shame: to know when we have done wrong, used The Rage unjudiciously, been paralyzed when we should have acted, or nursed an addiction, we would have no sense of our accomplishments. Workaholism has not delivered The Joy of accomplishment like pornography does not deliver The Joy of relationships. Maybe integrity is not something we are born with or into, but something slowly earned by learning to recognize its absence. Without the capacity to feel that vacuum, we wouldn’t have sought.
Joy guides. In shared pleasure, laughter, play, in being among beloved, I learn the codes of social conduct from people who can say, “fight me,” and mean ‘I love you’. Without the capacity to reflect, in discomfort, we cannot recognize patterns. Bean Dad is not my friend, but he is not my real enemy either. That flash community dispersed and the Earth remains largely undefended.
After switching from Debate, to Drama, then Humour, and then Duo, I tried Poetry.
If the performance arts taught me anything, it’s to know your audience. The judges didn’t care who was right, who had the evidence, whose argument was impenetrable, they wanted you to make them cry, and they wanted to love you. It helped if you made them laugh, but they had to want to see you at finals: you couldn’t bore them. The best way to do that was not universal, but that is, nearly universally, the way people judge.
Gloria Steinham’s work wasn’t popular because she was the best writer in the second wave, but because she was able to infiltrate male exploitation of poor women with her beauty and expose it to the middle class. Andrea Dworkin’s work wasn’t unspeakable. She spoke it; it was unhearable because she shouted it in overalls, with a big mouth and crazy hair. They were the spectacle. Not because they wanted to be, not because they particularly enjoyed the attention, but because they were women. What they had to say barely got through the endless attention given to their appearances. Because they were women: without the spectacle, we wouldn’t have even that much.
Marry Harris Jones wasn’t ‘The Most Dangerous Woman in America,’ at 83 years old, because she organized people, although she did that also, but because she put people to shame.
Her power was in stamina. My power will never be in being a body in the street, although I do that also, but in being one of many, in the sheer amount of evidence collected, in being able to illustrate an argument that can stand for itself, in knowing an audience well enough to make sure that they can hear it, in remembering our place in the Earthly legacy of women this side of the burnings.
My place is to float away alongside them, like ash, when my time comes, to forfeit all my names back into dust and droplets. Until then, I will fight and convalesce and it will mean ‘I love you’.
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
The system is fucked-up. If you are reading this, you probably know this already. You’re here because you know how fucked-up the system is. You know that it is based on the oppression of humans, nonhumans and the entire planet. You know that we need to fight this system, that we need to resist it with all we have. You may already be doing that anyway. I’m going to share some of the ways that I have resisted.
Resistance requires courage.
Resistance means standing up for what is right. It requires the willingness to go against an enemy so powerful that defeat seems inevitable. Sometimes, it may even require standing up to your loved ones. The majority of human beings, including our loved ones and even ourselves, are indoctrinated into this human supremacist, male supremacist, white supremacist culture that hates life. Anyone who dares to go against this culture is likely to be attacked on many levels, emotionally, socially, financially, or even physically. I’m sure many of us have faced this. I’ve faced such attacks for refusing to go along with mindless consumerism, for providing a radical view among non-political groups, and for refusing to conform to the dominant narrative. I have been coaxed, harassed, or threatened into submission. Regrettably, a few of these attacks have been successful. They serve to remind us how powerful the dominant system is, and how much of courage it requires to stand up against it.
Resistance means being prepared.
The system does not serve anyone. It is inherently flawed. Usually, these flaws are covered up by conveniences such as 24-hour electricity, hot water flowing out of a faucet, or the ability to instantly connect with anyone. The genocide and slavery that continues to go into making all this possible is well hidden. However, there are times when the injustices of the system become apparent, times when inherent flaws cannot be hidden anymore. The failure of the global supply chain during the initial parts of the lockdown is one example.
