In this article, Max Wilbert talks about his experience in fighting tar sand mining in Washington and Utah, and how this is related to the current campaign against lithium mining in Nevada. “I think it’s wrong to blow up a mountain for tar sands. I think it’s wrong to blow up a mountain for lithium, too. I guess I’m just stubborn like that.”
It’s often said that solar panels, wind turbines, and the lithium-ion batteries that store their energy and power electric vehicles will save the planet.
What most people don’t know is that producing lithium has direct links to the Alberta Tar Sands (also known as the Athabasca tar sands), the largest and most destructive industrial project on the planet.
This is a personal issue for me. I have fought the tar sands for over a decade. Starting in 2010, I began campaigning for the city of Bellingham, Washington to forbid a spur of the Trans Mountain pipeline which carries “dilbit” (diluted bitumen, AKA unrefined tar sands to which gas has been added so it’ll flow easily through a pipeline) under the city.
After months of campaigning, Bellingham became the first city in the nation to unanimously pass a resolution declaring tar sands fuel to be harmful. But despite overwhelming public opposition, the city’s attorneys said they couldn’t prevent the pipeline from operating using the law. What that says about the state of democracy is worth a whole different article. And perhaps a revolution. But I digress.
After my years in Bellingham, I lived in Salt Lake City, where I took part in the campaign to protect the Tavaputs Plateau in northeastern Utah from tar sands strip mining. As part of that work, I took part in public meetings, family camp-outs on the site, disruptive protests, and several direct actions against the U.S. Oil Sands Corporation.
For the last three months, I’ve been in Nevada, on Northern Paiute territory, holding down a protest camp established on the proposed site of an open-pit lithium mine. I’m an equal opportunity land defender. I think it’s wrong to blow up a mountain for tar sands. I think it’s wrong to blow up a mountain for lithium, too. I guess I’m just stubborn like that.
But as I’ve implied, these projects are directly related. It turns out, the proposed mine at Thacker Pass would likely rely directly on materials sourced from the Alberta tar sands as the key chemical ingredient in their production process.
According to the Final Environmental Impact Statement, the proposed Thacker Pass mine would produce 5,800 tons of sulfuric acid per day for use in refining lithium. That would require importing 1,896 tons of sulfur per day. That’s nearly 700,000 tons per year, roughly equivalent to the mass of two Empire State Buildings annually. This would be brought in to Thacker Pass on dozens of (diesel-fueled) semi-trucks each carrying 3,800 gallons of molten sulfur.
Most sulfur comes from oil and gas refineries, where it’s a byproduct of producing low-sulfur fuels to meet air-quality regulations. And here’s the punchline: according the U.S. Geological Survey, tar sands contain 11 times as much sulfur as conventional heavy crude oil. There are literal “mountains” of sulfur piling up in Alberta, and at other refineries which process tar sands fuel.
That includes the refineries in Anacortes, Washington, which refines the “dilbit” from the pipelines running underneath Bellingham, my old home. These two refineries are major sources of sulfur for the entire western United States, shipping out millions of tons annually.
According to Lithium Americas Corp. Vice President of Global Engineering, the proposed lithium mine at Thacker Pass would purchase sulfur on the bulk commodity market, and it would be delivered by rail to Winnemucca (60 miles south), then brought by truck to Thacker Pass. That bulk commodity market sources nearly 100% of its elemental sulfur from oil and gas refineries.
And so we come full circle: the lithium destined for lithium-ion batteries that will be extracted from Thacker Pass, will almost certainly be directly connected to the total destruction of Alberta’s boreal forest, the poisoning of the water across thousands of square miles, the epidemic of cancers and rare diseases in that region, the wave of missing and murdered indigenous women in Alberta, and all the other harms that come from the tar sands. And, lest we forget, the tar sands are a major contributor to global warming. Canadian greenhouse gas emissions have skyrocketed over recent decades, as tar sands oil production has expanded.
