Thoughts on the 50th Anniversary National
Wilderness Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 15th-19th,
2014
Here’s a picture of a rattlesnake.
Not just any rattlesnake, but one I and a friend
almost stepped on while sauntering down a well-trod path at Petroglyphs
National Monument just west of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
We were taking a brief respite from the 50th
Anniversary National Wilderness Conference, a fine event sponsored by some fine
and strange bedfellows indeed, including the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture
(clearcuts), the Pew Trust (Sunoco Oil) and Wilderness Watch (the kick-butt
wilderness watchdog group you should
join[i]).
I didn’t see where the Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps had chipped in,
and I hope that at the 60th celebration conference we have defied
this infuriating trend toward quid pro quo “partnering” and away from true
conservation to the point where I don’t see them chipping in for that one
either.
Interesting panels and discussions were
definitely thick at this one, and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised
at how much the progressive, deep-ecology side of the debate was openly
represented. That, I think, was largely due to the active engagement of progressive
groups like Wilderness Watch, who spent serious time and energy swimming
upcurrent against the quid pro quo crowd (clearcuts)[ii].
But Dave Foreman and the Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell, sharing the
stage within a mere timelapse of three days? You wouldn’t have seen that combination
if, say, the Wilderness Law’s 50th anniversary had fallen under Gale
Norton’s watch[iii].
The Bush Administration would have seen such active engagement of citizens demanding
meaningful participation at a government-sponsored event as a terrorist attack[iv]. I
was impressed, which says a lot about how easily impressed I am. Aw, shucks…
Do you see the rattler? Neither did we, until
Dee went from talking about esoteric river trips to a reality-based four-feet
in the air and five-feet away, followed by myself in a matter of nanoseconds,
no confounding, hair-splitting thought processes necessary. All instinct, and what
a wonderful way to exist, if only for a nanosecond.
I have had a peregrinatious life, which in
the West means I’ve been lucky. I’ve been incautious enough to have found
myself four feet above more than several rattling rattlers before the speed of
thought caught up with me, and so I’ve become somewhat of an expert at
regarding an individual snake’s beauty from that most-advantageous perspective.
You can believe me, then, that although I’m sure there are snakes out there
that are just as beautiful, there are none that are more so. She was fat and
bright, maybe four feet long (or maybe twenty, my memory’s kind of fuzzy on
that point) and a vibrating rear end that would make an exotic dancer jealous. By
the time my thoughts recongealed and I reached for my camera, she had scooted
under the bush, and even at five feet away I couldn’t see anything of her
except what you see in the picture, and a hint of her vibrating tail, which
looked more like the skeleton seed head of a Crested Wheatgrass stalk than a
world-class beauty’s butt, which somehow my camera missed. What a gracious
being to express her feelings to us in such a focusing way.
I’ve always been offended by the so-called
Tea Party’s co-opting of the Rattlesnake flag, because I like rattlesnakes. They
let you know as quickly as they can--which is usually just before you step on
them—that you’re about to step on them, and they’re always scooting away from
you when they coil, so as not to strike unless as a last resort. They’re
polite, to use a word no credible person with a straight face would use when
describing the intentions of your average armed teabagger at a gun rally. This is an excellent case in point, by the
way, in defense of the Rights of Nature[v].
How are snakes going to sue the bastards for libel unless they have adequate
copyright protections? Mere coincidence that they don’t? I don’t think so.
Anyway, this particular rattlesnake, at this
particular interlude between wilderness workshops, keynote speeches and plenary
sessions crystallized a thought that had been eddying around in my mind as I
absorbed as much as I could from such diverse conference participants as Forman
and Jewell. I guess at the risk of seeming unfair or uninformed, I’d tag those
two as fair representatives of the two ends of the spectrum on conservation and
wilderness debates represented at the conference as well as within the larger
debates between reasonable people who aren’t banking on a one-way trip to
heaven after they finish frying this world. More on them in a minute, but
that’s my point. The critical debates swirling around us in the face of Global
Warming about how we humans should even see
the non-human world, let alone relate to it, are not linear, as in having
only two ends. It’s a continuum, encompassing all, and if we North American
environmentalists have had a single blind spot these last thirty years or so, since
the slash-and-burn Reagan years forced everyone to the left of Attila to duck
for cover, it is the Silo Syndrome[vi],
where we see “our” cause as separate from the wholesale crumbling of a
reason-based society. “When,” you might protest, “has our society ever
been reason based?!”, and I would
readily agree. I’m a Luddite at heart, too. But as was on full display at this
formal, well-funded wilderness conference, Global Warming is the undercurrent
for everything we who yearn for rational discussions talk about these days, and
it is a difficult, almost rudderless conversation, which means starting from
difficult (read: problematic) places if you’re going to start from anywhere at
all, which we really should. So for easy reference, a “fear-based society” is
the opposite end of my admittedly-constructed spectrum, and fear-based
societies are demonstrably bad for the environment, environmentalists and everybody else, including snakes.
