The following press release was posted on the Gandlee Guu Jaalang (Daughters of the Rivers) Facebook Page. They are Matriarchs from the archipelago of Haida Gwaii (islands of the Haida people) who are currently upholding Haida law through the occupation of two ancient villages, Kung and Sk’aawats.
Haida Matriarchs Occupy Ancient Villages to protect against Covid-19
As people of Haida Gwaii, we uphold our responsibility as stewards of the air, land and sea. The Haida assert our inherent right to safety and food security in our unceded lands and waters.
As a matrilineal society, the Gaandlee Guu Jaalang, “daughters of the rivers”, are the Haida women who have the responsibility to protect Haida Gwaii.
After several community meetings, as of July 9th, 2020, Gandlee Guu Jaalang are upholding Haida law through the occupation of two ancient villages, Kung and Sk’aawats. The Haida people are asserting our inherent rights, according to our traditional ways, and ensuring food security during this global pandemic.
Following Haida leadership and the local state of emergency (SOE) the Gandlee Guu Jaalang must protect the health and safety of our people. Most island businesses have adhered to the SOE and have remained closed to non-residents during the Covid-19 pandemic. We have asserted that Haida consent must be provided before opening the island.
Two luxury sport fishing resorts have disrespected Haida law and jurisdiction putting island residents at risk. Queen Charlotte Lodge (QCL) and West Coast Fishing Club have reopened without Haida consent. This means plane loads of non-residents are coming to our islands and potentially exposing island residents to Covid-19. Previously, QCL has catered to predominantly wealthy American clientele. Haida Gwaii is a remote community with limited health care services and only two ventilators on all of Haida Gwaii. One case would devastate our communities.
The daughters of the rivers will peacefully occupy our homelands with children, Elders and island residents. Our people will exercise our right to food sovereignty and continue occupation. Our Haida leadership have been consistent in keeping our communities safe and have processes in place to assess reopening the islands. All businesses must respect these processes. These luxury fishing resorts must respect Haida law and receive consent before reopening.
Eighty to 95 percent of the Haida people were wiped out by the smallpox epidemic purposely introduced to Haida Gwaii to destroy our people. We plan to survive this pandemic at all cost.
The United States of America was founded on stolen land. The legacy of violence, discrimination, and criminal disregard for indigenous people continues today.
April 7, 2020
The undersigned Indigenous peoples and organizations write this letter to denounce the discriminatory response to COVID-19 and express our deep concern of the situation faced by hundreds of thousands of diverse Indigenous peoples of the immigrant community in the United States (U.S.), those in detention centers under the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), those survivingin makeshift camps on the northern Mexico border under the U.S. government’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), who are being systematically excluded in the COVID-19 pandemic response mechanisms.
We recognize that the global COVID-19 pandemic is affecting people indiscriminately. However, we highlight that the most vulnerable are the most affected and devastated by this pandemic: those living inextreme poverty and chronic malnutrition who are unable to access or pay for medical care, the undocumented, and those with limited English and/or Spanish languages, as they cannot understand the information about COVID-19 and/or express their medical and financial needs during this pandemic.
The lack of recognition of our Indigenous identity and the exclusion of our languages at the local, national, and international levels puts our lives at risk, threatens the survival of our People, and violates our rights of self-determination, autonomy and to be free from any kind of discrimination.
Language exclusion is illegal due to Executive Order 13166 regulating access to services provided to Persons with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) by federal departments, their agencies and the organizations contracted by them.
The Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Health and Human Services (HHS), and The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) of The United States Department of State (DOS) program etc., are excluding our peoples and communities at the Southern border and throughout the U.S.
Specifically, the rights established in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), describe the minimum human rights standards such as the right to revitalize and use our languages (Art. 13), establish and use the media in our own languages (Art. 16), the right to better economic and social conditions, such as health, (Art. 21) and the right to determine and develop priorities in all areas, including health (Art. 23).
We are deeply concerned that these minimum standards are not met and as a result, our peoples are being excluded from essential information and services to survive the Pandemic.
The continued lack of information in Indigenous languages predisposes our peoples, an already extremely vulnerable group, to more difficulties and health impacts. We face the exclusion of our Indigenous languages, as well as the lack of recognition of our existence, resulting in dangerous consequences for our peoples and our survival. As background, the deaths of five Maya children at the facilities of the Border Patrol (BP) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) before the pandemic indicates, unfortunately, what wecan expect.
Faced by this situation, we Indigenous peoples and organizations are organizing and articulating efforts to respond to the needs and priorities of our peoples in our own geographic regions and at the national level. Asan example, we are creating materials in Indigenous languages with Public Service Announcement videos on notices, public services, and information about COVID-19, printed materials, and cards that identify our primary language (I speak cards).
However, we are deeply concerned that our peoples, who constitute a large majority in the public services sector in urban and rural areas (for example, agriculture, construction, domestic services, and cleaning); mostly undocumented, without health insurance and those living in poverty, are not being adequately informed about resources and services at this time. For example, being informed of where to find food and health centers and/or access to computers for distance learning for their sons and daughters in their respective locations. We are concerned that most members of our community are unable to benefit from local, regional and national programs and services due to their legal status.
We express our outrage because in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, our community continues to suffer deportations, family separations, immigration raids, and the lack or null attention in cases of people in detention with contagion of the virus under the responsibility of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The criminalization of our communities will only increase fear and panic and will unnecessarily contribute to dangerous conditions resulting in the further spread of COVID-19 perpetuating genocide against Indigenous peoples, a genocide that has a long and dark history in the United States, and throughout the Americas.
FACED BY THIS SITUATION, WE REQUEST THE SUPPORT TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND ORGANIZATIONS, ANDTOOUR INDIGENOUS PROPOSAL BEFORE COVID-19
First, that the local, municipal, state and federal governments consult with our organizations and peoples to learn about our existence and needs.
Second, that the different government agencies support strategies already led by Indigenous peoples rooted in our experience and knowledge of the needs and priorities identified by our own peoples and communities.
Third, financial support:
Any legislation to provide COVID-19 relief and the benefits derived from such legislation must be accessible to Indigenous peoples.
The Interpretation of COVID-19 services and benefits legislated by Congress at the end of March 2020 in Indigenous languages.
Technical support to our organizations for our Educational Campaigns on COVID-19.
The creation of a communication mechanism / platform such as a telephone line and a website aimed for Indigenous peoples in priority languages so that they are aware of the resources available to them.