Revenue from sales of sulfur is not unimportant to the economics of tar sands oil extraction. One report from 2018 found that as much as half a million barrels per day of tar sands product would be economical to extract if legal levels of sulfur allowed in bunker fuel were lowered. Another report found that “developing a plan for storing, selling or disposing of the sulphur will help to ensure the profitability of oil sands operations.”
All this points to a relatively simple conclusion: extraction of lithium at Thacker Pass would directly support the economics of extracting additional sulfur-rich crude oil and bitumen at the tar sands, further incentivizing the destruction of the planet.
Why do we defend the land here at Thacker Pass? There are so many reasons. It is important habitat. It is sacred ancestral land for our Northern Paiute friends from the nearby Fort McDermitt tribe. It is beautiful. But we also stand to protect this place because we stand for the truth. Lithium mining, and by extension, much of the so-called “green economy” that is being developed is not separate from fossil fuels. It is firmly dependent on fossil fuels.
Besides the sulfur, this project would burn tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel per day — operating heavy equipment made of steel that was produced with metallurgical coke, a type of coal. That same steel makes up the frame of the electric cars, too. The roads into the mine site would likely be made of asphalt concrete. You know what another name for asphalt is? Bitumen. AKA tar sands.
The idea of a “green” electric car is a fantasy. The sooner we face that reality, the sooner we can put a stop to false greenwashing projects like the Lithium Americas/Lithium Nevada Thacker Pass mine. The sooner we face reality, the sooner we can recognize that to shut down the tar sands, we actually have to shut down the tar sands, not just blow up other mountains elsewhere and hope that leads to the end of the tar sands.
Do not fool yourself. This is not some great green transition. It is more of the same. More destroyed land, more poisoned water, more decimated wildlife.
It’s beautiful here at Thacker Pass. Yesterday morning, I woke before 5am to visit the Greater sage-grouse “lek” — mating ground — on top of the mountain directly above the proposed mine. I watched the male grouse strut and dance, and thought about the new USGS report showing that grouse populations have declined by 80% since 1965, and nearly 40% since 2002. That comes on top of previous population collapses. The population was 16 million a century ago. Now, it’s closer to 200,000. That’s a 99% decline. This region, the northwestern Great Basin, has been particularly hard hit.
It is possible for humans to live sustainably. Our ancestors managed it for hundreds of thousands of years. Is it possible to live sustainably, and drive cars? No, I don’t believe it is. You may not like it, but there’s a thing about the natural laws of the universe: they don’t give a damn if you like them or not. Gravity exists. Ecological constraints exist. If you ignore them, you will pay the price.
We cannot afford to ignore the truth, and because of this, we must stop the Thacker Pass mine — and the tar sands. We need your help. If you can contribute to this campaign, or to the broader transformation of society that is needed, reach out to us at https://ProtectThackerPass.org. Construction might begin very soon. If that happens, Thacker Pass will die. The water will be poisoned. And the truth will be crushed along with the sagebrush, under the hard metal treads of the bulldozers. Stand with us.
Written by Caroline Williford: a Letter and Poem, from North Carolina to Thacker Pass. Caroline outlines her concerns regarding Lithium Mining. Regardless of whether the minerals are used for fossil fuels or for electric vehicles, as far as the natural world is concerned, any form of industrial mining is as destructive as the other. We strongly believe it is of utmost importance to shift our allegiance from these destructive industries to the natural world.
Featured image: Pictured here is the Foote mine, a large open-pit lithium mine in spodumene pegmatite, located on the south side of the town of Kings Mountain, North Carolina. The Foote mine project was initiated in 1938. This photograph was taken in 1983. 45 years later. The photograph shows the mine viewed from its western rim looking east toward the Pinnacle of Kings Mountain. For those curious as to what an open-pit lithium mine in Thacker Pass might look like after its 40 year run, this may give you an idea. Photograph by J. Wright Horton, Jr., U.S. Geological Survey.
On Thursday, February 11, 2021, a court decision overturned the Trump administration action that would have allowed mining, primarily for fossil fuel projects, on 10 million acres of previously protected land in western states. This decision sounds like a triumph, halting potential mining projects and preserving threatened habitat that would otherwise have been destroyed. This ruling sends the message that mining processes that harm the environment are unacceptable.