This hasn’t always been the case, and to her
great credit, as well as to the credit of those who invited her, Sarah James of
the Gwich’in Nation, whose lands encompass the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
and whose survival depends on its protection, was the sole plenary speaker I
heard mention the term “human rights” in relation to environmental politics[vii].
Others hinted at it, which is a sign of great hope to me, but let’s be blunt. The
rattlesnake’s continued well-being depends on how we relate to ourselves as much
as how we relate to the rattlesnake. Human rights is the third leg of a monster centipede with a hundred legs, bigger than the
combined weight of all of our silos. That's a scary centipede. I’ll try to explain.
When I was an organizer for the Montana Human
Rights Network, our executive director would often recount how, back in the “days”
when the environment was an issue with more political traction (read: more
grant money) than human rights, he would approach the various statewide
conservation organizations for cooperation and support on the Fight-The-Right
issues we were working on, only to be told something to the effect that “Well,
we’re with you in spirit but we really can’t come out in the open on this one.
You know…it would offend some people we’re trying to work with.” Etc. These
days the situation has been reversed somewhat, and thus the Silo Syndrome
perpetuates itself. We stand alone, we get picked off alone. It’s a shame,
isn’t it?
My own entrance into human rights politics was
precipitated by the violent “Wise-Use” reactions, orchestrated by the
extractive industries, against local environmental activists—my friends—in the
Northern Rockies. I simply couldn’t see how the two weren’t inextricably tied. You
can’t have meaningful dialogue about mutual respect for people and the
environment with the political equivalent of a spoiled five-year-old throwing a
tantrum, could you? I didn’t think so, and I’ve looked at such far-ranging Land-based
messages represented by icons like Forman and Jewell with just such a lense for
many years. It’s interesting, that for all the damage done to our body politic
by the anti-enviro tantrum throwers who are never brought to account, we as
conservationists never take them on holistically, with accountability as a reasonable goal. Global Warming has its own focusing
power now, but it still seems that, for all our trying, somehow we have avoided
effectively defending the Land and Water as a cohesive, planet-loving movement,
which in turn leads us right down these ultimately self-realized paths of
muggings by the various enviro-bashing, teabaggin’ sovereign-citizen movements
such as we have been plagued with in the past and our politics are currently
infested with now. The quid pro quo/ collaboration crowd rushes in to fill the
gap that we ourselves left open to them, and are as wrong as they can be. The
most fundamental issue of the day is whether or not humans are to continue on
this planet and that issue does not have “two sides”. We’re clearly up against dysfunctional,
apocalypse-driven behavior on a massive scale. What to do?
Well…it must be clear to you by now that,
barring those beautiful nanoseconds when I’m four feet above a rattling
rattler, I’m one of those people who are doomed to confounding, hairsplitting
thought processes and, if you’re still reading this, so are you. My condolences,
and I’ll try to finish this thread with as little more pain as possible. But
now that you’ve read this far and I know you’re hooked, I feel a responsibility
to give you fair warning that, as a banjo player, I tend to digress. I’ll
explain some more, in other words. Here goes.
I’m all for less AynRandian (read: less disingenuously
predatory) human beings like Sally Jewell being put in charge of the Department
of Interior. She’s obviously a step or five in the right direction away from
Gale Norton, who once went on record as opining that the Southern “cause”
during…you know…the Civil War (!) was
basically sound (!?!). And I doubt if Jewell’s political enemies will come up
with any dirt as damning as the quid pro quos between Norton and that criminal,
corporate fall guy, Jack Abramoff. But that’s beside the point, isn’t it? The
fact is that both Jewell and Norton welled up, so to speak, from the very corporate
oil patches that are Mother Earth’s most intractable foes, Jewell from Mobil and
Norton from Royal Dutch Shell. I can understand why a politician like Bush
would pander to chicken-eating dogs vying to watch the henhouse, but not so
much why Obama thought he had to move in the same direction, and make no
mistake. As good a heart as Sally Jewell may have or as much as we love our
R.E.I. goodies[viii],
she was Obama’s overture to just such a chicken-eating beast[ix]. That’s just Ugly Politics 101, and nothing
against Jewell. But putting Mobil on your resume for Secretary of the Interior
lowers you a notch or two on the environmental trust-o-meter. How could it not?
On the other hand, I’ve always fallen in with
the EarthFirst(!) vision, which boils down to the super-simple, self-preserving
philosophy of the Earth coming First[x] while
also having a basic problem with “monkeywrenching”. I never could make the leap
that wrecking some working stiff’s stuff would somehow convince him to quit
acting like an asshole. I’m a working stiff, too, and sometimes I act like an asshole. Empathy is what
Jesus, among other people, said would save the world if anything could, and I
agree with him on this point. It’s also one of the core radical notions we Deep-Ecology
types ask those same stiffs to have for other species. Wrecking loud, obnoxious
equipment is a great outlet for many things, and I still greatly admire those
who don’t confound themselves with such thoughty thoughts. But this is Reason Number
One that I ended up on the Human Rights side of environmentalism.