Everyday examples include extreme cases of violence against a person of an oppressed group, especially when the violence cannot be deemed to serve anyone. These incidences open up discussion about systemic flaws, and may lead to structural changes, for better or worse. Resistance means being prepared to notice and utilise such situations, to highlight the flaws within the system, and to direct the momentum for positive changes.
Resistance should also be strategic.
It means considering the best and the most effective means to achieve one’s goals. We are up against a system that has far more resources and more power at its disposal. We cannot be prodigal on our use of time and energy. Sometimes, this means backing off from a fight. It is not possible to win every argument, every legal case, every fight against the system. Effective resistance requires us to identify the fights that are worth spending our limited time and energy on.
Resistance comes in different forms.
Regardless of the nuances in our political ideologies, or the differences in our life situations, there are many ways to resist the system. For me, fighting for my right to planned parenthood is a form of resistance. For a woman who has submitted to patriarchy all her life, fighting against her family’s pressures to abort her daughter is resistance. Every form of resistance against this culture should be welcomed.
I believe Derrick Jensen could not be any clearer when he says:
“The good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look there is great work to be done.”
Salonika is an organizer at DGR Asia Pacific and is based in Nepal. She believes that the needs of the natural world should trump the needs of the industrial civilization.
“Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat an enemy without too much bloodshed and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed; war is such a dangerous business that the mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.”
“In practice, we always base our preparations against an enemy on the assumption that his plans are good; indeed, it is right to rest our hopes not on a belief in his blunders, but on the soundness of our provisions. Nor ought we to believe that there is much difference between man and man, but to think that the superiority lies with him who is reared in the severest school.”
Ordinary Americans will never win the reforms we need to survive until or unless hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class people across the United States participate in the political process.
It’s really that simple.
The existing left does not have the numbers or resources, hence power, to win meaningful reforms.
The primary impediment to political organizing efforts is the lack of left-wing political institutions and structures. Unions must be rebuilt. Political institutions, perhaps in the form of new parties or structures somewhat similar to the DSA, must be developed. Community organizations, churches, tenants’ unions, and cultural projects will also play vital roles. In short, we need it all, and we need it now.
One of the obstructions to building structures and institutions is the unhealthy and unproductive cultural habits of poor and working-class people, including those already involved with political efforts. Here, I’m not so much talking about our eating habits or lack of exercise, though both are worthy of debate and discussion — I’m specifically thinking about the inordinate amount of time American adults spend on immature cultural activities that hinder organizing efforts: binge drinking, drug abuse, video games, Netflix, cosplay, etc. In my experience, Americans, particularly progressives, can muster any number of excuses to avoid cultural and political engagement.
To paraphrase the late-great comedian, Bill Hicks, the right is up at 4:00am, ready to fuck the world, whereas my left-wing friends wake up at noon, hungover and depressed.
We face a tremendous contradiction: on the one hand, serious, long-lasting, strategic, and powerful political structures must be developed in order to successfully channel the righteous anger and frustration felt by so many poor and working-class Americans, but in order to build those structures, we need poor and working-class Americans prepared to take the helm.
Here, things get tricky. While it’s true that we can find plenty of examples of successful single-issue or union campaigns — it’s also true that such efforts are limited in scope and do not represent bigger trends in American society.
This is the case for many reasons.
First, existing activists and organizers do not adhere to a strict set of methods and skills that are absolutely required to build long-lasting structures. Second, existing activists and organizers (not all, but many) treat their efforts like a hobby or job. Politics is neither.
Politics is war. And we’re fighting for our lives. Over 320,000+ Americans have died of COVID-19. Tens of millions of people have been catapulted into poverty, with millions facing eviction on January 1st, 2021. Nurses, warehouse workers, teachers, retail, grocery store, and service-sector workers of all stripes have been used, abused, killed, and discarded by a ruthless economic system and a federal government beholden to it.
The time for uplifting stories about resistance is long gone.
We’re not here to speak truth to power— we’re organizing to survive, and survival requires winning. What do I mean by winning? In the short-term, winning would look like Medicare For All, free childcare, increasing Social Security payments, expanding public housing, abolishing student debt, substantially increasing funds to public schools, and enacting some form of UBI, basically Bernie’s program, but with minor additions.