Unfortunately, this ruling is aimed only at fossil fuels.
What about the mining project at Thacker Pass, in Nevada, approved in the eleventh hour of Trump’s presidency, that still has the green light? The 5,700 acres of also previously protected land, now currently slated for mining, that would be destroyed for the extraction of lithium?
This lithium would be used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and as storage for renewable energy. Because of this, the destruction of Thacker Pass is being described as “green.”
If you start to dig into what it means to construct an open-pit lithium mine on a piece of land, you will learn that there is nothing green about it. The Thacker Pass mine would burn some 11,300 gallons of diesel fuel per day, the carbon emissions from the site would ultimately exceed 150,000 tons per year, and producing one ton of lithium would require strip mining and processing of up to 500 tons of earth. Tons of sulfuric acid would be produced every day, in addition to other harsh chemicals that could leach into the groundwater. The project would require over 1.7 billion gallons of water annually from a local aquifer which is already over-allocated. The effect on native wildlife and vegetation would be catastrophic, including species that are rare and already en route to extinction.
This is the native, ancestral, sacred land of Paiute and Shoshone people.
Such a project may provide job opportunities for some locals, but for all locals it would impact air and water quality for future generations. This mining project would continue for four decades. The project that begins at 5,700 acres could expand over time to 17,000 acres, which could triple all numbers mentioned here. Furthermore, the Thacker Pass lithium mine is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. On February 24, 2021, an executive order was put into place by the current administration that could potentially unleash a whole new era of lithium mining in the US.
My question is, why is it acceptable to mine for this purpose, for lithium, if the well-being of the earth is our actual concern? It is mining all the same. This is not actual change. It is more of the same. More destruction, more extraction and decimation, and for what purpose? Continuing a way of life that perpetuates a depletion of the earth’s resources and a number of species that also make this planet their home? Must we destroy the earth in order to save it? Where is the common sense in this equation? We are doing ourselves in. We are not thinking outside of the box. We are on one hand condemning mining efforts for fossil fuels due to the negative impact on the environment, and on the other hand not only advocating mining for lithium, but championing it, pushing it forward to the front of the room under the name of clean and green, all the while hiding its own equally catastrophic impacts on the environment in the periphery.
It’s capitalism and consumerism bullying ahead with an agenda that prioritizes profit over the critical thinking and sound decision making that could actually set us on a path to take care of the earth, rather than destroy it, as we attempt to save it.
Simply said: it’s greenwashing.
As someone who has been a part of the environmental movement for the majority of my life, I hate having to form that word upon my tongue, and to acknowledge such a divide among those of us who would otherwise be unified in a purpose to preserve the well-being of the earth. And yet, that word is upon my tongue, and it’s bitter. Yes, I can agree to forward-thinking actions to protect our environment, but not to those that require further destruction. We are already so far behind. We are already in the midst of a literal sixth mass extinction event on the planet, and this time it is driven by us, human beings. As one of those human beings, I want to do things differently this time.
I am not going to jump on the bandwagon of lesser evils. I am not going to believe the claim that an action is green or clean, unless I can dig all the way to the depths of it and find that it fully honors life just as it is at this moment and it requires no further assault in order for us to move forward. I ask that we do better this time. Lithium mining is not the answer. And, I am here making this statement: I do not support lithium mining, anywhere. I do not support lithium mining at Thacker Pass.
I want to protect Thacker Pass.
I have been following the efforts of Protect Thacker Pass from North Carolina over the last month, and the more I’ve learned about the mining project, the more appalled I’ve become. I had no idea what lithium mining entailed a few months ago. I’ve entered into one long conversation after another, sharing what I’m learning with friends, and with each conversation I’ve observed yet another person, like myself, waking as if from a deep slumber, shaking their head, astonished, and asking endless questions. How did we not know about lithium mining? How did we get so disconnected from the goings-on in the world that we no longer see what is actually happening around us, or ask the critical questions of how things are actually made? Such as, what does it take to make a lithium battery? And why do some people care while others do not? I can’t answer these questions for anyone else and so I am looking at myself.
