by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 6, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
The narrative being pushed today is that renewables, particularly wind and solar, will save us. By “save us” they mean allow us to continue our way of life unhindered into the future, despite a lower (and eventually zero, they tell us) reliance on oil. This view is so prevalent, it seems, that reactions of denial, or even confusion, are met with indignation and insistence.
I know the claims of this hope-filled crowd for what it is: fantasy. Part of me wants to go through every piece (wind, solar, hydro, nuclear) and point out their individual flaws. But I have a particular ability to see the heart, or essence, of the issue, and I am compelled to make this simple.
The push to “renewables” is very… overhyped, I suppose is the right word. Industrial civilization was built on an oil EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) of 100 to 1. Nowadays we’re down to somewhere about 12 to 1. Conventional oil (the cheap, easy to access stuff) peaked back in 2005. This is not really argued against by anyone at this point. Unconventional oil has filled the gap. But – and here’s the huge but –
1) unconventional oil sources have been funded through increasing amounts of debt and many of these companies are going bankrupt (33% in 2016, a projected 33% more in 2017, leaving only 1/3rd of those companies standing by 2019) [link], and
2) the greatest source of unconventional has been shale oil and gas – the great majority of which is in the USA. Unfortunately, shale oil and gas both peaked in 2015 and are now declining.*
* Edit: In November 2017, shale production slightly exceeded this mark and production is set to increase a bit further into 2018. I am currently writing an article on shale explaining this which will be up soon. We can expect shale output to rise into next year, but then will decline. This is known and expected.
So, that leaves us with “renewables.” I put the word in quotes because it’s a misnomer – none of these sources are actually renewable. They are completely dependent on oil to build, maintain, and transport. All renewable technology and construction, as well as the infrastructure and transportation needed to get their product to consumers, is dependent entirely on oil (fossil fuels). Another giant problem is that these are all sources of producing electricity. The problem with this is twofold:
1) most of the energy we use isn’t electric – electricity production is only 18% of total world energy demand, and
2) all of the electricity we do produce employs fossil fuels.
It is important to note here too that transportation (big 18-wheelers, ships, planes, mining equipment trucks, etc) cannot transition to electricity to run them – the batteries are absurdly too heavy (in some cases 50,0000 times too heavy) and with current or projected technology this problem will not conceivably be fixed anytime soon. Transitioning the consumers to electric cars won’t fix the problem whatsoever.
”Peak oil” is primarily a liquid fuels transportation crisis because of this very issue.
Another point to make is that there is no national infrastructure currently that can replace any significant fraction of oil with renewable energy. Building such an infrastructure has been estimated by countless studies to cost literally trillions of dollars and take at least 20 years – and when we are currently facing a global economic slowdown we don’t have the money to invest in that. And we don’t have the time to wait because the crisis will hit before such an infrastructure would be built even if we did invest the money today, which we can’t. This brings us to the point: we will have to face a world-changingly profound loss of overall energy, even as demand and populations continue to increase.
But make no mistake – a greater dependence on renewables is inevitable. The problems occur when you realize that these renewables are themselves dependent on oil, which is being funded by debt that won’t last and is ending in bankruptcies and has an ever-lower EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested).
The outcome of all this is that, yes, we will become more and more heavily reliant on intermittently-available renewables. But (and this is the point that many miss) as we become more reliant on renewables on a small scale (personal use, business use, town use), we will be living with increasingly less and less overall energy on a large scale (geographically, nationally, globally). All the systems that are geographic (grid systems), national (the economy), and global (trade, imported goods, etc), will inevitably fail and we will have to make due with local solutions. Renewables will power a fraction of our current way of life at best – and they will not be sufficient to continue business as usual as we have known it. Wind and solar last for about 20 years before they need to be replaced – with energy outputs only available through oil. As John Michael Greer has said:
“The question isn’t whether or not sun and wind are useful power sources; the question is whether it’s possible to power industrial civilization with them, and the answer is no.”
All of the promises of the hope-addicted crowd of course also rest on the false premise that fossil fuels themselves will be cheap and easy to obtain for the next 35 years or so in order to pave a smooth road for this transition.
I’m afraid the result of all this is a staggeringly significant reduction in the standards of living for the vast majority of the world.
Eventually everything will even out and humanity will live a much more sustainable way of life – just like humanity has for ten thousand years before the industrial age. In the meantime, expect turbulence.
In closing, let’s end with a simple but profound thought: You can’t use fossil fuels to extract all the resources to make solar panels and wind turbines and then expect these less efficient means of energy production to save a society with ever-increasing energy needs.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 1, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
by Suzanna Jones
Editor’s note: Suzanna Jones is an off-the-grid farmer who lives in Walden, Vermont. She was among those arrested protesting the Lowell wind project in 2011. This originally appeared in VTDigger; republished with permission of the author.
There is a painful rift among self-described environmentalists in Vermont, a divide that is particularly evident in the debate on industrial wind. In the past, battle lines were usually drawn between business interests wanting to “develop” the land, and environmentalists seeking to protect it. Today, however, the most ardent advocates of industrial buildout in Vermont’s most fragile ecosystems are environmental organizations. So what is happening?