But Vince, why not go bigger? Because it doesn’t matter how badly we want or wish or scream for certain policies: the U.S. left lacks the basic institutions necessary to shift the balance of power away from elites and to ordinary people, hence we’re in no position to demand more. If we want more, we have to organize a base capable of demanding more. That requires a lot of hard work (social media posts, YouTube channels, and pithy essays won’t cut it).
We face unprecedented challenges:
climate change, increasing risk of global pandemics, nuclear proliferation, a fully globalized and technologically integrated financial system/economy, and an increasingly fragmented social and cultural landscape, with each trend fueling right-wing movements across the planet. That’s the context in which we’re living, fighting, organizing, and dying.
Do I want more than Bernie’s reforms? Fuck yes. I’m with Jim Morrison: “We want the world, and we want it now!” But wanting and actually doing are two different things. Achieving the goals I laid out above would significantly improve the lives of poor and working-class people. For many, such reforms would mean the difference between life or death.
If, of course, an opportunity to push a more radical agenda presents itself, existing activists and organizers should jump on it, but they should do so with a vision and strategy.
Indeed, the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd represent the limitations of what a non-organized left can achieve. Yes, millions can turn out for protests, but without organizations and institutions to keep them engaged, little is accomplished in terms of meaningful reforms or long-lasting institution-building.
All that said, in order to build successful institutions, especially long-lasting structures capable of taking on and defeating the most murderous and powerful government and corporate sector in the world, the U.S. left will need heavy doses of discipline, accountability, commitment, and seriousness, which requires challenging people.
Right now, I have friends, neighbors, and former coworkers in their mid-50s, unemployed, sitting at home playing video games all day. I have friends in their 30s, trade union members, who spend their weekends cosplaying. They’re not alone. Americans spend a disproportionate amount of their time distracted from the political world. Can you imagine our grandparents playing dress-up while fascism marched through Europe?
To be clear, I’m not prescribing misery — what I’m saying is that people in this country need to grow the fuck up.
Remember, everything is on the line. Yes, I also enjoy sports, parties, concerts, art, working out, my cat, going to the beach, visiting historical sites, family gatherings, and a whole host of shit that must, for the moment, take a backseat to political organizing efforts.
Creating institutions and cultural norms that facilitate solidarity, love, creativity, and fun should be the ultimate goals of our political efforts. In other words, let’s organize and fight back, then truly enjoy life. Yes, we can find enjoyment while fighting back, but I worry that too many Americans, particularly self-identified leftists, process politics as entertainment. In fact, the absurd proliferation of left-wing podcasts and media outlets is perhaps the best measure of this ongoing and troubling trend. For every left political organization that’s created, at least one hundred left media outlets are born — another sign of the deeply immature, narcissistic, and unserious nature of left politics in the U.S.
Here, I’m not prescribing burn out, nor am I prescribing workaholism.
I’m not asking you to discipline yourself for a corporation, government agency, or ungrateful spouse, nor am I encouraging you to beat yourself up in order to live up to some unobtainable cultural or beauty standard — I’m encouraging you to get disciplined and fight back for yourself and your loved ones, and yes, even for the people you don’t personally know.
I’m arguing that you should take politics seriously, which first requires taking yourself seriously — your life, desires, values, family, and friends. That means waking up early. That means making daily plans. That means making weekly work schedules. That means sticking to them. The best political organizers I’ve met over the years are also, unsurprisingly, quite organized in their personal lives. We should cultivate more.
In the end, the left will never accomplish much without building structures and institutions, and building successful structures and institutions requires disciplined, accountable, and serious people. Everything self-proclaimed leftists do in terms of organizing or activism should take place with these things in mind.
In this piece, originally published in Counterpunch, George Wuerthner examines previous successful conservation movements, and describes what we can learn from them.