Have I been asleep? Is it too late? How did I get to a place of such complacency and blind trust, that I stopped actively looking at the world around me, really looking? Looking in the way that matters. And, what can I do about it, now? When I can’t find answers any other way, I sit down and write. What follows is my attempt at answering these questions in my relationship to Thacker Pass. What I ultimately discovered is this: now is the time for action, and it’s time to go to Thacker Pass.
***
Now is the Time
It seems to me that there are many ways of looking at the world.
There is the way of looking when we are caught
layers deep
in our stories
of yesterday’s confoundments
of tomorrow’s yearnings
to the extent that we simply cannot see
one inch beyond
where our glazed over eyes might meet the world.
And there is the way of looking
when the rug has suddenly been pulled out ruthlessly, beneath us
and we are searching
eyes keen as eagles
for the thing that has just been lost. How could we not have seen this coming?
Everything is seen painfully anew.
What is now missing like a holy gap,
a tear in the great fabric of the world.
The loss pounds our gut with regret.
And there is the way of looking
that is now
without the stories clouding view. The moment before the thing is lost.
The one that is in fact here, everyday upon waking
if we take up its humble, quiet call.
It requires us to participate.
To shelve the stories.
To get down on our knees and see the world before us.
Really see it.
Every fine tuned rake of the sand, marked
by the talons, hooves, and claws that daily grace this place.
And perhaps the call is not quiet at all.
But a continuous, piercing cry.
The kind of which we as humans may think we cannot hear, may claim
we cannot hear, like other animals.
But we can. If we just lean in. Closer.
Now.
This is the time before.
The imminent hour.
When the stories are rising up,
teeming and swelling and clamoring
to be heard before it’s too late.
This is the time of choice. When we can choose something different than before.
Trading one heartless destructive act for another is not the way.
Destroying in order to save.
Not the way.
The lesser of two evils.
Not the way.
Is this really the only choice we have to make?
No.
We limit ourselves.
Perhaps we are so smothered by the din of
our culture’s mighty noise
that it’s hard to hear. It’s hard to see.
But we owe it to the earth to which we belong
to take off the blinders, to quiet a moment, and listen
to the urgent message being issued forth: please just stop.
Stop mining.
For any reason: coal, oil, lithium.
Not for fossil fuels, not for supposed clean energy.
This is not clean energy.
Drilling into the earth to break, leach and deplete
the elements that make up our very foundation.
Displacing the native inhabitants of a place,
greater sage-grouse already in their ongoing dance with extinction,
pygmy rabbits, golden eagles, pronghorn antelope,
from the burrows in the ground to the nests arching up in the sky.
Poisoning the water as far as 150 miles downstream.
Depleting the water supply of the driest known state in our entire country.
Leaving the land scarred, barren, empty, parched, destroyed.
I want to live this way, and this way only:
Stirred from sleep each waking day
with an ear to the world’s whisperings,
loyal to its call to hear and think critically
outside of the green washings of capitalism and industry
where the solutions are tinged with blood, death and loss.
I want to walk my feet out the door and help trace lines around
that which is mapped for destruction
which we have somehow forgotten is also our very destruction,
our death, our loss.
I don’t ever want to forget that we are one and the same.
We, and this earth beneath our feet.
The only difference between us, the rivers, the mountains,
and the other creatures of this vast place
is the voice with which we speak.
The cadence, the language.
We as humans hold a lot of power, too much, with what we choose to say, and when.
Our voices are crucial.
So I’m going to offer mine up, and say right here:
STOP.
Upon the Proposed Mining of “Thacker Pass, Nevada”. A poem by Sarah Gar, a visitor to the land of the Paiute and Shoshone people and the sagebrush creatures.
It’s quiet here.
And I’m not talking
about experimental silence,
American guru silence,
or any sleek human site
that seeks inner peace
(and other noise)
to drown out the drawing-down
and drying-up of every sacred thing.
I’m talking about silence
of lands beyond witness,
a silence embedded and embedding,
the one nestling in the nighthawk’s cries
and cradling these words.