According to former New York Times foreign correspondent Chris Hedges, this change is symptomatic of a broader shift that has taken shape over many years. In his book “Death of the Liberal Class,” Hedges looks at the failure of the Left to defend the values it espouses – a fundamental disconnect between belief and action that has been corrupting to the Left and disastrous for society as a whole. Among other things, he argues, it has turned liberal establishments into mouthpieces for the power elite.
Historically, the liberal class acted as watchdog against the abuses of capitalism and its elites. But over the last century, Hedges claims, it has traded that role for a comfortable “seat at the table” and inclusion in “the club.” This Faustian bargain has created a power vacuum – one that has often been filled by right-wing totalitarian elements (think Nazi Germany and fascist Italy) that rise to prominence by ridiculing and betraying the values that liberals claim to champion.
Caving in to the seduction of careerism, prestige and comforts, the liberal class curtailed its critique of unfettered capitalism, globalization and educational institutions, and silenced the radicals and iconoclasts that gave it moral guidance – “the roots of creative and bold thought that would keep it from being subsumed completely by the power elite.” In other words, “the liberal class sold its soul.”
From education to labor to agriculture and environmentalism, this moral vacuum continues to grow because the public sphere has been abandoned by those who fear being labeled pariahs. Among the consequences, Hedges says, is an inability to take effective action on climate change. This is because few environmentalists are willing to step out of the mainstream to challenge its root causes – economic growth, the profit system, and the market-driven treadmill of consumption.
Hedges’ perspective clarifies a lot. It explains why so many environmental organizations push for “renewable” additions to the nation’s energy supply, rather than a reduction of energy use. It explains why they rant and rail against fossil fuel companies, while studiously averting their eyes from the corporate growth machine as a whole. In their thrall to wealthy donors and “green” developers (some of whom sit on their boards), they’ve traded their concern about the natural world for something called “sustainability” – which means keeping the current exploitive system going.
It also makes clear why Vermont environmental organizations like the Vermont Public Interest Research Group and the Vermont Natural Resources Council – as well as the state’s political leadership – have lobbied so aggressively to prevent residents from having a say regarding energy development in their towns. By denying citizens the ability to defend the ecosystems in which they live, these groups are betraying not only the public, but the natural world they claim to represent. Meanwhile, these purported champions of social justice turn their backs as corporations like Green Mountain Power make Vermonters’ homes unlivable for the sake of “green” energy.
Hedges’ perspective also explains why environmental celebrity Bill McKibben advocates the buildout of industrial wind in our last natural spaces – energy development that would feed the very economy he once exposed as the source of our environmental problems. Behind the green curtain are what McKibben calls his “friends on Wall Street,” whom he consults for advice on largely empty PR stunts designed to convince the public that something is being accomplished, while leaving the engines of economic “progress” intact. Lauded as the world’s “Most Important Environmental Writer” by Time magazine, McKibben’s seat at the table of the elites is secured.
In this way the “watchdogs” have been effectively muzzled: now they actually help the powerful maintain control, by blocking the possibility for systemic solutions to emerge.
Environmentalism has suffered dearly at the hand of this disabled Left. It is no longer about the protection of our wild places from the voracious appetite of industrial capitalism: it is instead about maintaining the comfort levels that Americans feel entitled to without completely devouring the resources needed (at least for now). Based on image, fakery and betrayal, it supports the profit system while allowing those in power to appear “green.” This myopic, empty endeavor may be profitable for a few, but its consequences for the planet as a whole are fatal.
Despite the platitudes of its corporate and government backers, industrial wind has not reduced Vermont’s carbon emissions. Its intermittent nature makes it dependent on gas-fired power plants that inefficiently ramp up and down with the vicissitudes of the wind. Worse, it has been exposed as a Renewable Energy Credit shell game that disguises and enables the burning of fossil fuels elsewhere. It also destroys the healthy natural places we need as carbon “sinks,” degrades wildlife habitat, kills bats and eagles, pollutes headwaters, fills valuable wetlands, polarizes communities, and makes people sick – all so we can continue the meaningless acts of consumption that feed our economic system.
Advocates for industrial wind say we need to make sacrifices. True enough. But where those sacrifices come from is at the heart of our dilemma. The sacrifices need to come from the bloated human economy and those that profit from it, not from the land base.
We are often told that we must be “realistic.” In other words, we should accept that the artificial construct of industrial capitalism – with its cars, gadgets, mobility and financial imperatives – is reality. But this, too, is a Faustian bargain: in exchange we lose our ability to experience the sacred in the natural world, and put ourselves on the path to extinction.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 19, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: The first Rights of Nature lawsuit in the US was filed on September 25, 2017, in Denver, Colorado. The full text of the complaint can be found here.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
In the war for social and environmental justice, even the best lawyers rarely serve as anything more than battlefield medics.
They do what they can to stop the bleeding for the people, places, and causes suffering on the front lines, but they do not possess the weapons to return fire in any serious way. Lawyers lack effective weapons because American law functions to protect those in power from the rest of us; effective legal weapons are, quite literally, outlawed.
Nonetheless, understanding the limits of the law to affect change through my experiences as a public defender, I recently helped the Colorado River sue the State of Colorado in a first-in-the-nation lawsuit — Colorado River v. Colorado — requesting that the United States District Court in Denver recognize the river’s rights of nature. These rights include the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve. To enforce these rights, the Colorado River also requests that the court grant the river “personhood” and standing to sue in American courts.
