by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 14, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Featured image by Buffalo Field Campaign
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
Two days ago, three of last wild bison were shot and killed illegally in a no-shooting zone in a campground barely 100 yards from the boundary of Yellowstone National Park.
The next morning, I skied out of the woods with a patrol from Buffalo Field Campaign and found the buffalos’ butchered carcasses; ribcages, stomachs, patches of hide, and a few leftover chunks of flesh parting the slowly flowing water of the Madison River.
I’m not opposed to hunting. In fact, I’m a hunter myself and am looking forward to elk season. The problem is that the Central Herd of the Yellowstone buffalo number less than 700. Their numbers have plummeted in recent years. Park biologists say that the population decline is “unexplained,” but it seems pretty well explained to me: hazing, harassment, human manipulation, and overhunting are driving wild buffalo in Yellowstone to the brink.
I just learned a few minutes ago that the other major threat (besides unsustainable overhunting) to wild buffalo in the greater Yellowstone area is nearly ready to begin operation. Yellowstone National Park is opening their buffalo trap on the north side of the park in the Gardiner Basin. At this facility, your tax dollars and your public lands are put to work to trap and ship to slaughter hundreds of wild buffalo each year in an effort to maintain populations at an artificially low “minimum sustainable number.” All this is being done on behalf of Montana’s infamous livestock industry.
The total buffalo population is less than 4700, and the U.S. government and legally permitted overhunting is killing hundreds per year.
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Here at Buffalo Field Campaign, everything revolves around the buffalo. Patrols leave every morning and afternoon to keep tabs on herds and hunting activity. Another group monitors the trap and firing-line style hunting at Gardiner. We gather each evening to discuss the day’s activity and share information on where the buffalo are, how many are located in which areas, which direction they are moving, what patrols to do the next day, and so on.
On bad days, we share information on how many were killed.
We bear witness to these atrocities and organize to stop them under a buffalo skull mounted on the wall and a shrine of artwork, poems, quilts, and other items dedicated to or inspired by the buffalo. As I write this, I can look up and see artwork from kids. “I heart buffalo – Tatanka roam free!” “Don’t kill the buffalo!” “I love buffalos.”
The headquarters of Buffalo Field Campaign is located in a 100-year-old cabin that was originally built for railroad workers. The irony that a building originally constructed by one of the prime instruments of western colonization is now being used to house a resistance movement isn’t lost on us.
But the walls are thick and the old stonework throws heat from the big wood stove nicely. This is a good place now. A 20-year spirit of resistance emanates from the patina on the lodgepole pine walls and the hearts of the people moving through the space. It’s practical, too. We’re close to the areas where hunting and hazing pressure is highest, and having a place to warm up, eat a delicious meal (fresh 20-inch trout and wild rice last night), and sleep soundly is important after a day out skiing in 5-degree temperatures.
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Sitting around camp this afternoon after returning from patrol with a few friends, we talked about how the dominant culture is killing everything. Prairie Dogs are being poisoned en masse in Colorado (and elsewhere). Pinyon-Juniper forests are being bulldozed into oblivion. The oceans, the watery womb of all life on this planet, are dying.
Places like Buffalo Field Campaign provide a starting point for building effective resistance. Long-term, grassroots projects based on non-compromising defense and material support are essential. And organizations allow for enough resources to be gathered in one place to be more effective.
In an article titled, “Once, the Monsoon,” my friend Suprabha Seshan writes about her work in plant conservation in the Western Ghat mountains in India. She writes of the breathtaking beauty of her home, “where a small team of dedicated ecosystem gardeners, skilled in various aspects of horticulture, plant conservation and Western Ghat ecology, grow native plants of this mountain ecosystem, or biome, through techniques honed over four decades of experimentation and practice.
“The trails are full of jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) and smashed, partly-eaten remains of its relative, the ainili (Artocarpus hirsutus), which sports smaller orange fruits with a spiny skin enclosing lobes of sweet flesh and large seeds. Wild jamuns and mangoes, rose apples, guavas and sweet limes, and dozens of forest tree species are also fruiting. Bonnet macaques, Nilgiri langurs, Malabar grey hornbills and giant squirrels are gorging in the canopy. Someone reported seeing a troop of lion-tailed macaques with babies. It is feasting time for everybody in this valley: wild boar, humans and cattle included. Elephants come by at night, attracted from afar by the smell of overripe jackfruit—to them, a delicacy.”
Her team cultivates more than 2,000 species of highly endangered plants, “mostly from areas that have already been deforested.” She describes their work as a search-and-rescue mission, writing that “we refer to these plants as refugees, similar to human refugees suffering the depredations of war, displacement, climate change and general toxification of the environment.”