We do not want those whose first impulse is to compromise. We want no straddlers, for, in the past, they have surrendered too much good wilderness and primeval areas which should never have been lost.
– Bob Marshall on the founding of the Wilderness Society
There is an unfortunate tendency on the part of conservationists to forget or ignore history. A greater appreciation of past conservation victories as well as defeats can inform current efforts. In far too many cases, there is a tendency to believe that it is necessary to appease local interests typically by agreeing to weakened protections or resource giveaways to garner the required political support for a successful conservation effort. However, this fails to consider that in nearly all cases where effective protective measures are enacted, it has been done over almost uniform local opposition.
In those instances where local opposition to a conservation measure is mild or does not exist, it probably means the proposal will be ineffective or worse—even set real conservation backward.
Nevertheless, many environmentalists now believe that due to regional parochialism and lack of historical context, significant compromises are necessary to win approval for new conservation initiatives.
These compromises demonstrate a failure to learn the lessons from conservation history. In particular, it is striking that in today’s era of greater environmental awareness, many environmentalists are willing to propose compromises that offer far weaker protections for our public lands heritage than what was accomplished decades ago, when resource extraction industries had a much greater influence over local and regional economies.
LESSON ONE: Nearly all worthwhile conservation successes were established over strong local objections. This opposition is not surprising. Current land users have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Though environmental protection has been shown repeatedly to provide long term economic and social benefits to regions, those who benefit are often different from those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. We nearly always hear that protection will ruin the local economy.
Thus Yellowstone National Park was created by Congress mainly over the opposition of locals in Montana Territory, who wanted the park to remain open to homesteading, logging, and ranching. Indeed, annually for twenty years after establishing the park, Montana’s Congressional representatives introduced bills into Congress to undesignate the park. Fortunately, due to strong support for the park from the “dreaded eastern establishment,” these efforts did not succeed.
Similarly, when Franklin Roosevelt established Grand Teton National Monument in 1943, Jackson’s local leaders declared that Jackson would become a “ghost town,” and Wyoming’s Congressional delegation introduced a bill to eliminate the park. The bill successfully passed both branches of Congress. The monument only survived because Franklin Roosevelt vetoed the bill.
Early efforts to create a park in the Olympic Mountains with the first park bill were introduced in 1904—a statement that was vigorously opposed by local timber interests. Teddy Roosevelt responded and established the Olympic National Monument in 1907 and put vast tracts of virgin timber off-limits to logging when logging was king.
Nevertheless, opposition from logging interests continued. However, in 1938 outside interests lead to the establishment of Olympic National Park. In the long run, the park’s creation has been shown to have substantial long-term benefits to the residents of the Olympic Peninsula. However, those who made their living by cutting down the Olympic Peninsula trees are not necessarily the same people who are now making a living from the park’s scenic, ecological, and tourism values.
LESSON TWO: Don’t assume all locals are opposed. Typically the most vocal opponents are those with the largest vested interest in maintaining the status quo. There may even be a “silent majority” that is at least neutral or mildly supportive of your proposal, but they are not the ones who control the local politics. However, whether one or many local supporters, nearly all successful conservation efforts rely upon outside leadership to issue a state or national concern. And there is usually some visionary (or group of visionaries) that led this national campaign ala John Muir (Yosemite), David Brower (Dinosaur), Bob Marshall (Gates of the Arctic), Olaus Murie (Arctic Wildlife Refuge), Willard Van Name, Rosalie Edge, and Irving Brant (Olympic), George Dorr (Acadia), etc.
LESSON THREE: Creating and generating the political case for strong conservation protection, as opposed to more limited or weak gains, often takes a while, sometimes a long time. For instance, in the 1930s, Bob Marshall publicly called for protecting all of the Brooks Range north of the Yukon River as a national park. It took until the 1980s for his vision to become a reality. Look at a map of northern Alaska. You will see that nearly the entire Brooks Range is now in some protected status between national wildlife refuges, national preserves, and national parks.