Four of my comrades in the international environmental organization Deep Green Resistance (DGR) and I, are listed as “next friends” to the Colorado River. The term “as next friends” is a legal concept that means we have signed on to the lawsuit as fiduciaries or guardians of the river. I also serve, with the brilliant Deanna Meyer, as one of DGR’s media contacts concerning the case.
Several times, I’ve been asked whether I think our case is going to win. We have provided, in the complaint we filed, the arguments the judge needs to do the right thing and rule in our favor. In this sense, I think we can win. And, if we do win, the highly endangered Colorado River will gain better protections while the environmental movement will gain a strong new legal weapon to use in defense of the natural world.
But, when has the American legal system been concerned with doing the right thing? While every ounce of my being hopes we win, if we lose, I want you to know why. I want you to be angry. And, I want you to possess an analysis that enables you to direct your anger at the proper targets.
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The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) does incredible work to demonstrate how the American legal system is stacked against us. CELDF began as a traditional public interest law firm working to protect the environment. They fought against industrial projects like waste incinerators and dumps only to encounter barriers in the legal system put in place by both government and corporations.
According to CELDF, government and corporations “developed a structure of law which – rather than focused on protecting people, workers, communities, and the environment – was instead focused on endless growth, extraction, and development.” This structure is “inherently unsustainable, and has, in fact, made sustainability illegal.”
The current structure of law forces us into what CELDF calls the “Box of Allowable Activism.” The Box is formed by four legal concepts that have so far proven to be unassailable. Those concepts are state preemption, nature as property, corporate privilege, and the regulatory fallacy. State preemption removes authority from local communities by defining the legal relations between a state and its municipalities as that of a parent to a child. Local communities are not allowed to pass laws or regulations that are stricter than state law.
Currently, nature is defined as property in American law. And, anyone with title to property has the right to consume and destroy it.
As CELDF notes, “this allows the actions of a few to impact the entire ecosystem of a community.” To make this worse, corporations – who own vast tracts of nature – are granted, by American courts, corporate rights and “personhood.” Corporate personhood gives corporations the power to request enforcement of rights to free speech, freedom from search and seizure, due process and lost future profits and equal protection under the law.
Finally, CELDF explains that “the permitting process, and the regulations supposedly enforced by regulatory agencies, are intended to create a sense of protection and objective oversight.” But, while water continues to be polluted, air poisoned, and the collapse of every major ecosystem on the continent intensifying, we must conclude that this protection is not happening.
Regulatory agencies give permits. By definition, they provide permission to destructive activities. CELDF states, “When they issue permits, they give cover to the applicant against liability to the community for the legalized harm.”
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I went to law school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and became a public defender in Kenosha, WI because I thought I could push back against the institutional racism of the American criminal justice system. Just like CELDF learned working through traditional environmental law, I learned quickly that my hands were tied by the legal structure, too.
Something similar to CELDF’s “Box of Allowable Activism” exists in criminal law. Prosecutors overcharge. For example, I represented a single mother of three charged with six counts of theft despite the total value of what she was accused of stealing amounting to less than $30 — one count for the bag of rice, one for the butter, one for the salt, one for the pack of chicken breasts, one for the onion, and one for the garlic.
Then, prosecutors offer plea deals taking advantage of a defendant’s rational self-interest and fear. In my previous example, the prosecutor offered to dismiss four of the six counts of theft and recommend 30 days in jail if my client pled guilty to two counts, the rice and chicken. When the prosecutor made her offer, she reminded my client that not taking the deal meant facing a long trial process while risking conviction on all six counts and being exposed to two years in jail.
Defense attorneys are ethically bound to defer to their clients’ desire to take a plea deal. Meanwhile, public defender offices are woefully underfunded. And, with the majority of criminal defendants so poor they qualify for court-appointed counsel, public defenders are notoriously overworked producing mistakes that lead to their clients’ incarceration.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Deep ecologist, Neil Evernden, connects the problems facing lawyers fighting institutional racism and lawyers fighting ecocide in his book “The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment.” Evernden asks us to imagine we are lawyers defending a client who is black in apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow American south.
He asks, “What would you do if faced with a trial judge who denies your client any rights and who, after hearing your case, simply says: ‘So what — is he white?’”
Everndem claims that we only have two options in this situation. We can demand that the judge recognize the rights and dignity of our client and risk condemning our client to execution. Or, we can play by the rules, reinforce problematic law, contribute to its precedence, and detail our client’s genealogical records at length “to try to prove our client white.”
Evernden correctly notes that too often when environmentalists are challenged to justify their declarations on behalf of the living world, they proceed to try to prove their client white. Evernden writes, “Rather than challenge the astonishing assumption that only utility to industrialized society can justify the existence of anything on the planet” the environmentalist “tries to invent uses for everything.” But, “the only defense that can conceivably succeed in the face of this prejudice is one based on the intrinsic worth of life, of human beings, of living beings, ultimately of Being itself.”
We want our lawsuit, specifically, and the rights of nature framework, generally, to be legal arguments for the intrinsic worth of life and of living beings like the Colorado River.
