Two hundred species went extinct today. The last individual from each of these 200 species dies each day. Merely fifteen years ago, that number was 150. While extinctions are a natural process, the scale of the current mass extinction is a direct result of industrial civilization. In this article, Rebecca writes about her grief for all her lost kins, and about some groups who are actively working to save some of the remaining ones.
Hearing the last song of a male Kauai ‘O’o tears me up. He was singing for a female who will never come. Now his lovely voice is gone too. I cry for him, and for all the species we have lost. First listed as endangered in 1967, the Kauai ‘O’o lived in the forests of Kaua’i, and was extinct 20 years later, after their habitat was destroyed by human activity.
One in a million species expires naturally each year, but now extinctions are happening 1,000 times faster. Humans are driving species extinct more rapidly than ever before in the history of the planet. Since the dawn of industrial civilization, we have lost eighty-three percent of wild mammals and fifty percent of plants, and a million more species are at risk —all largely as a result of human actions.
Everywhere there is life, there is song.
The planet is always singing. Humans are meant to live in sync, our unique note resounding within the symphony. Instead, our dominant culture is killing all the other voices, one by one, as if removing instruments from an orchestra. Some birds have forgotten their song, like the once abundant regent honeyeater. Now critically endangered, they are unable to find other honeyeaters and hear their songs.
The world needs the bitter and resonant cry of every creature, even our own deep voices, attuning with the song of the world. As a wilderness and soul guide, I invite people to listen to the voices of all the others and remember their own unique notes, the mythic purpose of their souls. I was made for this work. Yet it is not enough to stop the destruction of the last remaining wild species.
Whistling
Did the Kauai ‘O’o know he was calling out to an empty world? “The costs of civilization are too high,” his song pierces me. “Remember the connection we once had.” The first human words sounded like birds. Humans and birds evolved from a common ancestor, a reptile millions of years ago. Both grew to form complex vocalizations and social groups. Rare whistling languages, often called bird languages, used to be found all over the world. The truest voices of our ancestors, they are now heard only in a handful of places with scattered settlements or mountainous terrain.
In south-western Costa Rica, I lived amongst the Guaymi people in rustic dwellings, eating home-grown rice and beans in banana leaves. We taught each other, in Spanish, our first languages. When the Guaymi whistled to each other, the sound traveled a great distance through the rainforest. They looked beautiful with their heads and bodies vibrating, faces and lips moving wildly to form the unusual sounds.
In the foothills of the Himalayas, the Hmong people speak in whistles. In their courtship rituals, now rarely-performed, boys would wander through nearby villages at nightfall, whistling poetry. If a girl responded, the dialogue would continue. The lovers added nonsense syllables to assure the secrecy of their melody.
Longing
“Is anyone alive out there?” the Kauai ‘O’o sings, but there is no reply, nor will there ever be again. Is he sorrowful? That is what I feel when I sense what is happening and read things like of all the mammals now on Earth, ninety-six percent are livestock and humans—only four percent are wild mammals.
Tears flow. I long for a world more alive than the one we inhabit. For rivers to run clear and flocks of birds to fill the sky. Ancient trees to cover the land. Oceans to teem with whales and coral. For machines that mine coal, oil, and trees to be dismantled. For people to stop extracting and start honoring. For lost cultures and species to return, and be driven out no more.
Longing is prayer, and prayer is a conversation. If we listen to nature and our dreams, we can be guided towards the actions that matter most. If we ask and await the mystery, we can receive a response and then embody what is asked. Prayer is what we become when we offer our lives in creative service.
Will civilization collapse first, before the biosphere?
Or after all species and wild places are already gone? Species can’t survive without unspoiled habitat, but there is less every day. Even in the wake of late-stage global capitalism, I long for a sustainable society, rooted in an ethical approach in its relationship with the land, honoring the voices of river, bird, rock, and tree.
These collaborative relationships have existed for millennium. The Yao people still team up with the honeyguide bird in sub-Saharan Africa to hunt for honey. Using a series of special chirps, humans and birds communicate with each other. The honeyguide birds lead the way to hidden beehives, and the Yao people share the sweetness with their avian friends.
Protecting
Is the Kauai ‘O’o aware this is his last message to the world? What will humanity’s last song be? The last passenger pigeon died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. She had a palsy that made her tremble and never laid a fertile egg in her life. In the 19th century, passenger pigeon migrations darkened the sky. Flocks took hours to pass and were so loud that human conversation was impossible. These birds sustained people through the winter. By the mid-1890’s, flock sizes numbered in the dozens rather than hundreds of billions.
Passenger pigeons were hunted out of existence. After the invention of the telegraph and the railroad, the commercial pigeon industry boomed. Hunters killed them in their nesting grounds and harvested the squabs. No one stopped when their numbers crashed. People slaughtered them until the end. In the 19th century, people did not believe they could drive a species to extinction. This seems to mirror a denial still present today. Most people do not believe humans are destroying the biosphere of the living planet.
“People need these jobs,” the passenger pigeon industry said to avoid restrictions on hunting. Industries today make similar claims, as their mines, dams, and industrial agriculture clear cut and pave over ecosystems, poison rivers and the sea, and dry up underground aquifers.
Indigenous peoples have always been the Earth’s greatest defenders.
Indigenous people protect eighty percent of global diversity, even though they comprise less than five percent of the world’s population. The Earth needs more people to stand in solidarity. I wonder if the Kauai ‘O’o felt as desperate as I do, if he understood that the planet is being plundered. I imagine myself singing alongside him, calling out—are you out there? What will you do to protect the beloved Earth?
Industry plans to destroy a critical corridor for pronghorn antelope and mule deer, nesting ground for golden eagles, ferruginous hawks, and prairie falcons. Lithium Americas is slated to build a lithium mine on Thacker Pass. They say it will provide jobs. Falsely, they call it green to manufacture belief that it somehow will not destroy the biosphere. Five to eight percent of the global population of endangered sage-grouse live there.
The watershed is home to the threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout and the endemic King’s River pryg. I invite you to join environmentalists Max Wilbert and Will Falk in protesting the mine. I will be joining them the last two weeks of April.
The songs of eagles, hawks, falcons, and sagebrush are priceless and irreplaceable.
This is the video that inspired Rebecca’s article.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