LESSON FOUR: Pragmatists, in the end, leave messes for future generations to clean up. Capitulating to local interests with half-baked compromises in the interest of expediency typically produces uneven results. Either they do not adequately protect the land or create enormous headaches for future conservationists to undue often at a significant political and economic expense.
For instance, when the national forest system was first established, the lands were protected from commercial uses, much like our current national parks. However, in 1905, Gifford Pinchot proposed expanding this system of national forest reserves into national forests, opposition to the forest system from mining companies who wished to use timber from national forests for mining timbers and other mine construction lead to a compromise that permitted commercial logging. Some conservationists like John Muir were opposed to this compromise, but they lost in their efforts. Others felt that a compromise was needed, and besides, it was reasoned such a compromise would be harmless because most of the best timber was outside of the forest preserves and on private lands. No one could imagine there would be much demand for logging on national forest lands.
A similar compromise was also made regarding commercial livestock grazing to win over western ranchers. So commercial logging and ranching were put in place to neutralize western opposition to the forests—but we are still paying the price for that decision today.
Another example is Lake Tahoe—the gem of the Sierras. Initially, there was a movement to protect the lake as a national park. But in the interest of expediency and due to local opposition that wanted to log the great pine forests surrounding the lake, the park proposal was dropped in favor of national forest status. Today many of the problems that plague the Tahoe basin, including water quality decline, are a consequence of this decision, including the abundance of private lands (which could be settled within national forests but not parks).
Point Reyes National Seashore represents another example. The park was created by the purchase of private ranchlands on the Point Reyes Peninsula. As a compromise, any rancher that wanted to remain on their former property and continue ranching/farming was given a 25 year grace period, after which they would be required to leave the property. Almost immediately, the ranchers began to lobby to extend the grace period. Today, fifty years later, they are still operating on the public lands and damaging the water, wildlife, and plant life of the peninsula. Had the Park Service and Congress done what any other property owner does upon purchasing land, which is to pay for the land and have the former owners leave, we would not be facing the prospect of another 20 years of livestock production on these parklands.
We’ll never know whether these compromises were necessary. One could argue that we would not have any national forests today if we had not made such compromises, but this is mostly conjectures. National support for parks and other preserves was very high, and it is likely national forests without logging and grazing would have won Congressional approval.
LESSON FIVE: Over time, most locals view conservation areas as an asset and source of pride. This change typically takes a couple of decades, but I know of no exceptions. Despite this realization that any particular park, wilderness, etc. is overall a benefit to the local and regional society does not typically result in local support for new conservation proposals as they come along. In other words, though people in Montana have grown to love Yellowstone National Park, there was still stiff local opposition to new wilderness areas adjacent to Yellowstone National Park like the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness when it was created in 1978.
To illustrate one example, I will highlight the chief milestones along the way towards today’s Grand Canyon National Park.
GRAND CANYON
1882. Senator Harrison (later president) introduces three proposals for a Grand Canyon National Park into Congress without success.
1883. Harrison, elected president, creates 15 forest preserves, including one surrounding the Grand Canyon.
1898. Coconino County Board of Supervisors passes resolution opposing new forest preserve—and attempts to have protections lifted.
1903. Teddy Roosevelt visits the canyon.
1906. Roosevelt signs a bill to create a large game range at canyon again over local opposition.
1908. Roosevelt asks his attorney general whether there was any limit on the size of areas that could be protected using the recently passed Antiquities Act (1906). The Act was created to protect “small” sites like Indian ruins. However, according to the attorney general, no size limit exists—so Roosevelt uses the Antiquities Act to create a million-acre Grand Canyon National Monument.
Residents in Arizona were outraged. Arizona’s congressional delegation succeeded in blocking all funding for the implementation of monument protection. They sued the federal government and went all the way to the Supreme Court. They argued that Roosevelt exceeded his powers and the original intention of the Antiquities Act. Supreme Court upholds the use of the Antiquities Act, and Grand Canyon National Monument remains.