We are attacking two of the walls forming the Box of Allowable Activism. We seek to overturn the concept that nature is only property, and we seek to erode corporate power by giving the source of corporate power (nature) rights to stop corporate exploitation. These arguments are not currently accepted, but neither was the argument that “separate is inherently unequal” when Thurgood Marshall argued this and ended school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education.
This is all well and good, but we are still forced to construct our argument only with currently acceptable legal language. We seek “personhood” for the Colorado River, for example. But, the river is much more than a person. The river is an ancient and magnificent being who carved the Grand Canyon, who braved some of the world’s most arid deserts on her path from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California, and who facilitates countless lives, human and nonhuman.
I am afraid, that in seeking personhood for the Colorado River, people will mistake our arguments as trying to prove the Colorado River a “person” while reinforcing the notion that a being only has value as far as that being resembles a human.
***
Evernden only contemplated two options. We can prove the Colorado River a person, or we can demand recognition of our client’s dignity. But, there is a third option: Dismantle the power stacking the legal system against communities and natural ecosystems.
To fight this power, we must understand how power works. Dr. Gene Sharp, who CNN has called “a dictator’s worst nightmare” and the “father of nonviolent struggle,” is the world’s leading theorist of power.
Sharp identifies two manifestations of power – social and political. Social power is “the totality of all influences and pressures which can be used and applied to groups of people, either to attempt to control the behavior of others directly or indirectly.” Political power is “the total authority, influence, pressure, and coercion which may be applied to achieve or prevent the implementation of the wishes of the power-holder.”
Sharp lists six sources of power: authority, human resources, skills and knowledge, intangible factors, material resources, and sanctions. Interfering with these sources of power is the key to a successful resistance movement.
The powerful know where their power comes from and they protect the sources of their power. It is one thing to protect these sources with brute force. But, why use brute force when you can persuade the oppressed that there is nothing they can do to affect the sources of power? Or, when you can mislead the oppressed about where those sources of power are?
In this spirit, the powerful do everything they can to convince the oppressed that the current arrangement of power is inevitable. They seek to convince us that the legal system exists to protect communities and the environment. They teach us to look back through history to view our few victories as the result of a system devoted to justice.
These few victories are held up as proof that sooner or later the courts always make the right decision. We are pacified with assurances that if our lawyers are clever enough, if they work hard enough, if they articulate the truth eloquently enough, judges will recognize the brilliance of our lawyers’ arguments and justice will be served.
Justice for the natural world has rarely been served. CELDF names the final blockade to justice the “Black Hole of Doubt” and teaches, “We think we’re not smart enough, strong enough, or empowered enough – we literally do not believe we have the inalienable right to govern.” Sharp says, “Power, in reality, is fragile, always dependent for its strength and existence upon a replenishment of its sources by the cooperation of a multitude of institutions and people – cooperation which may or may not continue.”
Any resistance movement aspiring to true success must engage in shrewd target selection to undermine sources of power. Taking Sharp a step further, it is possible to prioritize which sources are more essential to the functioning of power than others. Corporate power is maintained through the exploitation of the natural world. There is no profit without material products. There are no material products without the natural world. If corporations lose access to ecosystems like the Colorado River, they will fail. If corporations fail, they can no longer control our system of law.
We may win in court and corporations will have to respect the Colorado River’s rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve. We will also gain a foothold for other ecosystems to assert their own rights. We may fail in court, but that does not mean the fight is over.
In many ways, our failure would simply confirm what we already know: the legal system protects corporations from the outage of injured citizens and ensures environmental destruction. If we fail, we must remember there are other means — outside the legal system — to stop exploitation.
Regardless of what happens in our case, we encourage others to employ whatever means they possess to protect the natural world who gives us life.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 25, 2017 | Lobbying, Strategy & Analysis
Featured image: Dead Horse Point, Colorado River. (Clément Bardot/Wikimedia/CC-BY-SA-3.0)
Editor’s note: The first Rights of Nature lawsuit in the US was filed on September 25, 2017, in Denver, Colorado. The full text of the complaint can be found here.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
On Tuesday, September 26, the Colorado River will sue the State of Colorado in a first-in-the-nation lawsuit requesting that the United States District Court in Denver recognize the river’s rights of nature. These rights include the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve. To enforce these rights, the Colorado River will also request that the court grant the river “personhood” and standing to sue in American courts.
Four of my comrades in the international environmental organization Deep Green Resistance and I, are serving as “next friends” to the Colorado River. We are represented by the noted civil rights attorney Jason Flores-Williams who is based in Denver. Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund is serving as advisors in the case.
The term “as next friends” is a legal concept that means we have signed on to the lawsuit as fiduciaries or guardians of the river. Under current law, the Colorado River is not “legally competent” and, so needs “next friends” to ensure her rights are protected. A “next friend” is someone who appears in court in place of another who is not competent to do so – like a minor or someone with a mental disability. My role, as next friend to the Colorado River, is to protect the river’s rights.
We recently released a press release that has been widely shared on social media. National media outlets are beginning to take notice. And, we’re getting interviews, receiving email inquiries, and responding to online comments. So far, the most common question is: Why does the Colorado River need rights?