Fourth, the assignment of contact people between government agencies and our organizations to support prevention, mitigation, and monitoring of COVID-19, and the exchange of community and government resources.
During this time of crisis for humanity, we unite as one voice and express our concerns, but also our recommendations to meet the needs of our peoples, who survive their respective realities based in our languages, traditions, worldview and experiences.
Together, valuing and respecting the diversity of all our communities, peoples and cultures, we will be able to respond to the needs of our peoples and future generations.
LA Comunidad Ixim, Maya Collective in Los Angeles, CA
Alianza de Organizaciones Guatemaltecas de Houston
Red de Pueblos Trasnacionales/Transnational Villages Network (Pueblos Nahuas-Tlaxcalteca, Mixteco y Nahua/ Nahuas-Tlaxcalteca, Mixteco and Nahua Peoples)
Red de Intérpretes Indígenas/Network of Indigenous Interpreters (Pueblos Mixteco, Tlapaneco, Nahua, Mam, Cuicateco, and Kichwa)
Colectivo de Intérpretes Comunitarios Pixan Konob’de Champaign IL
Ben Warner relates the coronavirus pandemic to the wetiko disease, what Jack Forbes calls “a spiritual sickness with a physical vector”—the disease of colonization.
By Ben Warner
A virus has been infecting humanity for centuries and it threatens all life on earth. This virus of selfishness is named Wetiko by many indigenous Americans. It is a form of psychosis, an infection of the mind and spirit that allows the creation of this cannibalistic culture often called Western Civilisation.
“Now, were Columbus and his fellow European exploiters simply “greedy” men whose “ethics”were such as to allow for mass slaughter and genocide? I shall argue that Columbus was a wétiko, that he was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. The Native people he described were, on the other hand, sane people with a healthy state of mind. Sanity or healthy normality among humans and other living creatures involves a respect for other forms of life and other individuals, as I have described earlier. I believe that is the way people have lived (and should live). The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko as an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious.”
Although Covid-19 is not “the cure” as some misanthropes claim, it does expose some truths, allowing us time to identify the real problems and reflect on ways to build an effective resistance to solve it.
What kind of culture needs a virus that attacks the respiratory system to force it to make behavioral changes that reduce levels (in China, the UK, Australia and worldwide) of nitrogen dioxide, a gas that increases the likelihood of respiratory problems? The decline of air pollution over China is estimated to have saved 77,000 lives.
What kind of culture needs a respiratory virus to save people from choking to death on the poison it produces? A wetiko culture.
While reports of nature and dolphins returning to the ancient city of Venice were exaggerated, why did the tweet that started it become viral? Why did so many people love the idea that nature might be reclaiming one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations?
It is likely that globalized capitalism caused this pandemic. What other form of human organization would lead to a marketplace selling highly-stressed animals, thus creating the conditions for a virus to cross the species barrier? Even if the virus originated in America, as some claim, it was spread by globalized transport. What other system would create the trade links and transportation to allow this virus to spread rapidly?
There is a strong likelihood of more viruses emerging with every bit of nature we destroy. Industrial civilization is the only human culture that extinguishes biodiversity at such an unprecedented level that it makes mass pandemics almost inevitable.
In a sane and healthy culture families forced to stay at home due to a disaster would not fear violence from members of their own household. In the Wetiko infected culture we have already seen an increase of men inflicting domestic violence (worldwide, France, the UK, the USA, South Africa) on the women and children they should be caring for. This culture of dominance is one we should all reject. By objectifying every being and viewing them simply as resources to be consumed; women, forests and all of wild nature become resources to be used, abused, tortured and killed.
Medical experts predicted this crisis. Governments and the ruling class knew what was coming, but did not meaningfully try to stop it. They simply planned the best way they could extract capital from it. They asked themselves how they could turn the virus and its consequences into a resource. This neoliberalcabal, includes the World Economic Forum (an organization which only represents leading global companies) and, which is now in partnership with the United Nations and World Health Organization. The response to this crisis is being controlled by global corporations. Do you think they care about you, or their profit margins?
The global elite tell us “we are all in this together.” If that is true then why did Prince Charles and Boris Johnson get tested when displaying mild symptoms? Meanwhile our nurses and doctors remain untested. The authorities are using this pandemic as an excuse to take away our rights and force us to comply with their agenda. How exactly have the authorities provided the services you need?
Consequences of Economic Shutdown
The community-strengthening sectors such as; arts and culture, local markets and small businesses have been forced to close and are unlikely to survive. They could be taken over by multinationals or simply disappear. Sectors that serve capital (finance, big tech, mining, construction, energy, industrial agriculture etc.) either continue unabated with their destruction or will be revived and bailed out when the lockdown ends. In fact promises of bailouts have already started.
Working class people cannot work from home. They have to work to stock the supermarket shelves and make sure we have food to eat. Most of these people are women, so once again, poor women will suffer the most. The majority of the global poor do not have access to healthcare and are starving to death amid food shortages (the Philippines, India)
It is likely that after this pandemic, governments and the global elite will implement the green new deal. This will not benefit the environment nor will it benefit poor communities. It will benefit the corporate sector. What is happening currently may have far reaching implications; we may never return to normal. We are already seeing countries pass laws to force medical treatments on patients who do not want them. In some countries (e.g. Sweden) there has already been microchipping of people. It is voluntary at the moment, but for how long? Elsewhere there is evermore increased, intrusive surveillance. People are being fined thousands of dollars for simply leaving their homes. Some medical professionals are advocating for infrared-visible tattoos for those who have been vaccinated—a procedure with unknown effects on health and privacy. Could we see governments make this compulsory?
It is hardly surprising that with at least 200 species going extinct each day we are fast approaching the 6th mass extinction. What else can we expect from a culture ruled by psychopaths?
Covid-19 provides the privileged with a frightening glimpse of what many face in the present and what we are very likely to face on an increasing scale in the future. Panic buying, massmigrations, starvation, reduction or complete loss of civil freedoms, social unrest and nations switching from fake democracies (inverted totalitarianism) to outright dictatorships. As species extinction, soil depletion and climate change continue to accelerate we could all face a more extreme version of this.
What Can We Do?
In this culture, there are people who value (and hold) power and money over relationships and love. By taking a bird’s eye view we can remember the importance of building communities and take decisive, effective action. Those of us who value relationships and love rather than money and power need to prepare ourselves. We need to help others prepare. While the media propagates panic, we need to organize collectively.