Tall sagebrush touches it —
4 feet 33 millimeters
of branching space,
where voice and silence
play by listening,
weaving water and light
without worrying who
appears as what
before whom.
It’s as if nothing can be said
to arrive or leave in wild places.
Even our breath cannot be said
to enter this place
where it meets other selves
always here and already inside.
But when Grandmother comes,
wakes the fire with practiced taps,
the flames flare in reminder
of whose Spirits keep this place.
Even in “deserted” places
dry soil knows to gather
soft and firm around water,
forming delicate strata
to nourish roots
and catch the drifting seed.
We, too, know to gather,
asking if we are also this place,
and if so,
how we can return.
To get here
we must track ourselves
by species memory,
a long way back,
to when losing one’s way
first became possible.
We trace back to the end’s beginning,
when the volume had to rise,
to create an endless diversion,
to mask the pesky screams
of women and slaves.
Yes, we tracked ourselves,
even did a blood spatter analysis.
A few facts emerged to tell us:
We are the losing and the lost.
There’s nothing lonelier than empire, and nothing stranger than killing one’s beloved.
These facts cleared the room.
Even history couldn’t erase them.
The clock ticked.
Corporations continued to cut down the ancient ones.
And so we rose, rotating and revolving
pulled forward by the falling-apart feeling
which is love.
This must be love because,
as sung by Paiute and Shoshone,
danced by pronghorn and coyote,
this place would hold forever,
streams passing
through trouts’ gills,
sun glancing off scales
and into eagle’s eyes
as she watches over.
Past and future
would nest together,
quiet as grouse eggs,
speckled and constellating,
in tacit reference to each other.
Birth and death would spiral together,
strong and fragile as pyrg shell,
and we would learn again
to listen and to hold
this language,
the spinning of the silence
that found us first,
soft as jackrabbit,
buried as bones,
strong spines of sage
and mountain song.
As a former English professor from the East Coast, Sarah now focuses on writing and activism in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry grieves patriarchal and colonial violence, summons reverence for the natural world, and upholds matriarchal cultures which cherish life.
In this latest video from Thacker Pass, Max explains why he is protesting against lithium mining for the so called green energy.
Featured image: Pygmy rabbit by Travis London
The small Pygmy rabbit is Thacker pass and Thacker Pass is Pygmy rabbits. This small rabbit is a target of many predators at Thacker Pass. The rabbits find their refuge in the form of the sagebrush plant or in the burrows that it makes in deep, soft soil. Much like the sage grouse, the pygmy rabbit relies on sagebrush not only for protection but for more than 90%. of its diet. The pygmy rabbit requires large expanses of uninterrupted shrub-steppe habitat. Unfortunately, right now the pygmy rabbit faces many threats. Conversion of indispensable sagebrush meadows for agriculture and development for oil and natural gas extraction, and now the lithium boom, are depleting an already fragile ecosystem. One more reason to resist.
For the past 25 days, there has been a protest camp set up behind me, right out here. This place is called Thacker Pass, in Northern Nevada, traditional territory of the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshoni.
This area here is the proposed site of an open pit lithium mine, a massive strip mine that will turn everything into a heavily industrialized zone.
This site, right now, is an incredibly biodiverse Sagebrush habitat. There are Sagebrush plants over a hundred years olds, cause it’s oldgrowth Sage. There’s Sage-Grouse. This is part of the most important Sage-Grouse population left in the entire state, Around 5-8 percent of the entire global population of Sage-Grouse live right here.
This is a migratory corridor of Pronghorn. One of the members of the occupation saw about 55 Pronghorns in an area that would be destroyed for the open pit mine.
There are Golden Eagles here, multiple nesting pairs. We’ve seen them circling over head. We’ve seen their mating flights, getting ready to lay their eggs in the spring.
There are Pygmy Rabbits here. There are Burrowing Owls. There are Gopher Snakes and Rattle Snakes. There’s Rabbit Brush. There’s Jack Rabbit.
There’s Paragon Falcon, or actually the desert variant of the Paragon Falcon, what’s known as the Prairie Falcon.