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The most fearless environmental philosophers – thinkers like Susan Griffin, Neil Evernden, Derrick Jensen, and John Livingston – have insisted that we will never be safe so long as the natural world we depend on is objectified and valued only for the way humans use it. Livingston calls the objectification of nature “resourcism” and explains: “A ‘resource’ is anything that can be put to human use … It is the concept of ‘resource’ that allows us to perceive nature as our subsidiary.” Livingston notes that once the nonhuman “is perceived as having some utility – any utility – and is thus perceived as a ‘resource,’ its depletion is only a matter of time.”
Because our legal system currently defines nature as property, “resourcism” is institutionalized in American law. While climate change worsens, water continues to be polluted, and the collapse of every major ecosystem on the continent intensifies, we must conclude that our system of law fails to protect the natural world and fails to protect the human and nonhuman communities who depend on it.
Jensen, while diagnosing widespread ecocide, observes a fundamental psychological principle: “We act according to the way we experience the world. We experience the world according to how we perceive it. We perceive it the way we have been taught.” Jensen quotes a Canadian lumberman who once said, “When I look at trees I see dollar bills.”
The lumberman’s words represent the dominant culture’s view of the natural world. Jensen explains the psychology of this objectification, “If, when you look at trees you see dollar bills, you will act a certain way. If, when you look at trees, you see trees you will act a different way. If, when you look at this tree right here you see this tree right here, you will act differently still.”
Law shapes our experience of the world. Currently, law teaches that nature is property, an object, or a resource to use. This entrenches a worldview that encourages environmental destruction. In other words, when law teaches us to see the Colorado River as dollar bills, as simple gallons of water, as an abstract percentage to be allocated, it is no wonder that corporations like Nestle can gain the right to run plastic bottling operations that drain anywhere from 250 million to 510 million gallons of Colorado River water per year.
The American legal system can take a good step toward protecting us all – human and nonhuman alike – by granting ecosystems like the Colorado River rights and allowing communities to sue on these ecosystems’ behalf. When standing is recognized on behalf of ecosystems themselves, environmental law will reflect a conception of legal “causation” that is more friendly to the natural world than it is to the corporations destroying the natural world. At a time when the effects of technology are outpacing science’s capacity to research these effects, injured individuals and communities often have difficulty proving that corporate actions are the cause of their injuries. When ecosystems, like the Colorado River, are granted the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve, the obsolete causation theory, en vogue, will be corrected.
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American history is haunted by notorious failures to afford rights to those who always deserved them. Americans will forever shudder, for example, at Chief Justice Roger Taney’s words, when the Supreme Court, in 1857, ruled persons of African descent cannot be, nor were never intended to be, citizens under the Constitution in Dred Scott v. Sanford. Justice Taney wrote of African Americans, “They had for more than a century before been regarded as being of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race … and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…” And, of course, without rights that white, slave-owning men were bound to respect, the horrors of slavery continued.
The most hopeful moments in American history, on the other hand, have occurred when the oppressed have demanded and were granted their rights in American courts. Despite centuries of treating African Americans as less than human while defining them as property, our system of law now gives the same rights to African Americans that American citizens have always enjoyed. Once property, African Americans are now persons under the law. Similarly, despite a centuries-old tradition where women were, in the legal sense, owned by men, our system of law now gives the same rights to women that American citizens have always enjoyed. Once property, women are now a person under the law.
It’s tempting to describe this history as “inevitable progress” or as “the legal system correcting itself” or with some other congratulatory language. But, this glosses over the violent struggles it took for rights to be won. The truth is, and we see this clearly in Justice Taney’s words, the American legal system resisted justice until change was forced upon it. It took four centuries of genocide and the nation’s bloodiest civil war before our system of law recognized the rights of African Americans. While the courts resisted, African Americans were enslaved, exploited, and killed.
Right now, the natural world is struggling violently for its survival. We watch hurricanes, exacerbated by human-induced climate change, rock coastal communities. We choke through wildfires, also exacerbated by human-induced climate change, sweeping across the West. We feel the Colorado River’s thirst as overdraw and drought dries it up. It is the time that American law stop resisting. Our system of law must change to reflect ecological reality.
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Colorado River between Marble Canyon (Source: Alex Proimos/Flickr/CC-BY-NC-2.0)
This is ecological reality: all life depends on clean water, breathable air, healthy soil, a habitable climate, and complex relationships formed by living creatures in natural communities. Water is life and in the arid American Southwest, no natural community is more responsible for the facilitation of life than the Colorado River. Because so much life depends on her, the needs of the Colorado River are primary. Social morality must emerge from a humble understanding of this reality. Law is integral to any society’s morality, so law must emerge from this understanding, too.
Human language lacks the complexity to adequately describe the Colorado River and any attempt to account for the sheer amount of life she supports will necessarily be arbitrary. Nevertheless, many creatures of feather, fin, and fur rely on the Colorado River. Iconic, and endangered or threatened, birds like the bald eagle, greater sage grouse, Gunnison sage grouse, peregrine falcon, yellow-billed cuckoo, summer tanager, and southwestern willow flycatcher make their homes in the Colorado River watershed. Fourteen endemic fish species swim the river’s currents including four fish that are now endangered: the humpback chub, Colorado pikeminnow, razorback sucker, and bonytail.