The monsoon that brings life-giving rain to the Western Ghat mountains is failing because of global warming. Rains are coming late or not at all. All the beings that are dependent on the monsoon, including humans, are at risk of total collapse because industrial civilization is destroying the Earth’s climate. The heroic work being done at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary could be undone by the collapse of the biosphere as a whole. Suprabha concludes her article by saying that we need to be asking where our loyalty lies: with “the machines or the monsoon?”
Here with the buffalo, the same questions are occurring to me. The heroic work of defending the buffalo is absolutely essential, and unless the death march of this culture is stopped, the buffalo are headed for the same extinction that faces us, too.
I want a world in which wild buffalo roam 60 million strong and in which the monsoon brings rivers of rain to the Western Ghat mountains. This will require working with organizations like the Buffalo Field Campaign and the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, and it will also require dismantling the larger systems that are killing the planet.
Without both approaches—fighting for the local, and dismantling the global—we, and the buffalo, and the monsoon, are doomed.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 13, 2018 | Protests & Symbolic Acts
by Buffalo Field Campaign
Mark your calendars and plan to join Buffalo Field Campaign for some winter rallies for wild buffalo!
Yellowstone, Montana, and other bison managers have aims to kill upwards of 900 of the gentle giants this winter, all to appease Montana’s infamous livestock industry. The country’s last wild buffalo — a sacred and keystone species who is our National Mammal — are in dire straights and we must rally together to demand that they are protected and allowed to flourish, not be slaughtered to satisfy the whims of the cattle industry.
BFC Week of Action!
February 12 – 18, 2018
Join us for a series of gatherings, events, and rallies that we have planned for various towns near Yellowstone National Park. Dates, locations, and details are as follows:
Feb. 12, Monday, BFC Headquarters, West Yellowstone, MT
Kick off the week at camp with a meet-and-greet, orientation, and feast before we begin the week’s events.
Feb. 13, Tuesday, Gardiner, MT. First Annual Rosalie Little Thunder Memorial Walk
At 1:30 pm, gather at the Gallatin National Forest Gardiner Ranger District Office, 805 Scott St W, Gardiner, MT. We will begin our walk at 2:00 pm. We will walk through the town of Gardinger, past the Roosevelt Arch, and down Old Yellowstone Trail through Yellowstone National Park, The walk will end around 5:30, at the Beattie Gulch Trailhead, where we will share a meal and then hold a candlelight vigil in solidarity with wild buffalo and all of their advocates.
Feb. 14, Wednesday, Bozeman, MT. Rally Through Downtown
We will have an information table at the Bozeman Library, 626 E Main St, Bozeman, MT, from 11:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. We will gather banners, signs, and puppets, and march up and down Main Street throughout the day. Lunch and snacks will be provided.
Feb. 15, Thursday, BFC Headquarters. National Call-in Day and Day in the Field
A day of rest, direct action trainings, and field orientations for folks at camp. Everyone around the country and the globe will chime in and make Yellowstone’s and Montana’s phones ring off the hook as we hold our National Call-in Day. Targets and contact information will be forthcoming.
Feb. 16, Friday, Helena, MT. Rally at the State Capitol
Meet on the steps of the state capitol building, 1301 East Sixth Avenue, from 12:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. for a rally. We will have speakers from various Tribes, BFC, and other organizations to share their inspiration about wild buffalo. We anticipate drumming, singing, and story-telling. Possibly a visit to Governor Bullock’s office. Folks are also welcome to visit the office of the Montana Department of Livestock to share your feelings with them. A hot meal will be provided after the event. More details regarding speakers, etc., will be shared as available.
Feb. 17, Saturday, West Yellowstone, MT. Rally Through West Yellowstone
Meet at BFC Headquarters by 8:00 am for breakfast, or by 11:30 to carpool to town, or meet at Buffalo Spirit at 12:00, 14 N Canyon St, West Yellowstone, MT. From noon until 3:00 p.m., we’ll break out the banners, signs, drums, and puppets and march through the town of West Yellowstone, which is the most visited entrance to Yellowstone National Park.
Feb. 18, Sunday, BFC Headquarters. Gathering, Feasting, Trainings, and Story-Sharing
Enjoy a day in the field with the buffalo, learn from experienced activists, relish a delicious dinner, then share the stories and songs from your culture or your experiences, and learn from others. This close-down to our Week of Action is a bonding time that strengthens our solidarity as we move forward to defend the Earth from wherever we roam.