We must engage with every form of effective resistance. We need to talk with each other. We need to be united. We must collaborate with others whenever we share a common goal. Here are some specific examples.
Go On Strike
In late 2019 and early 2020, striking French electrical workers cut off the power to major corporations, including Amazon and government agencies. Previous French strikes have seen transport workers park trucks across the entrance to oil refineries and ports, shutting them down. We can learn from the French workers’ unions. A strategic general strike could shut down whole industries.
Build Community Defense Networks and Practice Discipline and Skills
Neighborhood organizing. The military and the police serve the interests of the ruling class. We should keep them out of our neighborhoods by forming our own defense forces and patrols. Emphasizing community safety and mutual aid. We should confront, record and prevent racist policing. This is one way to create a sense of neighborhood sovereignty. Refuse to report on your neighbors, instead help each other out. Defend small business and community infrastructure, drive out industries exploiting neighborhood land and labor, and resist corporate takeover.
Engage in Rent Strikes and Debt Strikes
The economy doesn’t need our labor, as evidenced by, the UK government paying people not to work. To continue the economy needs us as consumers. We could stop paying rent and paying off our debts. We could boycott the economy altogether and provide for our own needs from a land base. We have the collective power to take down the economic system.
Create Mutual Aid Systems and Local Food
We could grow food together, providing for others in our neighborhoods. Get to know neighbors in person. We need to abandon any belief that the government will provide for us and start providing for ourselves. As millions of people lose their jobs, they will see that the money economy does not serve us. This could promote opportunities to explore localized economies that do not depend on money and the global economy.
Learn and Teach Practical Skills
Offer skill shares such as food production, permaculture, maintenance and repair, crafts, direct democracy, local culture, arts and healing. All these skills can be learnt and taught. Learning together strengthens community and supports neighborhood well-being.
Raise Awareness About Political Issues and Revolutionary Analysis
Increase understanding about where political power is held, and how it is being exercised. It is in globalist institutions (World Economic Forum, World Bank, United Nations, International Monetary Fund) and Big Tech. It is not in regional, national or local governments. Power is being exercised electronically, including through surveillance, it need not be exercised overtly.
The more organized we can be in building resistance, in localizing economies, the easier it will be for everyone. Global economic collapse is inevitable. Bringing it about and/or supporting transition is important work. We can find vulnerabilities in the structure, as the French Union workers did. We can start conversations to consider the possibility of life without electricity as an option. Without it the ruling class have fewer ways to extend power over us. We could support direct action to target the electricity grid and shut down the energy industry.We could be at the point in history when revolution to overthrow capitalism is inevitable. We need to be ready.
Ben Warner is a longtime guardian with DGR, a teacher, and an activist.
Disclaimer: This article was based on information and evidence available at the time of writing. The situation is changing quickly. Please, post links to anything you believe is relevant in the comments section, so the article can be updated as necessary. The links and questions in this article invite you to seek answers for yourself, engage critical thinking and investigate. You may not agree with everything. However, now more than ever, we need to collaborate and unite for revolutionary change, whenever and wherever we can.
There is a family of bacteria dwelling in soil, in water.
Some reside in the bodies of cows. Humans domesticate cows, for meat, milk, labor.
Cows are corralled in large groups, in small spaces, near to human settlements. The bacteria, disturbed by the upset of their microbial life-ways, shift their behavior. Now they move quickly between cows, they become more aggressive. Cows get sick.
Increased human-cow contact allows bacteria to pass from bovine into human bodies, and adapt to their newfound hosts. Humans build cities, into whose crowded centres ever more people migrate, to live breathing a grey swill of fumes, eating poorly, labouring to exhaustion in cramped, lightless, unventilated factories.
Going home to rundown tenements on piled garbage streets. It is the dawn of the glorious new Industrial Age, and in their great cities, humans are coughing blood. A bacterial disease is diagnosed: tuberculosis.
Over a century later, it continues to quietly fell over a million of the world’s poor each year.
There is a virus in the bellies of wild ducks, harmless to the birds. As ducks fly pond to pond they shed the virus into water, infecting other birds, who fly to other ponds, infecting yet more birds.
Humans domesticate ducks and begin raising them in captivity. Birds in cages have no ponds to fly to, so the virus cannot reproduce itself as it once did—it must change its habits. It adapts.
Now, it transmits rapidly between birds. It grows more virulent, since it no longer needs a living host: in captivity, healthy birds cannot flee the dying. The virus learns flexibility. It infects.
Soldiers are packed into squalid barracks, undernourished, cold and damp. Their immune systems exhausted by the stresses of combat. Outside the trenches, humans live in greater density, in closer proximity, in larger cities than ever before.
Many are recovering from immunity-battering bouts of measles, tuberculosis. A formerly innocuous bird virus spills into human bodies as a formidable pathogen. It spreads person to person across the earth’s surface until one-third of the total human population is ill. 50 million are estimated dead.
It is the Flu of 1918, the deadliest pestilence in human history.
There is a virus, its natural reservoir a small, insect-eating bat whose home is the forest. The forests are shrinking. Human cities go on expanding, there are more factories, more farms where humans store their captive legions of birds and pigs.
The bats’ habitat is fragmented by deforestation. The stress of that loss strains the sensitive animals’ immune systems, exciting the expression of a latent virus. Flying through what remains of the forest, stressed bats shed the virus. Now other animals are infected.
Humans hunt and trap wild animals and sell them at urban wildlife markets. The concentration of different animal species creates a fertile medium for viral recombination. Sustained human-animal contact grants adventuresome viruses access to human hosts.
At a wildlife market in a city with a population of millions in one of the world’s most polluted regions, a virus strays from a caged animal into a human body. Commercial air travel has made it possible for humans to cross oceans overnight.
They take with them whatever microbes their bodies harbor. A new viral disease emerges, within months it has spread across continents. The human death count steadily rises.
Covid-19 is one in a series of infectious diseases to unsettle the standard operating procedures of human societies. Disease has been civilization’s consort since our earliest history. Yet we are stunned by Covid-19, as if the concept of disease were alien—an “unprecedented event.” In a state of emergency, there is a forgetting, an attenuation of vision. Drifting out of focus goes the context of the emergency, the history, patterns, reoccurrences of emergencies. As ecofeminist philosopher Susan Griffin writes, “Whatever is in the background disappears in the focus of a gunsight.”