Many of the West’s most recognizable mammals depend on the Colorado River for water and to sustain adequate food sources. Gray wolves, grizzly bear, black bear, mountain lions, coyotes, and lynx walk the river’s banks. Elk, mule deer, and bighorn sheep live in her forests. Beavers, river otters, and muskrats live directly in the river’s flow as well as in streams and creeks throughout the Colorado River basin.
The Colorado River provides water for close to 40 million people and irrigates nearly 4 million acres of American and Mexican cropland. Agriculture uses the vast majority of the river’s water. In 2012, 78% of the Colorado’s water was used for agriculture alone. 45% of the water is diverted from the Colorado River basin which spells disaster for basin ecosystems. Major cities that rely on these trans-basin diversions include Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Salt Lake City.
Despite the Colorado River’s importance to life, she is being destroyed. Before the construction of dams and large-scale diversion, the Colorado flowed 1,450 miles into the Pacific Ocean near Sonora, Mexico. The river’s life story is an epic saga of strength, determination, and the will to deliver her waters to the communities who need them. Across those 1,450 miles, she softened mountainsides, carved through red rock, and braved the deserts who sought to exhaust her.
Now, however, the Colorado River suffers under a set of laws, court decrees, and multi-state compacts that are collectively known as the “Law of the River.” The Law of the River allows humans to take more water from the river than actually exists. Granting the river the rights we seek for her would help the courts revise problematic laws.
The regulations set forth in the 1922 Colorado River Compact are the most important and, perhaps, the most problematic. Seven states (Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming) are allotted water under the Compact. When the Compact was enacted, the parties assumed that the river’s flow would remain at a reliable 17 million acre-feet of water per year and divided the water using a 15-million acre feet per year standard. But, hydrologists now know 17 million acre-feet represented an unusually high flow and was a mistake. Records show that the Colorado River’s flow was only 9 million acre-feet in 1902, for example. From 2000-2016, the river’s flow only averaged 12.4 million acre-feet per year. So, for the last 16 years, the Compact states have been legally allowed to use water that isn’t there.
“Use it or lose it” laws are also common throughout the Colorado River basin. These laws threaten ranchers, farmers, and governments holding water rights who use less water than they are legally entitled to with seeing their allotments cut. So, those with water rights are encouraged to trap or use more water than they need.
Since the completion of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, the Colorado River has rarely connected with the sea. Stop and let that sink in. Many scientists believe the river is between 4 and 6.5 million years old. The Colorado River is so strong, so determined, she cut out the Grand Canyon. This magnificent being, millions of years old, who formed the Grand Canyon is being strangled to death by dams, climate change, overallocation, and a legal system that refuses to remedy its own insanity.
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When you contemplate all those who depend on the Colorado River when you know the sheer quantity of life the river sustains, is it possible to mistake her inherent value?
I hate to reduce a being so ancient and so powerful to an argument based in human self-interest. Know this: If you’re one of the 40 million Americans who depend on the Colorado River’s water and you’re hydrated right now, the river is literally part of you. If that water is poisoned, if that water dries up, if corporate rights to steal that water and sell it back to you continue to trump the river’s right to exist, you will be hurt. This is not law. This not rhetoric. This is reality.
This is also why the Colorado River needs rights. Life requires clean water, breathable air, healthy soil and a habitable climate to create healthy ecosystems. Without these ecosystems, life is impossible and the right to life is meaningless. American law fails to protect life’s requirements because it defines nature as property and does not recognize the rights of nature. In a rights-based system of law, to be without rights is to be defenseless. And, after witnessing centuries of the exploitation of the natural world, we know that to be defenseless is to ultimately be destroyed. It’s time we protect those, like the Colorado River, who give us life.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 22, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a multi-part series. Browse the New Park City Witness index to read more.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Author’s Note: A member of Park City’s city government recently asked me why I write about Park City when Park City is doing so much for the environment, compared to other communities. I hope my respect for this person and the question is reflected in the days I spent contemplating an answer. In order to answer this question, I must answer several related questions. These answers give me a chance to be transparent about my motivations for writing this New Park City Witness series.
Underlying the question “Why do I write about Park City?” is the question “Why do I write at all?”
One reason I write is reflected in an experience I had, a few days ago, in Summit Land Conservancy’s offices. On a shelf, in a conference room, a book’s plain green and white cover grabbed my attention. It was the first edition of Park City Witness, published in 1998. Having recently finished the second edition of Park City Witness, and learning the first was long out of print, I was excited to see an original copy. I asked Summit Land Conservancy executive director Cheryl Fox if I could borrow the book.
Books, as anyone who has read a few knows, have the power to choose their readers. While reading the preface to the first Park City Witness, I knew I had been chosen. Maybe Cheryl knew I needed to read the book, too, because she wrote the preface to the first Park City Witness. In this preface, she quoted author Stephen Trimble who, in 1997 “speaking to a collection of writers and slow-growth activists amid the crowded shelves of Dolly’s Bookstore…explained how important it is for people who can write to write.”
Twenty years later, and Trimble’s words feel like they were spoken directly to me. I can write and because I can write, it is important for me to write.
