My nephew is two-and-a-half years old. His language capabilities are exploding, and he is growing fast. Like most toddlers, he is a wellspring of boundless energy and pure love. On our walks through Pacific Northwest forests, I’ve been teaching him which trees are cedar and which are maple. He loves birds, particularly crows. The first word I ever remember him saying was “caw!”
And like most kids — including me, when I was his age — he is fascinated with trucks, as well as with cranes, trains, ships, with all things mechanical and moving. The other night, I read him the old Mike Mulligan and his Steamshovel book with worn corners and fading colors — the same copy my own aunts and uncles read to me 30 years ago.
Today, my sleepy little nephew, preparing for a nap, asked me to read him another story. He handed me a book all about construction equipment: bulldozers, excavators, cement trucks. I sat next to him, singing the words of the book to lull him to sleep as he sucked his thumb and blinked his tired eyes.
I flipped from page to page. Each one was covered in beautifully drawn, anthropomorphized machines, finishing their work at the construction site and falling asleep one after another. Soon he fell asleep, and I quietly crept out of the room, thinking about toddlers and machines.
Why are trucks so exciting to a kid? Perhaps it is obvious: they are loud, big, fast, complex, powerful. There is the element of danger. Adaptively, there must be a survival advantage for children who are curious about loud, large, fast beings and objects.
There is a tragedy in this. The fascination that my nephew today directs towards trucks, in the past would have been focused on native megafauna — herds of bison, wolf packs, grizzly bears, whales, eagles — and on their habitat: raging rivers and waterfalls, towering old growth forests, slow grinding glaciers.
These were the big, powerful, mobile beings of previous generations. And they are gone now, or confined to small mountain fastnesses. We no longer grow up in relationship with wild beings, and this fascination with trucks could well be a misappropriation of the adoration our animist ancestors would have directed towards our animal kin
What better way is there to learn to be human than to relate to others who are both profoundly similar to you, and at the same time profoundly different?
Today, most children only see megafauna caged in the prison conditions of zoos, or on the same screen that brings them cartoons and special effects. The megafauna of human habitat has been replaced by mecha-fauna.
This breaks my heart.
Well-known Native American rights advocate and author Vine Deloria Jr. once said that most westerners experience nature as “an aesthetic experience,” in contrast to most Indigenous people who develop relationships with the natural world, including with specific wild places, species, and individuals.
Our ancestors made seasonal rounds and daily journeys to gather berries and edible plants, to hunt and fish and preserve food, to trade and meet with distant friends and family. As they traveled, they would have passed megafauna regularly — perhaps on a daily basis. Some of these kin would be prey, others potential predator, and still others simply neighbors whose boundaries should be respected. These interactions are the foundation of relationship with place, and when paired with an ideology that values balance with the non-human world, can result in societies that persist for tens of thousands of years without significantly harming the local ecology.
Today, my nephew relates to construction cranes and skyscrapers, not to lions and jackals; to garbage trucks and girders, not kudu and camels; to city buses and cement mixers, not Siberian tigers and endless herds of reindeer.
This makes me very sad.
I will not deny him his books, of course, or his fun. One night early this winter, I carried him on my shoulders into the fringes of a construction zone, where we clambered over piled rebar and explored the cab of an excavator. It is not his fault that this is the world he inhabits. When I was a kid, my parents would take me to construction sites and sit with me to watch new skyscrapers and office buildings and houses rise from foundation to framing and beyond. It was fascinating. I do not blame them for being born into this world. And these experiences did not quash my inner animist. On the contrary, now I spend most of my waking hours either in nature or working on its behalf. These qualities, or their potential, exist in every child. They only need patient nurturing.
Richard Louv, in his book Last Child in the Woods, writes that “Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.”
So I take my nephew walking in the woods, and camping on wilderness beaches, and crawling through bushes in the backyard. I point out the birds and the plants to him, and teach them their names, and climb trees with him. In this way, I plant the seeds that may mature into an ecological consciousness when he is grown.
Perhaps these issues seem small. But we, of all people, should know that giants grow from small seeds. And perhaps if we don’t believe ourselves, we should believe our opponents.