There are Mule Deer. We see them feeding up on these hills. There are Ringtail living behind this cliff behind me. There are Red Foxes. There are Kangaroo Mice. There are an incredible variety of creatures that live here. Many of whom I don’t know their names.
All this is under threat to create to create an open pit mine for lithium. To mine lithium for electric car batteries, and for grid energy storage to power these “green energy” transitions.
I’m not a fan of fossil fuels.
I’m not a promoter of fossil fuels. I’ve taken direct action for many years against fossil fuels. I’ve fought tarsands in Canada. I’ve fought tarsands pipelines in the US. I’ve fought natural gas pipelines, methane pipelines. I’ve stood on front of heavy equipment to block tar sands and fossil fuel mining in Utah. I’ve stood in front of coal trains to stop them from moving forward, to try and blockade the industry. I’ve fought the fossil fuel industry for many many years and will continue to do so.
What we need to recognize that the so called green energy transition that is being promoted is not a real solution. That’s why we’re out on the land. This is the place that is at stake right now. This is the place that is up to be sacrificed for the sake of this so-called green energy.
It was about a 175 years ago that the colonization of this region really began in earnest. That was when the first European settlers started coming across in Nevada. really setting up shops out here, in the mid-1800s. They mostly came for mineral wealth. They came for the gold, the silver. They came for mining. Nevada has been a mining state from the very beginning, and mining still controls the state.
I’ve spoken with some of my Shoshoni friends, my Goshute friends about the history of this: the invasion for mining. What happened was, the settlers came and they forced the indigenous population onto reservation. And they cut down the Juniper trees and the Pinyon pine trees. These were the main sources of medicine and food for many of the Great Basin Indigenous Peoples. I’ve heard it said that the Pinyon pines were like the Buffaloes to the Indigenous People out here.
Just like in the Great Plains, the settlers destroyed the food supply of the indigenous people. They forced them to participate into colonial economy using this violence. They forced them to participate in the capitalist system, in the mining system, in the ranching system. People were going to starve otherwise.
What happened in the mid 1800s was that men with guns came for the mountains. They started digging them out, blowing them up, turning mountains into money, carding that money away, and leaving behind a wasteland. That’s what’s been happening in Nevada ever since. It hasn’t stopped. That’s what we’re gonna see here unless it’s stopped.
The Lithium Americas Corporation, Canadian mining company that wants to build this mine: they raised 400 million dollars in one day a few weeks ago to try and build this mine.
Meanwhile the grassroots struggles to raise a few hundred dollars to help support people coming out here, camping, getting supplies, getting things we need, the travel to get people here. The camp is about a mile or mile and a half from here. There’s about seven or eight people out there.
We need more people to come out to camp. We need people to join us, to draw the line, to hold the line against this mining project.
It’s not just about this project here. I was at a panel discussion recently with some folks from the Andean Altiplano, what’s called the lithium triangle in South America. Argentina, Bolivia and Chile have this high desert region where the three countries meet. It contains about half the world’s lithium reserves. Lithium mining has been going on there for decades and it’s left behind a wasteland.
Indigenous People have been kicked out of their land. They’ve been dispossessed. Their lands have been poisoned. Their water has been taken.
Water usage is one of the major issues there, because it’s an extremely dry place, just like here. Nevada is the driest state in the US. And they wanna pump 1.4 billion gallons of water and use it to refine the lithium into its final product. 1.4 billion gallons a year.
The Queen River in the valley is already dry. The water’s already being overused.
You go back 200 years and there would be water there. There would be beaver dams. There would be fish. There would be wildlife in abundance.
This land is already in an degraded state compared to where it used to be, compared to where it needs to be.
The atrocities associated with this mine go on and on. This is an important cultural site for the Indigenous People of this region. This has been a travel corridor, through what’s now called Thacker Pass for thousands and thousands of years, an important gathering side. If you walk across this land, there’s obsidian everywhere across the ground. There’s all kind of flakes on the other sides of valleys, where indigenous people would gather obsidian and use it to make tools
This has been an important place for thousands of years.
Shoshoni signed a treaty, but they never ceded their land to the United States.