If it’s important for people who can write to write, it’s even more important for people who can write to write what needs to be read. While nearly two hundred species go extinct daily, while every mother’s breastmilk contains known carcinogens, while every major biosphere on Earth collapses around us, does anything need to be read more than encouragement for stopping the destruction?
I think the answer is obviously no. Many artists share this feeling. My favorite political cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan, in an essay titled “Artists: Raise Your Weapons” writes “…in times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable.”
Derrick Jensen, reflecting on a decades-long writing career with over twenty published books, writes, “…if we judge my work, or anyone’s work, by the most important standard of all, and in fact the only standard that really matters, which is the health of the planet, my work (and everyone else’s) is a complete failure. Because my work hasn’t stopped the murder of the planet.”
***
I write about Park City because of the privilege and power that exist here.
It may or may not be true that Park City does more than other communities to protect the environment. We must remember that Park City’s human population depends on an ecologically unnecessary and problematic industry – tourism – for its continued existence. Ask yourself: Do corporate marketers spend millions of dollars on enticing hundreds of thousands of people to board greenhouse gas emitting planes from around the world to visit… Kamas? Are tons of coal burned to pump hundreds of millions of gallons of water up mountainsides to snow-making machines in…Heber?
There’s a sense in which it really doesn’t matter whether Park City is doing more than other communities. My almost-five-year-old niece is becoming notorious for her sassy one-liners and refusing to let adults get away with their bullshit. I shudder when I think about looking her in the eye when she’s my age. She’s not going to care if Park City did more than other communities to stop the destruction of the world. She’s going to care that she can raise children in a world with clean water, clean air, and a habitable climate. She’s going to care, if she does have a baby, that she can feed her baby without passing carcinogens through her breastmilk to her baby.
I write about Park City because it doesn’t matter which community is more environmentally-friendly. The only thing that matters, while life on earth collapses, is stopping the collapse. Stopping the collapse will require confrontation with those in power and this confrontation will require material resources. Close to 80% of Park City’s population is white and white people benefit the most from the exploitation of the natural world. People of color, around the world, have long formed the frontlines of the environmental movement. Justice demands that white people join them there. Similarly, the median property value in Park City is $868,100, and the median household income is $105,000, which is almost double the national average. Park City has more than most communities, so Park City should give more than most communities.
***
The most important reason I write is because I’m in love. I’m in love with Gambel oak, maple, and aspen. I’m in love with the way they offer one last display of visual ecstasy in their changing colors before sleeping for the winter. I’m in love with rain and snow, the mystical moment rain becomes snow on a northerly autumn wind, and the water both of them bring. I’m in love with my partner, who was born here. I’m in love with her big, gorgeous brown eyes. I’m in love with the way her eyes become even bigger with warmth when she hears joy in her loved ones’ voices.
In short, I’m in love with life – a life made possible by Park City’s natural communities. We may experience life because the water we drink here, the air we breathe here, and the food we eat here combine to give us physical bodies. To love life is to love our bodies and loving our bodies, we must listen to them.
My body tells me to write. If I go more than a few days without pen, notebook, and solitude, the physical symptoms of anxiety affect me. I become fidgety, easily distracted, and slightly sick to my stomach. The longer I go without writing something coherent, the worse these symptoms get.
My body speaks through these symptoms. Through fidgetiness, my body tells me to act; writing, after all, is an action. The troubles with concentration are a warning to use my focus or lose it. Nausea accompanies and symbolizes the writing process, for me. There are times I’ve tried to quit writing, tried to shirk the hours of rumination, research, and drafting. But, the best words are not mine. They are given to me. Unreleased, they pool like bile and there is no relief until they’re written.
I used to be embarrassed to admit that I write to feel better. This seemed selfish to me. It felt impure. But, now I know that I do not create the anxiety anymore than I create the swelling that accompanies rolling an ankle. The swelling is a gift, a gift from my body, from the forces of life creating my body. My body, through swelling, tells me not to walk on the rolled ankle, and tells me to let the ankle heal.
Wherever we look there are bodies swelling, wounded, and scarred. Forests are clearcut, rivers no longer flow to the sea, and canyons are flooded by reservoirs. Life speaks through bodies – ours’, forests’, rivers’, canyons’ and so many more. Life tells us to let these bodies heal.
Before healing can take place, the injury must be stopped. Life, everywhere, is being injured. It does not matter how we stop the injury. But, we must stop it. There are a growing number of us in Park City who are willing to do more than is currently being done. We are willing to place our bodies in front of those destroying the planet – bodies we love as much as you love yours. Many of us are young, lack the wealth of older generations, look at a future growing darker and darker, and say, “This must stop.”
We could use your help.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 22, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a multi-part series. Browse the New Park City Witness index to read more.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
In Park City, the task is clear: Stop climate change, or the snow stops. Snowpack is the region’s freshwater supply and water is life. So, stop climate change or the community will lose life.
This is not news to most Parkites. And, thankfully, many Parkites have taken, at least, some kind of action. Park City Municipal Corporation hopes to achieve carbon neutrality, for the whole community, by 2032. An electric bike program was recently introduced, and electric city busses now run routes through town, in an effort to reduce carbon emissions. In a truly amazing display of community generosity, $38 million was raised to protect Bonanza Flats from development.