Failing to eliminate the monument, opponents took a new tact—like Healthy Forests Initiative—they used the conservationists’ language to hide their real intent—to undercut protection. Knowing the national popular support for parks, in 1917, Arizona Senator Henry Ashurst introduced a bill to make the Grand Canyon a national park.
1919. Grand Canyon NP was signed into law—but freed up much of the valuable mining, timber, and grazing lands to satisfy local interests. The bill removed monument and park protection to grazing and timberlands, reducing the overall acreage protected by the national monument by 2/3!
1927. Growing popular support for parks and the Grand Canyon lead to the expansion of Park boundaries to 646,000 acres.
1932 Herbert Hoover declared a new Grand Canyon NM to protect an additional 273,000 more acres surrounding the existing national park.
1969. Marble Canyon NM was created.
1975. Grand Canyon Enlargement Act adds Marble Canyon and Grand Canyon NM to the existing Grand Canyon National Park. Creating a park of 1.1 million acres that finally equals in size the original national monument that Roosevelt had protected in 1908.
1979. UNESCO declares Grand Canyon, an official World Heritage Site.
In the 1990s, when federal budget issues threatened to close the park to visitors, the state of Arizona offered to pay rangers salaries to keep the park open—illustrating the complete change in attitude that now prevails.
2000 President Clinton designates just over 1 million acres as the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument to protect much of the North Rim region of the canyon over locals’ objection. I predict that someday these lands will be added to Grand Canyon National Park.
Conclusion
The most important lesson is not to be discouraged when local people do not widely hold your idea for conservation protection. This should not prompt an immediate compromise to whatever legislation or goal you are pursuing. Instead, stick to the plan, and in many instances, you will prevail. Try to neutralize local opposition, but generate outside support if possible, make the issue a state or national issue.
For instance, it was downstate supporters in New York City that provided the political muscle to create the Adirondack State Park over residents’ objections. This park, now 6 million acres in size, has a clause that prohibits all logging on state lands. If early park advocates had tried to mollify locals to accept park establishment, there would have undoubtedly been logging permitted in the new park. Instead, park supporters successfully rallied people from outside the region to help create the wilderness park we have today.
All legislation is compromise, but don’t be the one to do the compromising—that’s the job of Congress. Make your best case for the best protection. If you don’t achieve that goal in any particular legislation, you can decide to oppose it and attempt to stop it or accept it with compromises. For instance, if you want all the roadless country in a particular area designated as wilderness, propose it all as wilderness and make your best case to save it all. If Congress cuts that in half, you have still successfully made the case that all the roadless lands are qualified for wilderness, and you can always try to enact more protective legislation in the future for these lands. However, if in attempting to secure local support, you automatically say or accept the notion that some of these roadless lands are ecologically unimportant or are throw away lands that can be developed; you have lost your moral authority to fight for protection later.
When and where you compromise affects the outcome, not only current issues but shaped future expectations. Thus a long-term vision should always be kept in mind.
George Wuerthner has published 36 books including Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy. He serves on the board of the Western Watersheds Project. You can read the original article here.
In this article, Suzanna explains how nihilistic relativism has spread across the environmental movement. It has altered our perception of right and wrong, and prevents the environmental organizers from taking a radical stance for the natural world.
This article was originally published August 26th in VT Digger. an off-the-grid farmer who lives in Walden.
Last month, the Trump administration gutted the 50-year old National Environmental Policy Act under the guise of “modernizing,” “streamlining” and making the law more “balanced.” Here in Vermont, similar language is being used to justify eviscerating our state’s landmark environmental law, Act 250. But it’s not the ethically- and environmentally-challenged Trump administration proposing the gutting, it’s the unholy alliance between the moderate Scott administration and the Vermont Natural Resources Council.
VNRC, once a staunch defender of Act 250, now supports creating numerous loopholes for harmful development in exchange for tepid forest fragmentation “protections” that would do little to halt further incursions of development into our mountain ecosystems. At the beginning of the 2020 legislative session, VNRC acted more like the Chamber of Commerce than the environmental organization it purports to be.