The mass media pandemic-panic and governments’ wartime rhetoric manipulate public perception. It amplifies anxiety, training that anxiety on an illusory “invisible enemy.” To exist in the state of emergency is torture for a public desperate for relief. So people are inclined to suspend reflection and accept the solutions handed down by those in power.
Fear disorients, distracts; it drives reactionary behavior dictated by the volatility of cortisol. Panic, once seeded, has a virality to rival any contagion. We materialize our imaginings into reality, by acting as if the worst-case scenarios have already arrived. Sirens scream. A stricken public rush to the supermarkets to prepare for imminent collapse. People panic buy toilet paper, creating a shortage. The emergency oozes through screens into everyday life as something palpable for all to experience, regardless of the facts of the outbreak. Panic intensifies, not helped by the authorities repeatedly blasting “This is an EMERGENCY”.
Responding to the emergency, politicians, intergovernmental organizations, and pundits have declared War on The Virus. The UN’s Department of Global Communications asserts, “The world faces a common enemy. We are at war with a virus.” In the United States, at the helm of “our big war,” President Trump leaps into action, militarizing the pandemic by activating the National Guard.
We are assured! We have the help of Biotech firms, hard at work on a vaccine. Billions of tax dollars paid out to prop up struggling corporations. We are assured, we will defeat this plasmid-coated adversary. The Virus will be vanquished. Crisis averted, emergency over, release the balloons, return to work, resume business as usual. Humanity has triumphed.
It is a habit of the Western mind to imagine that human existence is isolated from the natural world. That we can eat our way through the earth’s resources, laying waste to the environment without doing harm to ourselves. If the story of emerging viruses in the 20th-21st centuries has a moral, it is that human independence from the natural world is a delusion. Human health is contingent upon the health of the biosphere. When we brutalize the earth, we foreclose upon our own survival. Our actions enabled the spread of new pathogens. The structures and systems of our civilization have entrenched widespread susceptibility to infectious disease.
Anthropogenic environmental degradation is a precondition for disease susceptibility. This is evidenced by the high Covid-19 mortality rates in regions with poor air quality. Before Italy and Iran became coronavirus hotspots, they drew headlines for the deadly repercussions of unbreathable air. In China, ambient air pollution kills upwards of a million people annually.
As for the epicenters of Covid-19 mortality in the U.S, “Air Quality Health Advisory” ozone warnings are a summertime tradition in New York City. Louisiana boasts Cancer Alley. An 85-mile stretch of air-poisoning oil refineries and petrochemical plants along the Mississippi River. The same human systems that maximize vulnerability to disease make our societies unfit to respond effectively. In the U.S. the privatized, (for-profit) healthcare system has proven itself predictably useless under the pressure of a pandemic. There is no infrastructure in place for systematic testing. There are shortages of hospital beds, ventilators, nasal swabs and respirator masks. We are expected to be thankful that the biotech industry is highly motivated ( by money) to make a vaccine to save us.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government, in a bipartisan Disaster Capitalism trick lifted directly from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, has made hay while the sun of chaos shines. A $2.2 trillion package of handouts and loans will be distributed to corporations (airlines, the Pentagon and weapons manufacturers, industrial agriculture). For $1,200 each (per average-earning citizen) we are happy to subsidize corporate profiteering, warfare, environmental devastation.
The EPA has announced it will besuspending enforcement of pollution monitoring and reporting laws for the duration of the pandemic. There is no end date in sight. There is little consideration for pollution causing respiratory illness, which exacerbates the risk posed by Covid-19 . The U.S. is not alone in this. China has indicated it will be “modifying” environmental laws to hasten economic recovery now that its own Covid-19 crisis is cooling. Rejecting the panic driven amnesia, we can understand the connections now. The patterns from the present crisis to its predecessors. We can see that disease pandemics trace back to human actions and human systems. With tuberculosis and the Flu of 1918, it was the domestication of animals that spawned viral emergence. With Covid-19, it was progressive ruination of ecosystems and the commodification of wild creatures. Where we unbalance the natural world, we create ecological distress and disease. And once we are sick, it is social factors – industrialization, war, global capitalism, that raise death tolls. It was as true with tuberculosis as it was with the Flu of 1918 as it is with Covid-19.
The gravest threat to humanity is not any pathogen, but the diseased state of human civilization. Vulnerability to Covid-19 is predicted by preexisting chronicillness: diabetes, COPD, heart disease, liver disease, obesity and asthma. People with immune systems suppressed by pharmaceuticals and environmental toxins are also at higher risk. These conditions are the “diseasesof civilization”. The upshot of human lifestyles disfigured by consumer capitalism.
Chronic disease is an off shoot of patterns of industrialised labor and consumption, the foods and intoxicants with which we overload our bodies chasing “fullness” and “pleasure”. We experience an accumulation of stress in toxic environments riddled with sexism, racism, poverty and the colonial mindset: the backdrop of industrial production. Although these conditions are endemic: it is indigenous people, people of colour, women and the poor who endure thehighestincidence of affliction. The dispossessed will suffer most when confronted with infectious diseases such as Covid-19. The virus will flourish in bodies undermined by societal cruelties.
Demonizing a microbe as humanity’s nemesis scapegoats the natural world. This nurtures blindness to Covid-19’s background; the social history of infectious disease. If we pause, breathe, attempt a calmer review of context and history, what is revealed is that it is not The Virus, nor any pathogen, that threatens our continued life on earth. Human action precipitated the emergence of Covid-19. Humans razed the forests. Humans captured wild animals to sell at market. Humans squired a formerly harmless virus out into the world as a virulent pathogen. Human societies decimate the environment to glut the coffers of transnational corporations. To meet the insatiable demands of First World consumers, we collided with microbes once held within the fortifications of wild nature. Robust ecosystems. The unviolated bodies of animals. Like the virus of the hour, Junin, Machupo, Lassa and Ebola all spilled from wildlife into humans as a byproduct of deforestationand development. Novel flu strains continuously arise out of Confined Animal Feeding Operations, where humans warehouse domesticated animals in increasingly careless industrial conditions.
The world is comprised of microorganisms. To ‘wage war’ against microbes is folly. Infection and illness are inevitabilities beyond human control. So too is death. The social, cultural, structural pathologies that provoke viral emergence and needless mass suffering are our own inventions . It is in our power to remedy them. Protection from future pandemics is possible, but it’s not an antiseptic wipe, a face mask, a million ventilators, a vaccine, Medicare-for-All. It is preventing the viruses from emerging, by ending our violence against the natural world. We all, humans and non-humans, thread together within the delicate, interlacing of connections that binds us to the living earth. If we were guided by our deep knowledge of interdependence, rather than by fantasies of human detachment, we would not plunder as we do now. We would not be so reckless. We would know in our bodies that the destruction of the earth is self-destruction.