More information will be provided as we build these events. Please RSVP with our volunteer coordinators at volunteer@buffalofieldcampaign.org or call 406-646-0070. Bring friends, bring creative energy, bring your love for the wild!
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 12, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance
This morning, I spent four hours lost in an industrial neighborhood in Pocatello, Idaho. I was carrying two bags and a box full of food—altogether about 70 or 80 pounds—the wind was howling through the flat grey morning, and I must have covered five miles before I found the coffee shop that I’m sitting in right now.
Explaining why I am here requires that we go back almost 200 years. By the mid-1800’s, the U.S. empire was growing rapidly and expanding west. As guns and horses spread across the Great Plains, bison herds began to fall to hunters and settler-colonists in need of hides. At the same time, industrialism was expanding. Factories used buffalo leather straps as a strong yet elastic material to drive belts on their machines, which means that the bison were literally killed to drive machines.
By the year 1902, there were only 23 bison alive on this continent who took refuge in Pelican Valley in what is now Yellowstone National Park. This means that between 30 and 60 million had been killed in less than 100 years, most of them in less than 20 years. That’s a survival rate of less than one in ten million, or 0.0000007 percent.
The removal of the bison allowed cattle ranching to expand and allowed the U.S. army to force the powerful plains nations onto reservations. The removal of the native nations to reservations via a series of concentration camps allowed settlers to move in.
Over time, with the establishment of Yellowstone National Park and surrounding wilderness areas, the last 23 bison were able to expand their populations. Today, there are around 4,700 bison in the Yellowstone area who are direct descendants of those final 23 survivors.
At this point, you might be forgiven for thinking that as a society, we’ve learned better, and now we protect wild buffalo—especially within Yellowstone. The reality is the opposite. Over the past 33 years, government agencies including the National Parks Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have used our tax dollars to kill more than 10,000 wild bison in and around Yellowstone. In service of livestock interests, Yellowstone National Park has, in the words of my friend Stephany Seay, “more wild buffalo blood on their hands than anyone since the 19th century.”
Today the U.S. Government continues its 200-year-old war against the bison by herding, baiting, and hazing them into a trap located on the North Side of Yellowstone National Park. Here, they are kept for months, subjected to invasive medical procedures (including sterilization experiments), and then murdered. In the past few months, 169 bison have been killed (and counting).
The justification for this slaughter is misguided “management plans” which are heavily influenced—written, more or less—by the ranching industry lobbyists. As was true in the 1800’s, cattle reign supreme in Montana today, and bison pay the price. Idaho is the same. They have a “zero tolerance policy,” which means that any buffalo who enter Idaho are tracked down and killed.
Just so we’re clear, this slaughter is preventing the Yellowstone bison herds from naturally expanding their population into suitable habitat in adjacent National Forests. There is enough land and food and water for the bison, but the cattle barons want all of it
I’ve written and said many times before that we’re living in a war, and that the dominant culture (capitalism, industrialism, civilization, whatever you want to call it) is destroying the planet.
Most people in this culture don’t acknowledge this war, and as the saying goes, “silence is complicity.” Once you understand this war, continuing to stand aside is a betrayal to the planet. There are, however, thousands of people around the world who do acknowledge that this is a brutal war, and that we need to fight back.
These people include the organizers of Buffalo Field Campaign. Buffalo Field Campaign is a grassroots campaign that was founded by Lakota activist Rosalie Little Thunder and activist videography Mike Maese in the winter of 1996-7, when more than a thousand bison were slaughtered by the National Parks Service and Montana Department of Livestock.
Over the intervening 21 years, Buffalo Field Campaign has worked through advocacy, whistleblowing, lawsuits, and direct action to protect the last remaining wild bison in Yellowstone.
I’m on my way right now to Yellowstone. I don’t have a car to travel with, so I rented a one-way vehicle to Pocatello, where another group of friends will pick me up. There are seven or eight of us converging on Yellowstone to express our solidarity, bring donations and supplies, and join in the fight to protect bison.
I’ve often heard the saying that the life of a soldier is 99 percent waiting, and one percent overwhelming terror. In my experience, the life of a revolutionary organizer in the modern world is much the same. We need to prepare, write, organize, build our groups and political consciousness, and gain more resistance skills. Much of this work is boring, dangerous, or downright exhausting.
This morning, after driving through the day yesterday and sleeping on a friend’s grandmother’s couch (thanks for the bag lunch, Lois!), I woke up before 6, jumped in the car, and drove the middle leg of my trip. After dropping the rental car in a tiny, dingy office in the middle of an industrial park covered in trash and tumbleweeds, I had two options: sit awkwardly in the corner for a few hours, or shoulder all my bags, zip up my down jacket, grab my food box, and push open the squealing front door, and try to find my ways sans-GPS to a coffeeshop to get some writing done.