Meanwhile, there are a growing number of us in Park City, and across the country, who have lost faith in the traditional tactics employed by the environmental movement for creating change.
We voted. Many of us helped Barack Obama gain the presidency only to see American natural gas production increase by 34% and crude oil production increase by 88% since George W. Bush’s final year in office. Our votes couldn’t stop Donald Trump from gaining the presidency and everyday brings more news of his insanity. The EPA is gutted. The United States pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. And, climate change deniers occupy many of the federal government’s most powerful positions.
We reduced, reused, and recycled. Then, we learned that the general consensus amongst climate scientists is that developed nations must reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid runaway climate change. While it was still funded, the EPA reported that small businesses and homes accounted for 12% of total US greenhouse gas emissions while personal vehicles accounted for less than 26% of total US emissions. Based on these numbers, we realized that even if every small business and home in America reduced its emissions to zero and each American drove cars that emitted no greenhouse gas, the United States wouldn’t even come close to that 80% goal.
We participated in traditional conservation efforts. We helped to save Bonanza Flats from the bulldozers and chainsaws. But, we have not yet saved Bonanza Flats from the droughts, the wildfires, the fungus-killing aspens, and the pine beetles all made worse by climate change.
We are ready for escalation. We are ready for direct action.
**
Beneath the positivity, the small victories, and the feel-good atmosphere characterizing life in a mountain town like Park City, a desperation quietly grows. Climate change worsens, mass extinction intensifies, and natural communities collapse. Parents and grandparents fear for the futures of their children and grandchildren. Older generations approach the end of their lives worrying that they failed the younger generations. Younger generations wonder if they truly are disempowered, or if disempowerment is an illusion ensured by the apathy they’ve been labelled with.
For the most part, the desperation remains unacknowledged, unnamed, and repressed. Removed from the violence producing our material comforts and granting us the ability to live in a place like Park City, many never feel the desperation. Those who do doubt the authenticity of their intuition and wonder if the desperation is a sign of mental illness, proof that something is wrong with them, or a character flaw. When the desperation is expressed, those who point it out are called alarmists, conspiracy theorists, and sensationalists. When the reality described is too obvious to ignore, those who describe it are accused of causing paralysis and depression.
Nevertheless, the planet’s health is critically threatened. And, things are getting worse. We must act urgently and decisively. For those of us who know this, the question becomes, “How do we encourage others to act with the necessary urgency and decisiveness?”
***
In 2012, the Summit Land Conservancy published the second edition of Park City Witness: A Collection of Essays and Artwork Celebrating Open Space. In her introduction, Cheryl Fox – Executive Director of the Summit Land Conservancy – wrote, “Today we face unprecedented challenges to our natural environment. Solving this problem is the moral challenge of our century. The question we must ask is not ‘what can I do?’ but ‘what is the right thing to do?’”
I completely agree with her. Several months before I read her words, I wrote in my essay “Park City is Still Damned,” “Don’t ask, ‘What can I do?’ Instead ask, ‘What needs to be done?’”
So, what is the right thing to do? What needs to be done? Ms. Fox concluded her introduction with, “I encourage you to read this book. Then go out to the trails, the mountains, the creek that you have helped to save. Watch for angels or demons and the messages they send, and then bear witness…”
It’s been five years since Summit Land Conservancy published its celebration of open space in Park City Witness. In that time, the list of the indicators of ecological collapse has only grown longer. Witnesses, testifying in court, take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There are angels on the trails, the mountains, and in the creeks. But, there are demons, too. If we only bear witness to beauty, to optimism, and to celebration, we are liars. Telling the whole truth demands that we confront the demons, no matter how horrifying they are.
I have devoted my writing career to two principles: The land speaks. And, I have a responsibility to communicate what the land says as best I can. I hear the land speak of beauty. I also hear the land speak of horror. In Park City, while most writers and most artists focus on stories of beauty, who will confront the stories of horror?
We need new Park City witnesses. I cannot ask anyone to do what I myself am not willing to do. So, I commit, publicly, to being a new Park City witness. One who lives as honestly as possible with two realities. There is beauty and there is horror. The horror will consume the beauty if it is not confronted, described, and resisted.
To give my commitment substance, I have acquired a reliable vehicle, spent weeks researching, cleared my schedule, and formed a plan to visit places in Park City and across Utah where horror threatens to overwhelm beauty. These are places like the planned site for the Treasure Hill development, the Uintah Basin, oil refineries in North Salt Lake, the White Mesa uranium mill, and the coal mines in Price. My experiences will form a place-based series. Each essay will grow organically from the natural community it is written from. I welcome community discussion, comments, and feedback. The Deep Green Resistance News Service has graciously agreed to publish the writing this journey produces and you can follow along here. Please feel free to contact me.
My purpose is simple: In each place, I will search for beauty and I will search for horror. Then I will ask of that place, “What do you need?” I will listen for as long as I need to, knowing that the land rarely speaks in English and rarely observes a time recognizable by common human patience. After this, I will write. I will write as honestly as possible.
I hope to give a voice to those who feel the desperation. I hope to comfort those who feel crazy for the intensity of their concern. I hope to demonstrate that their concern is justified. I hope to catalyze the courage we so desperately need to resist effectively.
I hope to be a new Park City witness.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