Protection from catastrophes of our own making are possible, yes, but only with a radical transformation of human civilization; the totality of global systems and institutions, including how we live and how we think. The human species will survive Covid-19, but without change, alignment to the natural world, there will be another virus, another pandemic culling of an impaired population, and another after that. One day, the earth we have blighted will have done with us.
aurora linnea is a librarian and ecofeminist pariah living near the Atlantic Ocean.
Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine in Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, but for nearly five years several local Indigenous tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. Six land defenders, known as the “Thacker Pass 6,” are currently being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and have been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with two members of the “Thacker Pass 6,” Will Falk and Max Wilbert, about the charges against them and the current state of the struggle over the construction of the Thacker Pass mine.
Will Falk is a Colorado-based poet, community organizer, and pro-bono attorney for regional tribes who co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass. Max Wilbert is an Oregon-based writer, organizer, wilderness guide, and co-author of the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It; he co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass.
In September of 2023, TRNN teamed up with award-winning Indigenous multimedia journalist Brandi Morin, documentary filmmaker Geordie Day, and Canadian independent media outlets Ricochet Media and IndigiNews to produce a powerful documentary report on the Indigenous resisters putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. Watch the report, “Mining the Sacred: Indigenous nations fight lithium gold rush at Thacker Pass,” here.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Audio Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to the Real News Network podcast. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us in Nevada’s remote. Thacker Pass. A fight for our future is playing out between local indigenous tribes and powerful state and corporate entities held bent on mining the lithium beneath their land. Vancouver based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine at Thacker Pass. But for nearly five years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. In September of 2023, the Real News Network teamed up with award-winning indigenous multimedia journalist Brandi Morin, documentary filmmaker Geordie Day and Canadian Independent Media outlets, ricochet Media and Indigenous News to produce a powerful documentary report on the indigenous resistors putting their bodies and freedom on the line to stop the Thacker Pass Project. Here’s a clip from that report,
Brandi Morin:
Rugged Serene, a vast stretch of parch desert and so-called Northern Nevada captivates the senses I’ve been trying to get down here for over a year because this beautiful landscape is about to be gutted. One valley here contains white gold, lithium, and lots of it. The new commodity the world is racing to grab to try to save itself from the ravages of climate change. Vancouver based lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine, which will operate for the next 41 years. The company is backed by the Biden administration, andout, its General Motors as its biggest investor, 650 million to be exact, but for more than two years, several local tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action BC says the mine will desecrate the spiritual connection she has with her traditional territories. And she spoken out to protected at the mine site. Now Lithium Americas is suing her and six other land and water protectors in civil court over allegations of civil conspiracy, trespassing and tortious interference. The suit seeks to ban them from accessing the mining area and make them financially compensate the company. So I just wanted to ask you about the charges that you’re facing. What are they? And when did you find out? Oh, oh man,
Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu:
I don’t even remember. Is it civil? Something trespassing and something about disobedience? I dunno. I didn’t really, I didn’t read the papers. I just threw them in a drawer. Honestly, I don’t think we’re going to be able to stop. There’s 500 lithium mines coming. I just wanted my descent on record as an indigenous mother.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Now the last voice that you heard there was Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu, one of the six land defenders known as the Thacker past six who are being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and had been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. Today on the Real News podcast, we are joined by two other members of the Thacker. Past six will Falk a Colorado based poet, community organizer, and pro bono attorney for regional tribes who co-founded the group Protect Thacker Pass. And we are also joined by Max Wilbert, an organ-based writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. Max is the co-author of the book, bright Green Lies, how the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It. And he also co-founded Protect Thacker Pass. Max will thank you both so much for joining us today on the Real News Network.
Over the next half hour, we’re going to do our best to give listeners an update on the struggle at Thacker Pass, where things stand now and what people can do to help, because this is a critical story that our audience has gotten invested in through Brandy Morin and Jordy day’s. Brilliant reporting. But before we dig into the legal battle that y’all are embroiled in with Lithium Nevada Corporation, I want to start by asking if you could introduce yourselves and just tell us a little bit more about who you are, the work that you do and the path that led you to Thacker Pass.
Will Falk:
Yeah, I’ll start. This is Will Falk like you introduced me. I’m a poet, community organizer and attorney. I think my involvement in this kind of work started in my early twenties. I had some severe mental health issues and I found that going out into the natural world and listening to the natural world was the best medicine that I could find for those mental health issues. And while experiencing that, I realized that the natural world is consistently saving my life through offering me that medicine. And of course the natural world has given me and everyone I love their lives. So at that time, feeling the gratitude from that, I decided that I would devote my life to trying to protect as much of the natural world’s life as I possibly could. That has taken me to many frontline land defense campaigns and it’s often put me in allyship with Native Americans and other indigenous peoples who are resisting the destruction of their land.
So I got involved specifically with Thacker Pass after Max explained to me what was going on there. We both have spent a lot of time in the Great Basin and it’s an ecotype and a region that we both love very much. So when we found out that they were going to put this massive lithium mine on top of a beautiful mountain pass in northern Nevada, we decided we were going to try and stop it. So we went out to Thacker Pass on the very day that the federal government issued the last major permits for the mine, and we set up a protest camp right in the middle of where they were going to blow up the land to extract lithium. And we sort of had two goals. One, we wanted to stop the mine, but two, we wanted to force a bigger conversation about whether this transition to so-called green energy was actually green and whether we can really save the natural world by destroying more of the natural world, which is what it will take to manufacture things like electric cars and electric car batteries. But my involvement in this campaign is very much based in my love for the natural world and my recognition that everyone’s wellbeing is tied up in the wellbeing of the natural world. And this new wave of extraction for so-called green energy is just going to be another wave of destruction.