This is unceded land.
The Western Shoshoni never gave away their land. The US does not have legal title to this land. And the US government rejects that. They have appropriated something like a 175 million dollars, and set it aside to give it to the Western Shoshoni, if they will agree that the land was given to the United States. The Western Shoshoni has said “No. We won’t take your money. We want the land.” They have been fighting this fight for decades.
This is unceded territory. This land does not belong to the Bureau of Land Management. This land does not belong to the federal government.
This land belongs to the inhabitants of this land, people whose ancestors are in the soil. I don’t just mean humans. This land belongs to the Sagebrush, and the Pygmy Rabbits, and all those who have
Why don’t their voices get a say? Why don’t we take their preferences into account? What do you think they would say if we ask them, “Can we blow this place up?”
If Lithium America showed up and sincerely asked the Burrowing Owls, and the Sage-Grouse, and the Coyotes, and the Pronghorn Antelopes, “Can we blow up your home? Can we blow it up? Can we turn it into dust? Can we bathe the ground in sulfuric acid to extract this lithium which we’ll take away and make people rich, leaving behind a wasteland? Do we have your permission to do this?”
What do you think the land will say? What do you think the inhabitants will say? Do you think they will say it’s green? Do you think they’ll say:
“This is how you save the planet, by destroying our home?”
I think this is an important issue, not just because of what’s happening here, but because of what it means. Because of what it symbolizes.
When I was a young person, I was very concerned about what was happening to the planet. I was very concerned about the ecological crisis: the rainforest being chopped down, global warming, ocean acidification, the hole in the ozone layer.
I care about these things. I’ve cared about them ever since I was a little kid.
It’s hard to be a human being and have a heart, and not care about it unless you’re broken in some way.
I wanted to figure out what could be done. So I started reading about these issues. And of course what I was taught from a very young age was that solar panels and electric cars were going to save the world. That’s what I learned. That’s what the green media taught me. They taught me implicitly it’s okay to sacrifice places like this. They taught me it’s okay to sacrifice places like this if it means we can have electric cars instead of fossil fuel cars.
We don’t need cars at all. That’s the thing. And this is a hard message for people to hear because people don’t want to be told No. We’re not used to being told No in this culture. You can’t have that. It’s not okay for us to continue in this way.
We’re not used to this message. We’re used to getting whatever we want, whenever we want it.
That’s for the most part across the board. The average person in the American society lives with the energy equivalent of a hundred slaves. We live a life of luxury, like we had a hundred slaves working for us for twenty four hours.
That’s what the fossil fuel has brought to the modern era. That’s what this energy glut has brought to us. This mindset that we could have whatever we want, whenever we want. That’s something we need to get over. That’s something we need to change.
For the past five or six years, I was working on a book called Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost It’s Way and What We Can Do About It. My co-authors and I, in this book, really dive into these problems with details of the so-called green technology in great details. Things like solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, energy storage, batteries.
Not only these things, but a lots of the other “solutions” that are accepted as dogma in the environmental movement, like dense urbanization. We debunk these things in the book. These things are not going to save this planet. We can’t get around the problems we have found ourselves in.
We’re in a conundrum. This culture has dug itself into a very deep hole.
A lot is going to need to change, before we find ourselves in any resemblance of sustainability, of sanity, of justice, of living in a good way.
Earlier, I came around the corner in the mountains, and it felt like a punch in the gut because I had the premonition of no longer seeing this swab, this rolling expanse of old-growth Sagebrush, but of seeing an open pit. Seeing a mountain of tailings, of minewaste, of toxified soil. I had the premonition of seeing a gigantic sulfuric acid plant and processing facilities all through what is now wild. Where the Foxes run, where the Snakes slither between the Sagebrush, where the Golden Eagles wheel overhead.
That’s why I’m here to fight. I don’t want to see this turn into an industrial wasteland.
I don’t think many of us do. I think a lot of people are befuddled and confused by all these bright green lies. A lot of people buy into this crap. But a lot of people don’t. A lot of people understand that we need to scale down. A lot of people understand that we need to reduce our energy consumption, that we need to degrow the economy. That the latest and greatest industrial technology isn’t going to save us, magically.