A good friend of mine works for the Office of Recreation in Utah. A few years ago, she told me about how the far-right, typically anti-environmental state government had agreed to fund the office — but only if children’s outdoor programs were removed from the budget.
I have been thinking about this story ever since. The conclusions to be drawn from this are simple. In 2018, visitors to Utah spent nearly $10 billion and generated $1.3 billion in state and local tax revenue. Grand County alone, home to Arches National Park, hosted more than 2 million tourists. That’s 200 tourists for every resident of the county.
Tourism is big business. Taking children into nature, on the other hand, is not so profitable. Children do not buy trinkets, do not stay in hotel rooms, do not generate tax revenue. And children, unlike wealthy tourists, tend to go beyond aesthetic experiences when they are in nature. The child in nature hints at something subversive.
What are the ramifications when we take a developing child full of paleolithic genes and place them in a twenty-first century city? We don’t have to guess. We can see these consequences play out all around us. The boredom, alienation, and disconnection in childhood manifest later as selfishness and harm to self and others. Numerous studies have shown that on average, our ability to feel empathy is in a serious decline. This is one of the great tragedies of our time.
But perhaps we can reverse this trend. Perhaps, in time, we can go from mecha-fauna to megafauna once again. The famous Stanford Prison Experiment — in which volunteers were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards in a mock prison — is often invoked to demonstrate how humans will follow authority to the point of committing atrocities. But the results of that experiment — particularly the behavior of a few “guards” who showed compassion towards “prisoners” — can also be understood to demonstrate the opposite: that no matter how strongly we are coerced, how firmly we are pressured, how totally we are indoctrinated, some people will always see the truth. Some people will always resist empire.
Children in nature will not, by themselves, save the world. But if our children are totally cut off from Earth, we are surely damned. A child in nature is a beginning, a seed spreading tiny roots that one day may become the buttresses of a formidable trunk, inexorably levering up the concrete entombing our planet.
Max Wilbert is a writer, organizer, and wilderness guide. A third-generation dissident, he came of age in a family of anti-war and undoing racism activists. He is the editor-in-chief of the Deep Green Resistance News Service. His latest book is the forthcoming Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do about It. He lives in Oregon.
“The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote.“That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.”
Silent Spring, which inspired the modern environmental movement, was more than a critique of pesticides, it was a cri de couer against industrialized society’s destruction of the natural world.
Yet five decades of environmental activism haven’t stopped the destruction, or even slowed it. In those same decades, global animal populations have dropped by 70 percent. Right now, we are losing about one football field of forest every single second. Looking forward provides no solace: the oceans are projected to be empty of fish by 2048.
A salient reason for this failure is that so much environmentalism no longer focuses on saving wild beings and wild places, but instead on how to power their destruction. The beings and biomes who were once our concern have disappeared from the conversation. In their place we are now told to advocate for projects like the Green New Deal. While endangered ecosystems get a mention, the heart of the plan is “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” in the service of industrial manufacturing.
This new movement is called bright green environmentalism.
Its advocates believe technology and design can render industrial civilization sustainable, and that “green technologies” are good for the planet. Some bright greens are well-known and beloved figures like Al Gore, Naomi Klein, and Bill McKibben as well as organizations like the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and Audubon. These committed activists have brought the emergency of climate change into consciousness, a huge win as glaciers melt and tundra burns. But bright greens are solving for the wrong variable. Their solutions to global warming take our way of life as a given, and the planet’s health as the dependent variable. That’s backwards: the planet’s health must be more important than our way of life because without a healthy planet you don’t have any way of life whatsoever.
The bright green narrative has to ignore the creatures and communities being consumed. Take the Scottish wildcat, numbering a grim 35, all at risk from a proposed wind installation. Or the birds dying by the thousands at solar facilities in California, where concentrated sunlight melts every creature flying over.
Or the entire biome of the southern wetland forest, being logged four times faster than South American rainforests. Dozens of huge pulp mills export 100 percent of this “biomass” to Europe to feed the demand for biofuels, which bright greens promote as sustainable and carbon-neutral. The forest has a biological diversity unmatched in North America, lush with life existing nowhere else and barely hanging on. This includes the Southeastern American Kestrel. They need longleaf pine savannahs, and longleaf pine have been reduced to 3% of their range. The kestrels depend for their homes on red-cockaded woodpeckers, who exist as a whisper at 1% of historic numbers. Last in this elegiac sample is the gopher tortoise. Four hundred mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects cannot survive without the protective cover of the burrows dug by tortoises, tortoises now critically endangered. All these creatures are our kin: our fragile, wondrous, desperate kin, and environmentalists would have them reduced to pellets, shipped to Europe, and burned, while calling their slaughter “green.”
Facts about renewable energy are worse than inconvenient.
First, industrial civilization requires industrial levels of energy. Second is that fossil fuel — especially oil — is functionally irreplaceable. Scaling renewable energy technologies like solar, wind, hydro, and biomass, would constitute ecocide. Twelve percent of the continental United States would have to be covered in windfarms to meet electricity demand alone. To provide for the U.S.A.’s total energy consumption, fully 72% of the continent would have to be devoted to wind farms. Meanwhile, solar and wind development threaten to destroy as much land as projected urban sprawl, oil and gas, coal, and mining combined by 2050.
Finally, solar, wind, and battery technologies are, in their own right, assaults against the living world. From beginning to end, they require industrial-scale devastation: open-pit mining, deforestation, soil toxification that’s permanent on a geologic timescale, extirpation of vulnerable species, and use of fossil fuels. In reality, “green” technologies are some of the most destructive industrial processes ever invented. They won’t save the earth. They’ll only hasten its demise.
There are solutions, once we confront the actual problem.
Simply put, we have to stop destroying the planet and let the world come back. A recent study in Nature found we could cut the carbon added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution in half by reverting 30% of the world’s farmland to its natural state. This would also preserve 70% of endangered animals and plants. This is the lowest of low hanging fruit when it comes to combating climate change and healing our planet. Everywhere there are examples of how the wounded are healed, the missing appear, and the exiled return. Forests repair, grasses take root, and soil sequesters carbon. It’s not too late.
The green new deal has reforestation as one of its goals, but it’s not the main goal, as it should be. If environmentalism is going to help save the planet — and if it’s going to respond to global warming commensurate with the threat — it needs to return to its roots, and remember the love that founders like Rachel Carson had for the land. We need to pledge our loyalty to this planet, our only home.
There’s no time for despair.
Wildcats and kestrels need us now. We have to take back our movement and defend our beloved. How can we do less? And with all of life on our side, how can we lose?
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert are the authors of the forthcoming book, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. The book will be available March 16th, but you can pre-order to your local bookstore or library via IndieBound now.
In this piece, the author describes how to build relationship with a local species of plant to reconnect with ancient traditions and rejuvenate yourself in these challenging times.
All of the images in this post were taken by the author.
by a resident of the Willamette Valley
I live in the Willamette Valley, Oregon, my home for the last forty-plus years. My heritage is European by way of California, or, another way of saying it, is a settler heritage. Although all people’s biological heritage can ultimately be proudly traced to ancestors who used plant technologies, for example ropemaking and basketweaving, for sustainable ecological living, the heritage of Europeans on the North American continent is one of invasion. Now that the descendants of European settlers, like myself, are realizing the importance of ecological ways, it seems only appropriate that we help to prune back the invasive Himalayan blackberry even as we prune back the excessive ways of life that the European settler culture continues to extol.
For more information about the ties between basketry and tending of the land, see this video about native American basketry in contemporary California, as well as ethnohistorian David Lewis’ blogpost about the history of the Kalapuyans, the home tribe to the Willamette Valley.
The Willamette Valley has been home to the Kalapuyan tribes for at least the last 8 to 10 thousand years, and the Kalapuyans have a long history of techniques with rope making and basketry with this land. As ethnohistorian David Lewis writes in his blogpost “Kalapuyans: Seasonal LIfeways, TEK, Anthropocene” the Kalapuyan people used a variety of plants:
“From the rushes would be woven baskets and clothing and tools for the Kalpuyan households. Tule and cattails would be made into mats for a variety of uses. Cedar is the wonder plant, the bark could be woven into all manner of products, including waterproof clothing and hats, the wood was used for making plankhouses. Bark and wood could be harvested from living trees. Large fallen trees would be made into canoes. Dogbane was twisted into cordage, rope.”
For more on the Native American tradition of basketry, see the California Indian Basketweavers Association’s website.
Ground yourself by interacting with local plants.
Regardless of our biological or cultural heritage, we can tend the land in contemporary Oregon by pruning back the abundant blackberry, thereby reducing the use of pesticides to control blackberry, while also obtaining an amazing basketry material. We can make rope using the same technique as humans have since time immemorial, but using the blackberry plant. You can use the Himalayan or native blackberry; although Himalayan is much more common, neither is endangered. It is prolific and strong, making it a great material to practice weaving with. The blackberry bark can be braided and twined to be used for baskets.
#1 The ease of peeling the bark will vary according to season and how wet the season has been.
I have personally found that I can harvest this material since I started trying to, which was Summer of 2020-now, Winter 2020, but it was much harder in the end of July, when the weather had been dry for quite awhile.
#2 Take hold of a blackberry vine with one leather-gloved hand.
With your other hand, scrape off the spines and leaves with a stick.
#3 Cut the blackberry vine off at the base and split the vine lengthwise.
You can either use a knife to get it started and carefully work the vine apart with your hands, or you can kind of whittle it in half for the whole length of the vine.
#4 Remove the pith.
To do this, you will break the pith backwards in 1 to 2 inch pieces, rocking the pith back and forth before as you completely remove it from the vine so as to leave as many of the inner fibers on the vine bark.
#5 Once you’ve removed most of the pith, you now have material that is ready to use.
Coil the bark with the outer bark facing the inside, so that as it shrinks it will stay even, and tuck the end under.
You can store it, to rehydrate it later in a bucket of water or a wet towel, or use it right away. Good job! For project ideas to make with your bark see below.
Make a rope
To make rope, fold your blackberry bark in half. Rope is made by twisting the top strand of fiber away from you…
…and then bringing that twisted strand towards you and over the other strand, gripping the other strand so that they will securely change places.
After my left thumb and forefinger have inched forward to secure the twist (see above), my right hand can let go of the strand it just twisted and start twisting the new top strand, repeating the process (see below). This locks the two strands together with a technology that dates back more than 17,000 years. This is also called making cordage, or making a 2-ply fiber.
For four-stranded braiding
Label your four strands 1, 2, 3, and 4 from left to right.
To start, cross strand #2 over strand #3.
Then cross strand #4 over strand #2…
…under strand #3…
…and then turn and bring #4 back over strand #3.
Now do the same but starting from the other side, relabeling the strands as they now lie left to right #1-#4.
Take strand #1 and cross it over #2.
Take #1 under #3…
…and back over #3.
And repeat again, taking what is now your far righthand strand and bringing over it’s nearest neighbor…
…under the next one…
…and then back over the one it just went under.
This was a very loosely done braid for demonstration purposes, but with your own you can tighten it up as desired. Good luck!
To make a basket
You will need lots of lengths of blackberry bark. Take four one-foot lengths of bark and interlace them, over under, with four additional one-foot lengths of blackberry bark. If your bark has dried, you will need to soak it in a wet towel or bucket of water to rehydrate. Take a thin strand of blackberry bark and twine in front and behind of each spoke to stabilize your plaited square. To do this you will hook the middle of your thin strand around one of your middle spokes, it doesn’t matter which side you start on. You will take the left hand piece of your thin twining strand and pass it over the spoke it encircles and then behind the next spoke bringing it down towards you again. Repeat with your new left hand strand, always bringing the two strands back to home position which is facing towards you like an upside down “U” that curves around one of the spokes. As you move to a new side, you will rotate the square so that the strands are always pointing towards you.
After one or two rounds of twining, you will flip over your square and put a glass bottle whose bottom is the same size as your square on top of your work. Bend the spokes up around the glass bottle as you go, continuing to twine in the same direction, but now on the outside of your basket with the same in front, behind pattern. The featured image shows the side pattern, called twining, and the bottom pattern, called lattice.
A gold mine project in Veracruz that has run into local opposition envisions a low CAPEX, simple heap-leach open pit mining operation targeting approximately 100,000 ounces of gold production annually. Gold reserves at the project are estimated at 575,000 ounces which assures high pollution and destruction of the land in order to yield as much of the precious metal.
A new gold mine in Veracruz, Mexico, will be the first one in the world to be opened only two miles away from a nuclear reactor and from many pipelines – all in the middle of a densely populated, touristic area that is also the most important migratory route in North America. These are some of the main reasons why local activists are strongly opposing the project.
A History of Colonial Extraction
Mexico has a long mining history. Before the conquest, gold and silver were sought mainly to make jewelry and offerings. Tin, lead, and copper were also mined in the state of Michoacán after the Purembes (Tarascans) found a way to extract and work it. All these minerals were used to make certain tools, utensils and weapons.
But the history of extractivist mining in Mexico begins with the Spanish invasion. Most of the mineral resources were exported to Spain, and it is stated in the General Archive of the Indies (an important Spanish colonial archive housed in Seville, Spain) that 185,000 kilos of gold and 16,000,000 kilos of silver arrived in Spain from America between 1503 and 1660 alone.
“La Paila” and Other New Projects
Despite the efforts of the Spanish crown, however, Mexico still retains vast mineral wealth, and there are currently 21 mining projects about to start up. The project that concerns us was once known as “Caballo Blanco” and now as “La Paila,” which is the name of the hill where the project is to be located. This would be an open-pit gold mine on the hill of “La Paila” in the municipality of Alto Lucero, Veracruz.
The mining company is a subsidiary of the Canadian Candelaria Mining Corp., which reports that it has 12 concessions on 19,815 hectares of land (roughly 76.5 square miles) for the main project. The company has also identified four “high priority targets” for further exploration in the surrounding area: Bandera Norte, Bandera Sur, Las Cuevas, and Highway North. If permits for these additional projects are approved, it would significantly increase the footprint of Candelaria’s activity in Veracruz.
Impact of Extraction
To operate just one of these projects, thousands of liters of water are required for the leachate lagoon. These are the waste products of the process. They remain in the tanks and contain cyanide, sulfuric acid, mercury and other solvents that will be used to obtain 0.03 grams of gold for each ton of soil. Gold is associated with quartz rocks that must be ground, placed in large mounds, and washed with water mixed with cyanide. This represents a great risk for the populations living downstream from the mine. In addition, the water used for these projects is extracted from the nearby aquifers, leaving the local populations without water.
To extract the rock, large tajos (quarries) are opened that will remain there permanently. Such a process gives no thought to the layer of soil and vegetation that have to be destroyed in order to open these large holes in the earth, leaving a lunar landscape in which life would be impossible.
According to research presented in 2015 in La Jornada Ecoloógica, the following is necessary in order to obtain one ounce of gold, or what is contained in a “US Golden Eagle”:
extraction of 150 tons of rock
40 kilos of explosives (enough to demolish a five-story building)
processing of 25 to 50 tons of earth leached with cyanide solution
release into the environment of three kilos of cyanide salts (enough to kill 60 thousand people)
consumption of 100,000 to 150,000 liters of fresh water (enough to provide services to an average family for one year)
consumption of 1300kws of electrical energy (enough for an average family for a month)
consumption of 450 liters of fossil fuels to maintain water supplies and move mine equipment
emission of 650 kg of CO2 into the atmosphere along with other greenhouse gases such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide
The researchers also report that this type of project offers only 15 person-hours of income to the region, or “the salary of one person working for two days” (La Jornada Ecoloógica 200, August-September 2015).
Meanwhile, over a 20-year period, a gold mine uses 500 thousand tons of explosives, or roughly 40 percent of the explosives used in World War II. And in this case, those explosives would be used at a distance of only three kilometers from the Laguna Verde nuclear plant and two kilometers from five gas pipelines that pass through the region.
Ecological and Cultural Destruction
The area around the “La Paila” project is also an important migratory corridor known as “el rio de rapaces” (“the river of raptors”). It is the migratory route of hundreds of raptor species that travel between Canada and Central America, as well as a large number of hummingbirds and butterflies. In addition, there are 51 endemic and endangered species that live in this area year round.
There is also a community of 1231 cycads, which have an estimated age of between 2,000 and 3,000 years and are the oldest living vegetation in Mexico. These kinds of large-scale mining projects also have disastrous repercussions for the historical heritage of the region. In this case, the archaeological heritage of Quiahuixtlan and its surroundings would be destroyed.
And all this without even mentioning the 87 communities that would be directly affected by the project through the destruction of agriculture, livestock and fishing in the region.
We would be left without land, without water, without vegetation, without animals, and without spirit.
In these brief series, Max Wilbert explores the #ThackerPass Litium Deposit in Humboldt Count, Nevada which will serve as a lithium clay mining development project proposed by the Nevada government and federal agencies. This project will compromise the flora, fauna and streams of the area just for the sake of “clean” energy and profit.
This is the first video dispatch from my trip to the area of two proposed lithium mines in Nevada. I’m working to build awareness of the threats these projects pose and resistance to them. I’ll have more to share next week.
This video comes from the top of a ridge directly to the east of the proposed Rhyolite Ridge open-pit lithium mine in Southern Nevada. After arriving by moonlight the night before, I scrambled up this rocky ridge in the dawn light to get an overview of the landscape. Everything that you see here is under threat for electric car batteries.
This is habitat for Tiehm’s buckwheat, cholla cactus, sagebrush, rabbitbrush, prairie falcon, desert bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, jackrabbit, ring-tailed cat, and literally hundreds of other species.
Is it worth destroying their home and their lives for electric cars?
This is the traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
What killed 14,000 critically endangered buckwheat plants at the site of a proposed lithium mine to supply critical minerals for the so-called “green” electric vehicle industry?
This video reports from Rhyolite Ridge in western Nevada, traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
Was it rodents, or was it vandalism? Climate catastrophe or eco-terrorism?
Benjamin R. Grady, the President of the Eriogonum Society, said in a letter that “As distasteful as it is to consider, intentional human action may have caused the demise of thousands of E. tiehmii individuals over the course of two months from July to September 2020. Having studied this genus since 2007, I have visited hundreds of different Eriogonum populations across the American West. Never once have I seen this type of directed small mammal attack at any of those sites. To me, the widespread damage to just E. tiehmii plants was remarkable. The timing of this attack is also suspicious. The threat of a large-scale lithium mine has recently thrust E. tiehmii into the spotlight. This species has been monitored since the early 1990’s and this type of widespread damage has not been documented. While on site on the 23rd of September, I did not notice any scat, with the exception of a few scattered lagomorph pellets. I carefully examined uprooted plants and no actual herbivory was noticed. The green to graying leaves were unchewed and intact. Eriogonum species likely offer little reward of water or nutrients at this time of year.”
Either way, this video is a crime-scene investigation from the middle of the proposed open-pit lithium mine at Rhyolite Ridge, in western Nevada on traditional territory of the Walker River Paiute, the Agai-Dicutta Numa, and other bands of the Northern Paiute.
We don’t know what happened to these plants, but it is clear that they deserve protection. Ioneer’s plan to build an open-pit lithium mine at this site must be resisted.
Reporting from #ThackerPass#Nevada – site of a massive proposed lithium mine. Nevada government and federal agencies have fast-tracked the sacrifice of this mountainside in favor of a $1.3 billion dollar mine that could produce tens of billions in profits. Meanwhile, local streams will be polluted, Lahontan cutthroat trout spawning grounds will be smothered under radioactive sediment, Pronghorn antelope migration routes blocked, Greater sage-grouse habitat blasted to nothing, local people will have to deal with acid rain, ancient cultural sites will be desecrated, and this quiet wilderness will be turned into an industrialized zone — unless the project is stopped.