Max Wilbert:
Great to be on the show, max. Thanks for having us. I’ve been following the real news for years, so it’s great to finally have a chance to speak with you. I first became aware that there was a major problem in the environmental movement around 2006, 2005 when I went to an environmental fair in Washington state where I grew up and I came across a biodiesel Hummer out in the parking lot amidst all these organizations promoting protecting salmon and protecting forests and so on. And this was in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the midst of this age where the whole nation, the whole world is grappling with empire and imperialism and war for oil. And to me, the problem with a Hummer goes far beyond the oil that’s in its tank. The problem gets to the minerals that are mine to create the Hummer, the mindset behind that that says that we need these massive individual vehicles to get around the world, the mindset of militarism and consumerism sort of wedding together in this conspicuous symbol of consumption. And so I knew at that point that there was a major problem in the environmental movement. I was just a teenager at the time. And so over the years I started to explore this more and more and started to question some of the orthodoxies around green technology as a solution to the global warming crisis and the broader environmental crisis.
I believe that these are very real and serious crises. It’s kind of unavoidable unarguable if you look at the way of the evidence and even just what we see and experience with our own eyes. But green technology as a solution is something that I really think is a problem. It emerges out of this mindset of industrial products, like things that come out of factories that you buy as the solution. And to me, I’m much more interested and I tend to gravitate towards simpler ways of living, lighter ways of living in relationship to the land that have emerged over many thousands of years in all kinds of different cultures around the world where people have had good relationships with the planet and the water and the other life around them. So when I heard about Thacker Pass, I decided to go out and take a look at what was happening out there.
So I drove down, this was in the fall of 2020. I drove down there out into the middle of the outback in northern Nevada and spent a night or two camping up at Thacker Pass. And I just fell in love with the place the sun went down and the stars came out and the Milky Way shining bright across the sky and there are coyotes howling and bats flying around, and you can’t see a single light of a building or a city or anything for miles in every direction as far as the eye can see, which is a long way from the side of a mountain in Nevada where there’s no trees. There’s nothing blocking your view. And I felt like if I don’t try and fight for this place, then nobody else is going to because we’ve seen the mainstream environmental movement get very infatuated with these ideas that technology is going to solve all our environmental problems, that it’s going to lead us into some sort of utopian future. And so none of mainstream environmental groups have really challenged the rising threat of lithium mining and similar issues. That’s when I decided, you know what, we got to do something about this. I called up Will who was one of the few people who I know who I thought might be crazy enough to join me in the middle of the winter at a mile above sea level on the side of a mountain in Nevada to protest a mine. And he said, great, when do we start?
Maximillian Alvarez:
And can you just say a little more about when and how your efforts synced up with those of people living there, the members of the local tribes who’ve come together as part of this effort to stop the Thacker Pass Mining operation?
Will Falk:
Yeah. We had been up there in Thacker Pass trying to make as much noise as we could for I think six or eight weeks when some native folks from the closest reservation to the mine, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Reservation came up and had seen some of the stuff that we put online and wanted to learn more about what the mine would do. And when they came up, that’s when we learned that Thacker Pass is a very sacred place to local native folks. It is known as Beha in the local Paiute dialect that translates to Rotten Moon in English. And the place name has contains some of the reason why Peehee Mu’huh or Thacker Pass is so sacred. And there’s oral history that the Paiutes carry that talks about a massacre, a pre-European massacre that happened in Thacker Pass where some hunters were often in the next valley hunting and some people from a different tribe came and massacred the people there.
And when the hunters came back, they found their intestines actually strung out along the sage brush, and that created such a bad smell. And the past, if you’re looking at it from lower down in the basin floor, it looks like a crescent moon. So they named it ham. We also learned through Paiute oral history and confirmed it through documents that the Bureau of Land Management themselves possessed, that there was a massacre of at least 31 Paiute men, women and children in Thacker Pass on September 12th, 1865. This was a massacre that took place as part of what’s called the Snake War. This is a war that was fought primarily between settlers and minors, encroaching on PayU and Shoshone land in the 1860s. It’s been called the bloodiest Indian War west of the Mississippi. But I’ve always found it to be incredibly ironic that there was this massacre, the American government massacred Paiute people while they were resisting mining encroachments on their land.
And that was back in 1865. Now in 2025, the American government has issued permits to a mining company to erase the evidence of that massacre by destroying the site. There we realized that no one was making arguments on behalf of Native Americans in the litigation that had been filed against the Bureau of Land Management for permitting the mine. And so no one was telling the court about all of this sacredness and the permitting process that the Bureau of Land Management used was expedited under the Trump administration. This really isn’t a Democrat or Republic can issue because Biden took credit for that expedited process shortly after he came into office. But by expediting the process, they had not actually consulted with any regional tribes about the mine. And so many native folks in the area were just finding out about the mine months after it had been permitted by seeing stuff that we were generating from Thacker Pass. But I ended up agreeing to represent a few tribes to try and insert that perspective into the litigation to explain how sacred this place was, to explain how bad the government’s tribal consultation process was and to make sure people understood that this mine, that everybody wants to be so green is actually destroying native culture.
Max Wilbert:
So there we were on the mountain side at this point. This is June of 2021 and will begins to represent one and then two of the local native tribes, the Reno Sparks Indian Colony and the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe and is filing legal briefs from his laptop working inside his car and sleeping at night in the tent out on the mountainside, very difficult conditions to work in and doing it all pro bono, basically living on almost nothing as this is just a grassroots effort. And that’s what we went into it with the mindset. This is all during Covid. It’s very hard to get ahold of people, very hard to have public meetings or events and so on. So when we went out there, we didn’t know any of the indigenous people from the area. I had some other native friends from further east in Nevada and further south in different places and called them up and said, Hey, do you know anything about Pass and what’s going on there?
But they weren’t really local people from exactly that area. And so they said, no, sorry. So we just went out and we expected that we were going to connect with local people through the process of being out in the community and on the land. And that’s exactly what happened. We were able to build a really fruitful collaboration between the fact that Thacker Pass had the initial massacre, the Bema hub massacre, then the massacre that the US Army perpetrated the cavalry in 1865, and the fact that the place was occupied by native people for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. All kinds of campsites and archeological evidence of people’s occupation on the land there. Very significant sites, places where people hunt and gather wild foods and a place where people go to this day, well, I would say to this day, but you’re no longer allowed to go there because there’s a fence that’s been built. There’s bulldozers rolling and the land is being destroyed. So all the deer have been driven away. The pronghorn antelope, the Marmot, all the wildlife that people have relied on and had these relationships with for many generations, all the plants and herbal medicines and so on are being crushed or bulldozed out of the way as well. So it’s ultimately been a pretty heartbreaking fight as well. But it’s not unusual. It’s something that we’ve seen over and over again across what’s now the United States.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So let’s talk about the Thacker Pass six and Lithium Nevada Corporation’s lawsuit against you and four other land defenders, including some of the folks that our audience saw in Brandy Morton’s documentary. So you both Bhie-Cie Zahn-Nahtzu, Bethany Sam, Dean Barlese and Paul Cienfuegos are being charged with civil conspiracy, nuisance trespass, tortuous interference with contractual relations, tortuous interference with perspective economic advantage. So what can you tell us about the substance of these charges and about how you’re all fighting them in court?