That’s why I was lost on the streets of Pocatello, Idaho this morning.
by DGR News Service | Feb 2, 2018 | Culture of Resistance, Direct Action, Movement Building & Support, The Solution: Resistance
Activists, save these dates:
Deep Green Resistance will conduct advanced training in direct action, revolutionary strategy, tactics, and organizing June 22 – 24. This workshop is aimed at providing practical skills and networking to activists, organizers, and revolutionaries interested in saving the planet.
Environmental and social justice activists realize we are losing. Our tactics are failing and things are getting worse. This training will focus on escalation and creative, advanced tactics to increase our effectiveness.
Topics include the use and deployment of soft and hard blockades; hit and run tactics; police interactions; legal repercussions of resistance work; operational security; terrain advantages; strategy; escalation, and more.
The training will be conducted by experienced Deep Green Resistance activists / organizers as well as noted guest speakers (to be announced).
Sessions will be held next to Yellowstone National Park, providing a perfect setting to immerse ourselves in the natural world and activism.
Space is Limited and priority will be given to front-line activists, marginalized communities, and women. And save money with Early Bird Tickets – available for a limited time.
Click this link to apply now: https://deepgreenresistance.org/en/resistance-training-2018
Fitness enthusiasts know that resistance training leads to greater strength. Enhance the effectiveness of your resistance with us this June.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 30, 2017 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Current Management Practices Diminish Herd Viability to the Point of Hunt Closure Recommendations
by Buffalo Field Campaign
WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONTANA: Montana and Yellowstone’s severe mismanagement of wild, migratory bison has caused a serious decline in Yellowstone’s Central bison herd. The current management practices have diminished herd viability to the point that bison biologists are recommending hunt closures in Montana’s Hebgen Basin, west of Yellowstone National Park, lands where only buffalo from the Central Herd migrate to.
So far, this recommendation is not being heeded. Bison from the imperiled Central herd are already being killed by hunters.
The burden should not be on hunters alone. Yellowstone National Park must also take responsibility for their actions and refuse to kill for Montana cattle interests. Yellowstone’s unnecessary capture-for-slaughter operations far exceed the number of buffalo killed by hunters.
The Montana-based wild bison advocacy group, Buffalo Field Campaign, will hand deliver a letter to the Interagency Bison Management Plan (IBMP) decision-makers at an IBMP meeting held today in Chico Hot Springs, Montana. The letter urges hunt managers and Yellowstone to both take the necessary steps that will allow the Central bison herd to recover. The letter will also be sent to Montana Governor Steve Bullock as well as the Tribal Councils and Tribal Fish & Wildlife Commissions of the five Tribes hunting under treaty right.
“If Yellowstone moves forward with capture-for-slaughter operations, they will be neglecting their responsibility to the buffalo, ignoring the tragic shift that they recognize and have directly caused, and will be placing the bulk of the conservation burden on the five Tribes hunting under treaty right,” said James Holt, Buffalo Field Campaign Board Member from the Nez Perce (Nimiipuu) Tribe.
Bison managers know Central herd buffalo migrate west into the Hebgen Basin and also north into the Gardiner Basin. These distinct migrations doubly expose and impact the Central herd to capture and slaughter, hazing, and hunting firing lines on Yellowstone’s border.. The Central herd is in dire straits, hovering now at around 830 individuals, one-fourth the size it was in 2005. Barring a few radio-collared females, slaughter managers can’t differentiate Central from Northern herd buffalo.
“The Central herd is in this predicament because of Montana’s and Yellowstone’s gross negligence, and now Yellowstone biologists are calling for a hunt closure to offer a respite to Central herd buffalo, yet still want to kill up to 1,250 buffalo this winter – from both the Central and Northern herds – as they migrate north into the Gardiner Basin,” said Buffalo Field Campaign Board President Mike Mease. “While a hunt closure on the west side is badly needed, Yellowstone needs to do their part and stand up to Montana and refuse to capture. It is irresponsible and negligent for them to recommend hunting cease while they carry on with indiscriminate slaughter.”
The Central herd needs to recover before they disappear completely.
“The reality is Montana’s and Yellowstone’s “management” is causing a fundamentally tragic shift in buffalo behavior, migrations, and population structure,” said Buffalo Field Campaign media coordinator Stephany Seay. “Without additional habitat and protections, the Central herd will soon be gone, and the entirety of this last wild population is at risk of extinction.”
For more information about what is happening to America’s last wild buffalo, our National Mammal, visit www.BuffaloFieldCampaign.org.