This isn’t a tooth fairy situation, where electric cars will appear under our pillows and save the day. A lot of people understand this. That’s why for me, a big part of the battle is not education. A big part of the battle is power. A big part of the battle is actually stopping them.
Written By Max Wilbert and originally published on January 25, 2021 in Sierra Nevada Ally. In this article Max describes the plans for an industrial scale lithium mine, the harm this will cause and why we need to protect the area for endangered species.
Thacker Pass landscape. Image: Max Wilbert
On January 15th, my friend Will Falk and myself launched a protest occupation of the proposed lithium mine site at Thacker Pass, Nevada. We have set up tents, protest signs, and weathered more than a week of winter weather to oppose lithium mining, which would destroy Thacker Pass.
You might already be wondering: “Why are people protesting lithium? Isn’t it true that lithium is a key ingredient in the transition to electric cars, and moving away from fossil fuels? Shouldn’t people be protesting fossil fuels?”
Let me put any rumors to rest.
I am a strong opponent of fossil fuels and have fought against the industry for over a decade. I’ve fought tar sands pipelines, stopped coal trains, and personally climbed on top of heavy equipment to stop fossil fuel mining.
Now I’m here, in northern Nevada, to try and stop lithium mining. That’s because, in terms of the impact on the planet, there’s little difference between a lithium mine and an open-pit coal mine. Both require bulldozing entire ecosystems. Both use huge amounts of water. Both leave behind poisoned aquifers. And both are operated with massive heavy machinery largely powered by diesel.
The encampment at Thacker Pass. Image: Max Wilbert
I want people to understand that lithium mining is not “good” for the planet.
Sure, compared to coal mining, a lithium mine may ultimately result in less greenhouse gas emissions. But not by much. The proposed Lithium Americas mine at Thacker Pass would burn more than 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel every day, according to the Environmental Impact Statement. Processing the lithium would also require massive quantities of sulfur—waste products from oil refineries. One local resident told me they expect “a semi-truck full of sulfur every 10 minutes” on these rural, quiet roads.
This is not a “clean transition.” It’s a transition from one dirty industrial energy source to another. We’re making the argument for something completely different, and more foundational:degrowth. We need economic contraction, relocalization, and to stop using and wasting so many resources on unnecessary consumer products.
When people think about wilderness and important habitat, they generally don’t think of Nevada. But they should. Thacker Pass is not some empty desolate landscape. It’s part of the most important Greater sage-grouse habitat left in the state. This region has between 5-8% of all remaining sage-grouse, according to Nevada Department of Wildlife and BLM surveys.
Thacker Pass is home to an endemic snail species, the King’s River pyrg, which biologists have called “a critically imperiled endemic species at high risk of extinction” if the mine goes forward. Burrowing owls, pygmy rabbits, golden eagles, the threatened Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, and hundreds of other species call this place home, watershed, or migration corridor.
Thacker Pass is home to important old stands of Big sagebrush who are increasingly rare in Nevada and threatened by global warming.
One biologist who has worked in Thacker Pass, and who asked to remain unnamed for fear of retaliation, told me the Thacker Pass area “has seen the rapid decline of native shrubland/bunchgrass communities that form the habitat foundation.” He continued, “Those communities (particularly sagebrush) are already under tremendous stress from the dual-threat of invasive annual grasses (especially cheatgrass) and the increased fire returns that those volatile fuels cause.”
Now the BLM is permitting Lithium Americas corporation to come bulldoze what is left, tear away the mountainside for some 50 years, and leave behind a moonscape.
We are engaging in direct action and protest against this mine because the public process is not working. Despite sustained opposition, BLM ignored serious concerns about this mine and “fast-tracked” this project under the direction of the Trump Administration. We mean to stop the mine with people-power.
If you are interested in joining us, visit our website, to learn more about getting involved. And speak out on this issue. We can’t save the planet by destroying it. Transitioning away from fossil fuels and fixing humanity’s broken relationship with the planet will require a more critical approach. Follow
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