Will Falk:
Yeah, so I think one of the first things to understand is that on, we have to go back to an actual foundational law in American extractive industries, and that’s what’s called the 1872 General Mining Law, which was a law that was passed in 1872. It was passed partially to provide cheap leases to miners as a way to pay off the Civil War debt. And what that law did was it essentially said that mining is the highest and best use of American public lands, and that’s the way it’s been interpreted since 1872. So what this means is when a corporation locates valuable minerals on American public land, and I think the United States is something like 61% public land, if a corporation finds valuable minerals on that land, the 1872 mining law gives them an automatic right to mine those minerals to destroy the land where those minerals are, to extract those minerals.
The government does not have discretion to deny permits for these kinds of mines. It doesn’t matter if the place that they’re destroying is the most sacred place in the world to native folks. So what that means is that the lawsuits that we filed that we just talked about through the tribes with the tribes, those lawsuits that we filed, they never had the capability to stop the mine definitively stop the mine. All they had the capability to do was to force the government to go back and redo some part of the permitting process like tribal consultation. In other words, there is no legal way to stop public lands mines once corporations have found valuable minerals on that land. So that meant that once the lawsuits that we had filed against the Bureau of Land Management had failed and we had exhausted ways to try and force them to go back and redo that permitting process, the only real choice that we had left to try and protect Thacker Pass and all of the sacredness there was to engage in civil disobedience. So in 2023, we went out to peacefully protest, prayerfully protest the mine, and we did in fact interfere with some of the construction. We blocked some construction equipment from coming up some roads, and we apparently Lithium Nevada decided to move its employees to work on other parts of the mine that we weren’t at. And then we were sued for those actions.
It didn’t quite meet the legal definition of what they call a slap suit, a strategic lawsuit against public participation. But it very much worked in the same way we engaged in free speech, we engaged in our first amendment rights to protest our first amendment rights to petition the government for redress. But because we delayed some of the construction equipment from accessing the site, lithium Nevada sued us and was successful at achieving what’s called a preliminary injunction against us from returning to the mine site whatsoever. And it’s really important to understand that Max and I are not native, but we were sued with four other native folks. And those native folks, they descend from people who were killed in that 1865 massacre. And this means that they can’t go back to Thacker Pass to pray for their ancestors that were killed there. They’re not allowed to go back to their own homelands to mourn what has happened to Thacker Pass, but also when you’re sued like this in civil court, mainly what they call damages, if we lose the case, what we could owe is hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on what a judge might order.
So Lithium Nevada was accusing us of things like that tortious interference stuff that you just listed out that’s a lot about, we were depriving them of fulfilling contracts with their contractors to come in and do the construction. We were forcing them to cause to spend money. These are the allegations to spend money that they wouldn’t have had to spend if we didn’t do that. So they’re asking a judge to get that money from us. But I think it, it’s really important to understand that there really is no legal recourse for fighting public lands mines. And it’s really insane where if you give mining corporations an automatic right to mine public lands and destroy sacred native land, and then the legal system also gives a corporation the power to file lawsuits against us that could cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. You’re really talking about very thoroughly quieting any descent to these kinds of projects.
Max Wilbert:
Yep. It’s a little bit of double jeopardy. And we’ve talked about this all along. We were on a phone call with BC this morning who was in the video that Brandy did, and there’s a continuum between what happened in 1865 and what’s happening today, what was happening between 1864 and 1868 was a war that the US government waged on indigenous people of Thacker Pass and the surrounding Great Basin region in order to secure access to the resources of that region for settler, colonialists and corporate interests. And that process is continuing today. Now, when people in 1865 when people tried to protect Thacker Pass from soldiers, they were massacred on mass. And today when indigenous people, descendants of those people who are massacred try to protect Thacker Pass, they’re, they’re either arrested, they’re fined, they’re barred by courts from going back to the land. And this is inherently a violent process because if those orders are ignored, then what happens is men with guns will show up and either take these people to jail or possess their assets and so on.
So this is an extended process of land seizure enclosure of what was formerly common land among those indigenous communities. It’s a process of the commodification of these landscapes. And now with the Trump administration will mention that this has been a bipartisan push that Trump in his first term streamlined the permitting for the Thacker Pass mine. So he pushed it through very quickly. Biden then claimed credit for it and decided to loan over 2 billion to the mining company and supported in all kinds of ways, including defending the project in court. And then Trump is now continuing that process. We’re seeing the removal of things like public comment periods being struck down, the environmental review process for future mining projects, which was already a very inadequate anti-democratic process that amounted to tell us what you think about this project and then we’re going to do whatever the hell we want.
Anyway, even that sort of truncated toxic mimic of a real democratic consensual process of community engagement is being completely undercut. And that’s what we’re facing in the future. Backer passes, passes being built right now. There’s literally thousands of mining claims for lithium across the state of Nevada and many more across the whole country. And we’re seeing a big expansion in rare earth mining, copper mining, iron ore mining, all kinds of different mining as well as the boom in fossil fuel extraction that we’re seeing. So it’s kind of an all fronts assault on the planet right now, and people who get in the way, endangered species who get in the way, the plan is just sweep them aside using whatever means are necessary.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and that really leads into the somber next question I had for you both and it really building off what you just said, max, this is absolutely a bipartisan effort, not just in terms of ramping up domestic mining, oil extraction use of public lands, bulldozing like the very concept of indigenous sovereignty, which is as American as apple pie, I suppose. But on top of that, we also have the closing in of the state on efforts to oppose this and closing in on and repressing the methods of resistance from Jessica Reznicek to y’all in Thacker Pass to students protesting US backed genocide in Palestine. These are being categorized as domestic terrorism. So I wanted to ask, in this sort of hellish climate, what is the status of the fight over Thacker Pass and the fight for sovereignty on indigenous lands and the environmental justice effort to halt the worst effects of the climate crisis? What does that all look like today under the shadow of a second Trump administration?
Will Falk:
Things are pretty desperate right now. I think that as you were just saying, the Trump administration especially, but I think from here on out, I think each administration is going to figure out how to silence dissent, especially around anyone who is trying to interfere with the government or corporate access to the raw materials of industry like lithium, like copper, like iron ore, like aluminum. All these things that have to be ripped from the earth to create so many things, especially the weapons and war technologies that the United States uses. That’s a connection that I think really needs to be made. If the United States is going to continue sending weapons to Israel to conduct genocide and Palestine, there’s going to be a lot of public lands resources that are used to construct those weapons. If the United States does something like ramps up for war with Iran, it’s going to be a lot of public lands that are destroyed to create the weapons that are needed to fight that war.
And so I think that as American consumption continues to grow, as resources become harder and harder to come by and consumption intensifies, every administration is going to work to silence any interference with access to those kinds of things, that is absolutely not a reason to give up. It is a reason though for us to start to talk about our tactics and whether things like lawsuits and whether politely asking our senators to change their minds about things, whether this is really going to protect what’s left of the natural world. And while it is incredibly, incredibly hard work, we have to fight, there’s really no moral, there’s no other thing to do that allows us to keep our good conscience without fighting. And the truth is, if we fight, we might lose. We probably will lose. But if we don’t fight, we have no chance of winning, and we must fight to slow as much of this destruction as we possibly can.
Max Wilbert:
Yeah, well said, will. There’s a direct relationship between the destruction of the planet and the genocide and war that we’re seeing around the world. The links that I made earlier between the Hummer, for example, the military industrial complex, mass consumerism and resource extraction, and how that plays into imperialism and the exploitation of people all around the world, whether we’re talking about in the Congo or we’re talking about here in the United States, in these sort of rural hinterland, places like Thacker Pass where people get screwed over in a completely different way, but with similarities to what we see in Serbia, in Tibet, in all of these, in Mongolia, in all of these resource extraction districts around the world. And I think that we really need to break our allegiance to industrial capitalism to this way of living, this type of economy that we’re so used to right now, it’s really difficult because my food is in the fridge right over here. I’m reliant on the system. So many of us are. But the truth is that system is killing the planet and it’s killing all of us in the end. So I think the story of Thacker Pass for us is really about a transformation away from an industrial economy that is destroying everything to something that is much simpler and more sustainable.
It is been on my mind lately that during the fight against apartheid in South Africa, that fight was being conducted through legal means with community organizing and rallies and so on. And at a certain point, the apartheid state outlawed those forms of legal above ground organizing and the movement was forced for its very survival to go underground, to become clandestine and illegal. We’re not quite there yet, but we certainly seem to be headed there rapidly in this country where even what has previously been sort of well accepted means of protest and public dissent are being criminalized. And ultimately, I don’t know where that will take us, but I think too of the old JFK quote, which wasn’t about any situation like this, but he said, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And there is a sense in which this sort of authoritarianism that we’re seeing, it leads only in one inevitable direction, which is that people will continue to fight back and resist. And we need to try and do that effectively because it’s not just principles or ideology or ideas that are at stake. It’s people’s lives. It’s our grandchildren’s future, our children’s future. It’s clean water, it’s access to the basic necessities of life, basic human dignity. All this is at stake right now and it’s imperative that we do something about it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And we here at The Real News will continue to cover that fight. And in that vein, max will, I know I got to let you guys go in a moment here, but with the remaining minutes that we have together, I just wanted to round out by asking how you and the other defendants are doing faring through all of this and what your message is to listeners out there about what they can do to help.
Will Falk:
Thank you for asking that about how we’re doing. Yeah, it’s been really scary dealing with the lawsuit and having the threat of hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines issued against us. And that’s a really scary thing, and that’s a heavy thing. It’s also, I think any sort of effective resistance is going to require us to make sacrifices, to put ourselves, our individual wellbeing at risk. And we absolutely have to do that in smart ways. But I think that it’s really important that people understand that we’re not going to save the planet without taking on big risks to ourselves and to our own wellbeing. And we can’t do this in a completely safe manner. And it’s not that we are the ones creating the unsafe conditions, but if we get effective, those in power are going to respond harshly. They’re going to respond violently. And I think this is kind of a deep, deep way to think about your question.
What can people do to help? I think one thing people can do to help is start to get clear in their own minds that no one’s coming to save us. No one’s coming to swoop in and stop the destruction of the planet. Just stop the destruction of communities. And we’re going to have to learn how protect ourselves and to create the change that we know is so massively needed. And I think that if we can really start to develop a culture, a larger group of people that understand this and don’t quit when the inevitable repression and retaliation from the government and corporations come, then we’ll have a bigger community of people that can keep doing this kind of work and the sort of loneliness that often comes with activism and social justice work. If there’s more of us who understand what that’s like, what it actually feels like to put yourself in those kinds of positions, then we’re going to be much more resilient as a resistance community. We’re going to be much stronger together. And so, yeah, my biggest thing, what can people do? Consider thinking about the fact that we are the ones that have to stand up for ourselves. Get your mind right, get your soul right to understand that it’s not going to be an easy path. We don’t get to do it and stay completely safe, but it’s absolutely something that we must do. And the more of us that can see things like that, the more we can all support each other and the more effective we can ultimately be.
Max Wilbert:
I can’t say it any better than that. Courage. If folks want to learn more about what’s happening at Thacker Pass, follow our legal case, donate to our legal support fund. You can find all that information@protectthackerpass.org. And we’re gearing up there too for the next mine, the next project. And as this legal case hopefully comes to a conclusion one way or another in coming months and years, we’ve got more work to do. And so we’re just going to be pivoting straight to that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to thank our guests Will Falk and Max Wilbert, co-founders of the group Protect Thacker Pass, and two members of the group of Land Defenders known as the Thacker Pass, six who are being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation for protesting the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine. We’ve included reference links in the show notes for this episode so you can learn more about the Thacker Pass six and the ongoing struggle there in Nevada. And before you go, I want to remind y’all that the Real News Network is an independent viewer and listener supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we never ever put our reporting behind paywalls, but we cannot continue to do this work without your support. So if you want more vital storytelling and reporting like this from the front lines of struggle, we need you to become a supporter of The Real News. Now. We’re in the middle of our spring fundraiser right now, and with these wildly uncertain times politically and economically, we are falling short of our goal and we need your help. Please go to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. If you want to hear more conversations and get more on the ground coverage just like this for our whole crew at the Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.