It lined up developers, lobbyists, and business leaders to testify in favor of their proposed exemptions to Act 250.
One such exemption: removing downtown development from regulatory oversight, with no consideration of the consequences – particularly regarding wastewater issues.
This bill, H.926, will possibly be voted on during an unusual summer session meant to address pandemic and related budget issues. Perhaps gutting Act 250 is being considered now, under cover of Covid, because public awareness and participation are severely limited. After looking over H.926, a lawyer friend of mine asked me, “Why do we now have to defend the environment from environmental organizations?”
It’s a great question.
Part of the answer, of course, involves money. Fifty years ago, when Act 250 and other important protections were enacted, environmental organizations believed it was their role to draw lines in the sand beyond which economic interests could not go. They understood that we could not blindly expand industry, business and commerce into the landbase without inevitably degrading it.
But from the mid-1980s on, moneyed interests began co-opting the environmental movement by supporting groups that embraced “market-based” solutions to environmental problems. As environmental NGOs softened their stance against rampant development, we got “green consumerism,” “carbon trading,” “ethical investment,” “smart growth” and other business-friendly steps in place of genuine environmental protection. This form of “environmentalism” has turned corporations into “environmentalists” but failed to protect the natural world.
Were the leaders of those environmental organizations conscious of what they were doing?
Psychologist Robert Lifton’s work offers some insight. His career focused on examining how ordinary people become involved in projects with horrific consequences. This phenomenon, he explains, emerges from a shared ideology that remains unquestioned – often with a declared higher good or “claim to virtue” justifying it – thereby blinding people to the real-world consequences of their actions. He studied people responsible for atrocities throughout the last century. Expecting to find psychosis and sociopathy prevalent among them, he found something surprising: many were actually nice people. They were well-liked and respected in their communities. They had stable families and were loving parents and grandparents. They weren’t necessarily ideologues nor particularly hate-filled.
What they were was ambitious. Lifton concluded that when one is ambitious in a destructive society, one will participate in that destruction to reap the rewards. His conclusions are a cautionary tale that should alert all of us to look deep within and examine our conduct and motivations. The environmental leaders who espouse “balancing” environmental protections with the need for economic growth are more likely to win major funding, receive invitations to government roundtables, and hold the microphones that shape opinion.
Over time, the result has been that “environmentalism” is no longer about defending nature from the voracious appetite of the ever-expanding human empire, it is about convincing the public that we can continue that destruction as long as growth is cloaked in euphemistic adjectives like “green,” “smart,” “resilient” and “sustainable.”
But why has the public gone along with this shift?
The reason, in part, is that we have been afflicted by a new brand of ethics: nihilistic relativism. Originally identified by Hannah Arendt, nihilistic relativism allows us to deny our complicity because “right” and “wrong” are seen as simply relative measures. If our actions are better than the egregious actions of others, if they are disguised behind empty props such as “mitigation” and “balance,” our consciences are clear while our actions steadily eat away at the biosphere. The result, though, is that we have paved over our hearts and buried our affection for the living natural world that supports us all.
Firmly wrapped in the ideology of economic growth, the global ecocide and ultimate extinction we are hurtling toward is the logical endpoint of this dark pathology. Here in Vermont, nihilistic relativism reassures us that we are far more environmentally aware than Trump or his minions.
Meanwhile it blinds us from seeing that sometimes we are just as dangerous.
Suzanna Jones is an off-the-grid farmer who lives in Walden. This article was originally published August 26th in VT Digger: you can find the original, full article here:
Vigilante, paramilitary, and state violence against resistance movements is on the rise. Around the world, regressive forces are violently resisting social movements for justice and sustainability, or using intimidation to create fear. Our movements must prepare for this.
Ahjamu reminds us that “coming together is out best strength.” He says that the best deterrent for problems is ‘presence’ and starts by explaining how important is to get a team together, organized, and prepared before events. The training covers:
