by DGR News Service | Mar 15, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change, Direct Action, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling, Movement Building & Support, Obstruction & Occupation, The Problem: Civilization, Toxification
Editor’s note: In this excerpt, Samir offers an outline of the rationale for the harmful development of lithium mines. In parallel we are also offered an outline of the development of the protest camp. While we are happy that a popular outlet like Vice News is writing about our campaign, we do not agree with all of the author’s statements. DGR is strongly opposed to any kind of industrial processes like mining because they are inherently destructive to life on planet earth. Hence we do not believe that there can be a “greener” kind of industrial resource extraction.
A mining giant wants to extract lithium from the Nevada desert to power electric cars. But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without costs.
One of the largest known lithium deposits in the world has sat undisturbed under the Nevada desert for centuries. Now, a mining giant wants to extract the resource to power electric cars using a potentially harmful method.
Before bringing in its equipment, however, the company will have to go through a blockade of environmental protesters that have been camped out at the site since December.
“Like the wildlife, we hunker down when the weather gets very bad and wait for the storm to break,”
said Max Wilbert, who started the Protect Thacker Pass, the grassroots organization leading the occupation.
“But we’re not backing down. What is at stake here is the soul of the entire environmental movement.”
Right now, Thacker Pass, a section of public land stretching hundreds of acres in northern Nevada, is several environmental permits—and lawsuits—away from becoming a massive open-pit mining project run by Canada-based Lithium Americas. The metal excavated from the planned 18,000-acre site will be used to manufacture rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for electric cars.
But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without its costs:
The proposed mining process at Thacker Pass uses sulfuric acid, which could seep into the water supply. The operation also requires tapping into groundwater, which could decrease its availability. Both would impact the ecosystems of several at-risk species, like golden eagles, pronghorn antelope, and Nevada’s state fish, the Lahontan cutthroat trout.
In an effort to protect the land, dozens of protestors from across the country have posted up at the site in freezing nighttime temperatures with heated tents and portable mini-toilets. Local ranchers, concerned about the welfare of their land and water supply, have also joined the cause.
The original article can be read in full on Vice News.
For more on the issue:
Photo by Niklas Schweinzer on Unsplash
by DGR News Service | Mar 8, 2021 | Education, Movement Building & Support, Repression at Home, Strategy & Analysis
In this article Max Wilbert outlines the political and environmental need for security culture. He offers recommendations to secure communications.
By Max Wilbert
For 50 days, the Protect Thacker Pass camp has stood here in the mountains of northern Nevada, on Northern Paiute territory, to defend the land against a strip mine.
Lithium Americas, a Canadian corporation, means to blow up, bulldoze, or pave 5,700 acres of this wild, biodiverse land to extract lithium for “green” electric cars. In the process, they will suck up billions of gallons of water, import tons and tons of waste from oil refineries to be turned into sulfuric acid, burn 11,000 gallons of diesel fuel per day, toxify groundwater with arsenic, antimony, and uranium, harm wildlife from Golden eagles and Pronghorn antelope to Greater sage-grouse and the endemic King’s River pyrg, and lay waste to traditional territories still used by people from the Fort McDermitt reservation and the local ranching and farming communities.
The Campaign to Protect Thacker Pass
They claim this is an “environmentally sustainable” project. We disagree, and we mean to stop them from destroying this place.
Thus far, our work has been focused on outreach and spreading the word. For the first two weeks, there were only two of us here. Now word has begun to spread. The campaign is entering a new stage. There are new opportunities opening, but we must be cautious.
How Corporations Disrupt Grassroots Resistance Movements
Corporations, faced with grassroots resistance, follow a certain playbook. We can look at the history of how these companies respond to determine their strategies and the best ways to counteract them.
Corporations like Lithium Americas Corporation generally do not have in-house security teams, beyond basic security for facilities and IT/digital security. Therefore, when faced with growing grassroots resistance, their first move will be to hire an outside corporation to conduct surveillance, intelligence gathering, and offensive operations.
Private Military Corporations (PMCs) are essentially mercenaries acting largely outside of government regulation or democratic control. They are hired by private corporations to assist in their interests and act as for-hire businesses with few or no ethical considerations. Some examples of these corporations are TigerSwan, Triple Canopy, and STRATFOR.
PMCs are often staffed with U.S. military veterans, and employ counterinsurgency techniques and skills honed during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, or other military operations. And in many cases, these PMCs collaborate with public law enforcement agencies to share information, such that law enforcement is essentially acting as a private contractor for a corporation.
Disruption Tactics Used by Corporate Goon Squads
PMCs can be expected to deploy four basic tactics.
- Intelligence Gathering
First, they will attempt to gather as much information on protesters as possible. This begins with what is called OSINT — Open Source Intelligence. This simply means combing through open records on the internet: Googling names, scrolling through social media profiles and groups, and compiling information that is publicly available for anyone who cares to look.
Other methods of information gathering are more active, and include physical surveillance (such as flying a helicopter overhead, as occurred today), signals intelligence (attempting to capture cell phone calls, emails, texts, and website traffic using a device like a Stingray also known as an IMSI catcher), and infiltration or human intelligence (HUMINT). This last is perhaps the most important, the most dangerous, and the most difficult to combat.
- Disruption
Second, they will attempt to disrupt the protest. This is often done by using the classic tactics of COINTELPRO to plant rumors, false information, and foment infighting to weaken opposition.
During the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, one TigerSwan infiltrator working inside the protest camps wrote to his team that
“I need you guys to start looking at the activists in your area and see if there are individuals who are vulnerable. They’re broke, always talking about needing gas money or whatever. Maybe they’re disillusioned, depressed a little. Life is fucking them over. We can buy them a bus ticket to any camp they want if they’re willing to provide intel. We win no matter what. If they agree to inform for pay, we get intel. If they tell our pitchman to go f*** himself/herself, the activist will start wondering who did take the money and it’ll cause conflict within the activist groups and it won’t cost us anything.”
In 2013, there was a leak of documents from the private intelligence company STRATFOR, which has worked for the American Petroleum Institute, Dow Chemical, Northrup Grumman, Coca Cola, and so on. The leaked documents revealed one part of STRATFOR’s strategy for fighting social movements. The document proposes dividing activists into four groups, then exploiting their differences to fracture movements.
“Radicals, idealists, realists and opportunists [are the four categories],” the leaked documents state. “The Opportunists are in it for themselves and can be pulled away for their own self-interest. The Realists can be convinced that transformative change is not possible and we must settle for what is possible. Idealists can be convinced they have the facts wrong and pulled to the Realist camp. Radicals, who see the system as corrupt and needing transformation, need to be isolated and discredited, using false charges to assassinate their character is a common tactic.”
As I will discuss later on, solidarity and movement culture is the best way to push back against these methods.
Other examples of infiltration and disruption have often focused on:
- Increasing tensions around racist or sexist behavior
- Targeting individuals with drug or alcohol addictions to become informants
- Using sex appeal and relationship building to get information
- Acting as an “agent provocateur” to encourage protesters to become violent, even to the point of supplying them with bombs, in order to secure arrests
- Spreading rumors about inappropriate behavior to sew discord and mistrust
- Intimidation
The third tactic used by these companies is intimidation. They will use fear and paranoia as a deliberate form of psychological warfare. This can include anonymous threats, shows of force, visible surveillance, and so on.
- Violence
When other methods fail, PMCs and public law enforcement will ultimately resort to direct violence, as we have seen with Standing Rock and many other protest movements.
As I have written before, colonial states enforce their resource extraction regimes with force, and we should disabuse ourselves of notions to the contrary. Vigilante violence is also always a concern. When people seek to defend land from destruction, men with guns are usually dispatched to arrest them, remove them from the site, and lock them in cages.
How to Resist Against Surveillance and Repression
There are specific techniques we can deploy to protect ourselves, and by extension, protect the land at Thacker Pass. These techniques are called “security culture.”
Security culture is a set of practices and attitudes designed to increase the safety of political communities. These guidelines are created based on recent and historic state repression, and help to reduce paranoia and increase effectiveness.
Security culture cannot keep us 100% safe, all the time. There is risk in political action. But it helps us manage risks that do exist, and take calculated risks when necessary to achieve our goals.
The first rule of security culture is this: be cautious, but do not live in fear. We cannot let their intimidation be effective. Creating paranoia is a key goal for PMCs and other repressive organizations. When they make us so paranoid we no longer take action, reach out to potential allies, or plan and carry out our campaigns, they win using only the techniques of psychological warfare. When we are fighting to protect the land and water, we are doing something righteous, and we should be proud and stand tall while we do this work.
The second rule of security culture is that solidarity is how we overcome paranoia, snitchjacketing, and rumor-spreading. We must act with principles and in a deeply ethical and honorable way. Work to build alliances, friendships, and trust—while maintaining good boundaries and holding people accountable. This is the foundation of a good culture.
In regards to infiltration, security culture recommends the following:
- It’s not safe nor a good idea to generally speculate or accuse people of being infiltrators. This is a typical tactic that infiltrators use to shut movements down.
- Paranoia can cause destructive behavior.
- Making false/uncertain accusations is dangerous: this is called “bad-jacketing” or “snitch-jacketing.”
- Build relationships deliberately, and build trust slowly. Do not share sensitive information with people who don’t need to know it. There is a fine line between promoting a campaign and sharing information that could put someone at risk.
- Good security culture focuses on identifying and stopping bad behavior.
- Do not talk to police or law enforcement unless you are a designated liaison.
Secure communications are an important part of security culture.
Here are some basic recommendations to secure your communications.
- Email, phone calls, social media, and text messages are inherently insecure. Nothing sensitive should be discussed using these platforms.
- Preferably, use modern secure messaging apps such as Signal, Wire, or Session. These apps are free and easy to use.
- We recommend setting up and using a VPN for all your internet access needs at camp. ProtonVPN and Firefox VPN are two reputable providers. These tools are easy to use after a brief initial setup, and only cost a small amount. Invest in security.
We must also remember that secure communications aren’t a magic bullet. If you’re communicating with someone who decides to share your private message, it’s no longer private. Use common sense and consider trust when using secure communications tools.
Security culture also warns us not talk about some sensitive issues, including:
- Your or someone else’s participation in illegal action.
- Someone else’s advocacy for such actions.
- Your or someone else’s plans for a future illegal action.
- Don’t talk about illegal actions in terms of specific times, people, places, etc.
Note: Nonviolent civil disobedience is illegal, but can sometimes be discussed openly. In general, the specifics of nonviolent civil disobedience should be discussed only with people who will be involved in the action or those doing support work for them. It’s still acceptable (even encouraged) to speak out generally in support of monkeywrenching and all forms of resistance as long as you don’t mention specific places, people, times, etc.
Conclusion
Security is a very important topic, but is challenging. There are so many potential threats, and we are not used to acting in a secure way. That’s why we are working to create a “security culture”—so that our communities of resistance are always considering security, assessing threats, studying our opposition, and creating countermeasures to their methods.
This article is only a brief introduction to the topic of security culture. Moving forward, we will be providing regular trainings in security culture to Protect Thacker Pass participants.
Most importantly, do not let this scare you, and do not be overwhelmed. Simply take one security measure at a time, begin to study it, and then implement better protocols one by one. We use the term “security culture” because security is a mindset that should be developed and shared.
Resources:
Recommended topics of study:
by DGR News Service | Feb 22, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Mining & Drilling, The Problem: Civilization
Voices for Nature and Peace podcast features Kevin Emmerich, who was interviewed by Kollibri Sonnenblume about lithium mining. They talk about the harms caused by such mining on the unique ecology in the Thacker Pass area.
By Elisabeth Robson | Feb 17, 2021:
Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume interviews Kevin Emmerich from Basin & Range Watch about lithium mining, including the planned mine at Thacker Pass. This is an informative interview about how lithium mining works, and the impacts of lithium mining. From Kollibri Terre Sonnenblume, at Radio Free Sunroot:
The ugly truth behind the in-demand element
Lithium mining is back in the news these days, with activists occupying the site of a proposed mine in northern Nevada. (See episode 53 for my interview with Will Falk, one of the occupiers.) So I contacted Kevin Emmerich of Basin & Range Watch, to get more details about how lithium mining works, and what its ecological effects are. Basin & Range Watch is a desert defense group based in southern Nevada. They track industrial energy developments on public lands in the US southwest, and I consider them to be the premier online resource for learning about and keeping up-to-date with these projects, which include solar and wind.
Kevin & I spoke on January 30th, and we discussed the proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass; other projects at Clayton Valley and Rhyolite Ridge; the massive use of water in mining operations; the unique ecology of these sites in the desert and the Great Basin; the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan and how it was assaulted by the Trump administration; the prospects for exploitation and conservation of the desert under the Biden administration; the false choice of fossil fuels vs. “green” energy; and the importance of efficiency in reducing overall energy use and pollution.
Lithium Mining Ain’t Green, with Kevin Emmerich
For more on the issue:
by DGR News Service | Feb 20, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Direct Action, Mining & Drilling, Obstruction & Occupation, The Problem: Civilization
A beautfiul description of Thacker Pass by Will Falk | Feb 7, 2021
If you look across Thacker Pass from the shoulders of the Montana mountains, the land looks like a quilt the Double-H mountains in the south pulled up to their chin to keep warm during the cold winter nights. The hills that roll towards the valley floor are checkered with patterns. Much of the quilt, where the old-growth sagebrush persists, is an unbroken viridescent pattern. On the edges of the sagebrush, flaxen, rectangular patches of invasive grasses have sprung up from the wreckage created by the Bureau of Land Management’s clear-cutting chains. Separating the green and yellow patches, are lines of muddy brown where dirt roads have been built.
In places – my favorite places – the quilt bunches up into folds.
Those folds conceal nooks, crannies, alcoves, and cubbyholes where pygmy rabbits hide from prairie falcons, pronghorn antelope hide from rifle scopes, and I hide from the wind, sun, and the near-impossibility of stopping Lithium Americas’ open pit lithium mine.
Max and I received a second 24-hour notice to vacate Thacker Pass from BLM and the other lawyers we’ve been working with strongly advised us to heed this notice. They warned us that, if we were arrested, a federal judge would likely only release us from jail on the condition that we not return to Thacker Pass. If a judge released us on these conditions, to return to Thacker Pass would risk another arrest and more criminal charges filed against us. If we were arrested a second time, a judge would likely keep us incarcerated until the criminal charges filed against us were resolved.
We decided that being arrested when construction was not immediately imminent was not strategic – especially if it meant keeping us permanently away from Thacker Pass. Meanwhile, reinforcements had arrived who could hold down the occupation site and ensure a continuous presence at Thacker Pass. So, we decided it would be a good time to take a few days to shower and do some laundry.
The afternoon before we had to leave, I wandered down into Thacker Pass’ deepest refuge, into the rolling sagebrush hills that form the warmest section of the quilt – the same rolling hills, the same section of the quilt that will be ripped out for an open pit mine if Lithium Americas has its way.
But, I found no refuge there.
I took a dirt road still covered with the kind of old snow that preserves animal tracks the best. Rabbits, mice, kangaroo rats, sage grouses, red foxes, and coyotes had all found this dirt road useful before me. Seeing my clumsy, heavy boot tracks next to the artwork these creatures created with their feet embarrassed me. Every twenty yards or so, I stopped to study the tracks and to visualize the animal who had left them. When I saw rabbit and coyote tracks converge in the crimson of blood spilled over the cream of snow, the voices of coyotes a few hills away protested my voyeurism. Sacred predation, they insisted, is an intimate thing.
As I wandered, I tried to imagine what it would feel like if a member of each of the species represented by the tracks in the snow walked with me – shoulder to shoulder – to a grand, interspecies council organized to discuss how to stop the mine.
I came at last to the edge of an area that had been cleared for one of Lithium Americas’ exploratory water wells. The tracks disappeared before the clearing surrounding the well. The sagebrush seemed suspicious. The mud that squelched under my boots, upon determining the species my track belonged to, was eager to spit my feet out. I couldn’t blame the sagebrush or the mud. The last humans who had walked here were probably the same humans who bored a hole deep into the earth to learn how much water they could pump up from the earth and how many poisons they could pump down from the mine.
As I faced the sagebrush, they appeared to expect something from me. At first, I did not know what. Then, the harsh sounds of a heavy truck straining to haul a back-hoe up Highway 293, about a quarter-mile from where I stood, shattered the silence. The sage branches quivered. They trembled with fear.
It made me wonder: If sagebrush fear the trucks, do they know what Lithium Americas plans to do?
I began to narrate my premonitions. I saw a future where a line of trucks stretched for miles from Thacker Pass down Highway 293, east towards Orovada. The trucks screamed and screeched as they heaved back-hoes, excavators, tractors, and loads of the sulfuric acid needed to burn lithium from the earth. The air was thick with diesel exhaust. The ground shook as the machines thundered over the hills. Rabbits, mice, and rats scampered west out of the Pass through sagebrush roots only to find a new land already cleared for the hay fields in King’s Valley.
The activity so stressed a golden eagle mother that the eggshell surrounding her baby cracked prematurely because it was too thinly formed. Sage grouse awkwardly leapt from the valley floor towards the foothills, but they starved to death when they could not find enough habitat on the heights. Local coyotes – ever the survivors – howled at the horror of it all, tucked their tails, and, slunk over the ridgelines wondering when the new, pale humans would learn to listen to their trickster lessons.
The vision faded and I was left looking at the sagebrush that had gathered around me to listen to the terror I predicted. I second-guessed my decision to tell them. Perhaps it would have been best to let them enjoy the time they have left, I thought. Ignorance is bliss, after all.
As I faced those plants who I had just warned about the destruction that was coming, I wanted to run all the way back up the road to where my car was parked and drive as far away from Thacker Pass and the likelihood of her destruction as possible.
But, I didn’t run. I couldn’t run.
I don’t know if it was my own sense of honor or the mud sucking my feet into Thacker Pass that prevented me from fleeing. Finally, I asked aloud: “What do you need me to do?”
In response, my body turned wooden. My limbs became rigid. The hair on my arms and legs stood up like leaves drinking in the sun. I felt the machines through my roots first. My toes and fingers clinched at clumps of twitching soil. I felt vibrations through the bark that became my skin. Something big – bigger than anything I knew existed – was coming my way.
Then, I tasted the screams of my relatives on the breeze and through the root networks. They came as chemical messages – what scientists call “the release of volatile organic compounds” – that my sagebrush kin send through their communities when they are wounded. The screams were distant – just a trickle, at first. I started drinking different minerals to try to change my chemical composition to make myself displeasing to whoever was eating my family. But, then the shrieks saturated my surroundings. I frantically searched for new minerals, dug for deeper waters, and synthesized as much light as I could to create the strongest terpenoid compounds and volatile oils that I had used to protect myself before.
The chemical screams were being drowned out by the approaching, mechanical thunder.
I wished I was as fast as the pronghorn who sometimes browsed my branches. There was a moment when the thunder was strongest, the wind stopped, and the sun failed.
My legs cracked, my arms snapped, and the ripping began. My insides tore apart in a series of pops. I tried to grip the earth with the roots I had left but the dirt slipped through my grasp. With one final pop, everything went blank. There were no more minerals to taste. No sunlight to absorb. No water to drink. And, the chemical screams fell silent.
Back in my human body and soaking with sweat despite the cold temperature, I found myself clawing at my own guts as if they really had been torn out. When the wind mercifully blew this horror away, I found myself face-to-face again with the sagebrush.
“Stop them,” they said.
Photo by Max Wilbert
#ProtectThackerPass
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by DGR News Service | Feb 14, 2021 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Movement Building & Support, Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization, Women & Radical Feminism
In the second part of this two part series Sarah summarizes insights into the harm caused to mother earth and offers the reader sharp analysis regarding the dominant culture and what we can do to resist.
Featured image by Elisabeth Robson
Listen, I know Trump fatigue is real and people need time to recover from it. Trump fatigue was largely manufactured by mainstream media obsession. If the media had covered all of Obama’s terrible shit we would have had Obama fatigue too. Yes, Trump was BAD. But a fascist dictator? C’mon. If Trump was a fascist dictator then what do you call the president before him who dropped more bombs on innocent civilians than Trump did, deported more human beings than Trump did, who started a fracking boom? What do you call that prior president’s vice president (who is now President) who helped George W. lead the charge in invading Iraq? The U.S. military is the biggest polluter in the world! Biden has said he will INCREASE the already bloated military budget. If only Elizabeth Warren was president, she had plans to “green” the Military, lol.
There is no way to “green” industrial civilization or Imperialism.
To suggest otherwise is delusional. It’s like saying it’s better to bludgeon someone with a solar powered chainsaw, handcrafted by women in a remote African Village paid a “fair wage” than to murder someone with a gas-powered chainsaw.
Murder is murder.
Rape is rape.
Presidents are presidents: They suck. They do whatever they need to do to hold down the fort of Imperialism, including lying. Yes, Trump was unique in the number of lies he told (an average of 22 a day). This sucks because now anyone who lies less than him, like Biden, is seen as somehow honest by comparison. If it were not for Trump, Biden would be one of the most dishonest presidents ever! He lies in a similar way to Trump. In a way that the rest of us don’t lie. If they get caught in a lie, they lie more, they never apologize for the lie or the damage created by the lie. Biden has claimed he was against the Iraq war from the beginning, but records demonstrates otherwise.
“But Trump incited a riot!” you say, “He’s just SO bad!”
Biden’s Justice Department uses that riot as an excuse to rush a new “domestic terrorism” law; 14 states have moved to enact new Anti-protest laws, laws that will largely hurt groups like BLM, Indigenous water protectors fighting pipelines, and will stop “terrorists” like Max and Will. You cannot call Trump a dictator and then have Biden’s inauguration look like something out of North Korea! Biden’s inauguration speech was written by no one.
To have Lady Ga Ga come out and sing the national anthem was totally done to legitimize this presidency and this “democracy” as cool because most Americans view Lady Ga Ga as a counter cultural, trailblazing hero. She is a faux rebel. A real rebel, a real revolutionary, a real anti-authoritarian committed to real change, would have agreed to sing but when they got up there on live TV would have pointed out that the national anthem was written by a racist, slave owning, war hungry dude. The last verse of the Star Spangled Banner is now left out because of its racist content.
In the documentary about Lady Ga Ga she talks about dealing with all these high-up super powerful dickhead men in the music business industry. She recounted meetings where she felt totally objectified, felt like they expected her to be their whore, to which she replied…
“That’s not why I’m here, I’m not a receptacle for your pain. I’m not just a place for you to put it.”
Nice speech.
Maybe try applying it to the MOST powerful men in the world that had you performing the Empire’s theme song like a trained circus monkey! It is easy to see Trump as one of those music moguls, but it is disappointing that Lady Ga Ga cannot see Biden as that kind of figure as well. Just ask Tara Reade. Or Anita Hill.
J-Lo, a person whose Puerto Rican bloodline no doubt had their land stolen by White Europeans, sang Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’. Currently 98% of U.S. land is owned by white people, mostly men, so to sing this song is the height of hypocrisy. Woody Guthrie wrote that song as a kind of parody, mocking the overtly patriotic song ‘God Bless America’, and as a response to all the poverty he had seen traveling around the country. It is not until you get to the last verses of his song, that you realize his affectionate patriotism was sarcastic:
“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. The sign was painted, said: ‘Private Property.’ But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing. This land was made for you and me.
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple, By the relief office I saw my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me?”
The original sentiment Woody intended does not go nearly far enough: “this land” was made for WHITE men, this land was stolen, and this country was built with the stolen bodies of Africans. The oppression of poor whites that the song speaks to was on top of the enslavement of blacks, which was on top of the attempting erasure of Natives.
The belief that land can belong to anyone is part of our colonized thinking.
We are meant to live as PART of Her, not own or use Her. The fact that ‘Lithium America’ owns the rights to the lithium there is insane. Bolivia is home to the largest lithium deposits in the world. Evo Morales, the democratically elected president was outed in a coup with the help of the U.S. Morales refused to cooperate with international corporations wanting access to that lithium. Morales wanted the profits made from the mining to go back to the people, so he had to go. (He is back in now).
Of course it would be better for the impoverished people of Bolivia to benefit from the selling of that lithium instead of further enriching large corporations. This argument keeps us from focusing on the bigger issue of stopping the extraction. Obama said Fracking is an essential “transition” fuel. The big corporation ‘Rio Tinto Group’ told Native Tribes in Oak Flat, AZ that the copper mine they want to start there will be fine. They have damaged Aboriginal land and communities in Australia with a huge copper mining project.
We are so deprived, neglected, separated from Mother Earth.
The violence and dominance over Her has been normalized, made to seem necessary for our survival when the opposite is true. We have been bottle fed the teat of Industrial Civilization, never given the chance to bond with Her, to know a nurturing like no other. It may be too late to fully bond with Her like our ancestors did. She and we are perhaps too damaged, we should still try. We can start by asking the most difficult questions. Can we bring ourselves back from the brink of extreme distraction? Can we at least have the courtesy of being present with Her as she nurses the wounds we inflicted on Her?
As Arundhati Roy asks in her essay
“Can We Leave the Bauxite in the Mountain?”
The Lithium at Thacker Pass will allow us to continue a lifestyle that prevents us from consciously feeling the pain of what is happening to Her and to our own bodies. We must FEEL it to heal it. Mining that lithium is not about “saving the planet”, it’s about saving ourselves from feeling the outrageous pain of what we are doing. It enables us to bypass guilt and grief, so we get to feel like we are doing something good. We want to be rewarded without the work, while our Mother is being mindlessly sacrificed.
It was not until I did my walk to the Gulf that I started to understand how much car culture has shaped modern industrial humans.
It has reduced and simplified our existence in ways that disconnects us from the complexity of life. Our immersion in this complexity means it is hard to see the consequences of our actions. When you walk along highways for months as I did, you can see the devastation much more clearly. You feel the exhaust building up on your skin. You see so much small roadkill that you do not see from a car: insects, birds, snakes, toads, lizards, mice, voles.
We feel bad when we hit a larger animal, but when the little guys bite the dust we do not notice. We do not want to see or feel this shit. Our avoidance causes even more pain. I read about one study where a rubber turtle was put on the side of the road and a significant number of vehicles swerved to hit it. We have a sense that there is so much stacked pain that needs grieving, we fear it. The irony is, refusing to feel the grief will destroy us, if we do not go there TOGETHER. Recreating a culture that FEELS together is crucial. I can count on one hand, the people who feel as I do and I don’t live near any of them.
Being alone when facing complex grief and trauma can take a toll on us, and since we have no intact culture of dealing properly with our emotions many of us do not start. Climate scientist Peter Kalmus, is a mess. His wife is sick of him (as many I’m sure are sick of me). He has no cultural collective to hold him, or me in this time. I have had long-covid for 10 months now, the symptoms are debilitating. Covid is an illness caused by industrial civilization’s attack on Her, as a byproduct of ecocide. I have spent significant time involved in environmental activism and grieving the loss of Nature. What was happening OUT THERE, is now happening inside of me. We have been trained by this sick culture to think that individuals are self-contained, like The Great Basin being a self-contained endorheic *watershed (*an ancient Greek word meaning “to flow within”). We live without the knowledge that our actions have far reaching impacts. It is beyond dangerous.
We are all car sick.
The Earth Herself is car sick. The answer is not developing new and better motion sickness drugs. The answer is to STOP driving. The real Road Rage should be focused on the development of roads themselves, the veins of the industrial beast. The Mother’s veins, rivers, roots, mycelium, are sucked dry. We will never be able to extract enough, buy enough, or consume enough to ever “meet our energy needs”, that’s just code for “pain aversion”. There are not enough resources in the world to ever fill the bottomless pit that has been excavated in our souls by industrial culture. Our values mean nothing if we do not act on them. Those delusional boneheads that stormed the capitol may be misguided but at least they were acting on their values.
Meanwhile, many of the people who say they care the most are sharing Bernie Mitten Memes. We cannot meme our way out of this. That insurrection on the capitol could be used as a model for actual real movements. What would happen if thousands of Mothers stormed the capitol in the name of their children’s fucked future. The 1963 Children’s march in Birmingham resulted in thousands of children being arrested and sprayed with firehoses. It causes a public outcry. It pushed JFK to pass basic civil rights laws. Some call this “political theatre” – creating a scene so terrible and shocking that the public says ENOUGH and the leaders are forced to do something.
I am scared.
We have become jaded, numb, with such a strong aversion to pain! The pictures of dead animals may not be enough to reach us. Nor was seeing children in cages at the border. Or seeing children in Flint, poisoned. Seeing Indigenous people at Standing Rock terrorized. Seeing the devastation caused by American Imperialism in Yemen, or Syria, or Palestine, or Venezuela.
We must help one another find the courage, strength and tenderness to ‘be with’ what is happening. We must figure out TOGETHER how to respond, work out together how to find the tools. Preserving and conserving is not enough. These terms have the word SERVE in them, as if Nature is here to serve us. This language promotes separation culture and a human supremacist mindset.
Activism needs to evolve.
We need to remember. Derrick Jensen reminds us of the etymology of the word remember: to become a member once again. Everything we do in this perilous moment must be about returning to our roots, about re-establishing broken relationships, about remembering…as in becoming members of the Earth Community once again. Her community is incredibly resilient but there are limits. Some of those limits have been reached. We must ask how can we become responsible community members once again? We must sentence ourselves to a lifetime community service. We could start by listening.
Deep listening used to be a common occurrence for our ancestors and for those who still live with and rest in Her (fading) bosom. I worked for many years at a Garden Center. It got to the point that when I was in there with all those potted plants (most of them refugees ripped from their original ecosystems from around the world, or frankenflora bred and hybridized to serve our aesthetics and needs instead of Hers), I could literally hear them screaming! It was a chaotic cacophony, like a symphony orchestra warming up before they start to play. I knew these domesticated plants would never get to play in Her beautiful melodic orchestra. To escape the noise, I would often go out to the woods behind the greenhouse and imagine being small enough to sit under the canopy of the lilypad-like Mayapples while taking in the concert being put on by a nearby band of white Shooting Stars (a spring wildflower), bobbing their heads to a rhythm we no longer keep time to.
The voices of the dominant culture are repeating themselves non-stop. I too repeat myself as I challenge the dominant narrative. My dear friends, there will come a time where the only thing that “helps” isn’t donating money, or sharing posts, but physically putting YOUR body between HER body and the warheads of Empire, as Max and Will are doing at Thacker Pass. Do not be fooled by the certified “green” stamps of approval plastered all over the missiles. Industrial Civilization does not use “friendly fire”, it is a warship that has every intention of going out with a BANG, taking as many victims down with it as possible.
The proposed “transition of the energy sector” is a lie, the real transition is happening outside the artificial life support systems. It is happening inside us.
A longtime environmental activist, Sarah lives in Ohio US, she loves writing and refusing to mow her lawn. You can read her article published in the Washington Post here.
Please check out Max and Will’s website https://www.protectthackerpass.org/ for writings, interviews, videos, updates and ways to help them stop this wretched Lithium Mine.