Reason Number Two had to do with war. In
early 1981, I joined Missoula’s budding EarthFirst(!) chapter with the purest of
heart, the best of intentions and at the nadir of my Realpolitik naiveté. I’d
been working the woods for several years by then, seen and understood the
damage being done and I was righteously pissed, but I thought revolutions were
easier than they were. After an extended low-rent vagabond through Mexico and
Central America, though, where I had my first real chance to do face time with bulletholes
punctured into adobe church walls and burnt out buses within which kids died, I
started paying more attention to who our homeboy elites were and what, if they
were capable of sponsoring such savagery down there, they were capable of doing
to those of us up here who would be so brave and foolish as to openly advocate
violence against their pet bulldozers. I thought I saw horns poking through
what was left of the hair of Senator Jesse Helms, a personal friend of El
Salvador’s Roberto D’Aubuisson, and Reagan’s lead man for D’Aubuisson’s
mass-murder doctrine we still pay dearly for. Wow, I said. I better get my shit
together before I take these guys on.
As we all know by now, I was right about them[xi],
but I’m not bragging. I’m just explaining how I tripped away from overt EarthFirst(!)-ism
and headlong into the first of the three major human rights crises generated by
our homeboy wingnuts directly related to environmentalism in my adult lifetime:
the Central American anti-interventionist movement. “Let’s have a grown-up
conversation about wars”, we said, “which are always bad for the environment." When
Congress broke the law and approved Reagan’s $27 million dollar demand to fund
his drug-running Contra buddies, I got myself arrested for hanging plastic hamburgers
and bananas on a federal courthouse doorknob and not apologizing. It was
disobedient, but it was civil, like the stunt EarthFirst(!) pulled off at Glen
Canyon Dam with the 300-foot-long plastic crack. Call us hypocrites, but you
can’t help but love that kind of stuff. Still, I steered away from publicly-implied
threats I couldn’t back up. I didn’t rule out serving myself up to the bloody
buddies of D’Aubuisson, but I preferred to maintain a least a bit of an
illusion that I could choose my own time and place. Comfort’s where you find
it.
The second environmental crisis demanding a strong
human rights response was the militia flare-up of the mid-nineties. Lots of
people forget now, but if you were an environmentalist in the Northern Rockies
during that time you would well remember that the so-called “Wise-Use” movement
that morphed into the “militia movement” had been ginning logging-industry
activists bent on enviro-bashing since Jim Watt started brushing his fangs with
government-funded toothpaste. The Spotted Owl decision in 1990 was the icing on
the cake, and Ruby Ridge sent them right over the top, where they have stayed
ever since (Actually they’ve been there since before the Civil War, but that’s
another rant[xii]).
On the day Oklahoma City was bombed, for instance, I was wheeling my
four-year-old son past the Ravalli County Courthouse in his Flexible Flyer,
only to find out later that our courthouse had received its own bomb threat
that morning. As much as the automaton messaging at our thousand airports blather
on about how serious our elites take “terrorism”, no one was ever found and
convicted for perpetrating that atrocity, as well as many other atrocities I
could list but for the sake of being relatively positive, I won’t. In fact,
after things cooled down, several of those very “militia” enablers rose to
seats of power within local, state and national government, and have stayed
there.
This sort of stuff would stick in the craw of
conservationists living in the Northern Rockies, and when the Montana Human
Rights Network sprang into existence to counter the second violent wave
spilling out from the Secessionist Right, some of us joined up and many
remained active in the Fight-The-Right movement, because of our primary concern
for the Land. “Let’s have a grown-up conversation about guns,” we said, which
also didn’t go anywhere immediately, but is still a central conversation to
have concerning environmental awareness, since the third environmental/human
rights crisis, Teabaggery, plagues us to this day mostly, I believe, because we
progressives don’t tend to deal with the meta-crises of our time whole-cloth.
I think “environmentalists” are too often too
shy to call themselves “progressives” and vise-versa and for the wrong reasons.
The silo syndrome not only fragments us and makes us easier targets, it’s unnecessary. Defending the right to Dissent, specifically the rights of beleaguered
environmentalists, should always be at the top of any Deep Ecologist’s list of
grave concerns, and it used to be. Iconic conservationist, Stewart Brandborg,
who gave us the Wilderness Law as much as any other single person, living or
otherwise, had it right decades ago when he saw his main job as Executive
Director of the Wilderness Society from 1964 to 1976 not so much in terms of getting
more Wilderness per se as in “making Democracy work.” He and his colleagues recognized
the Whole Cloth, that if you’re going to have human societies living on the
land—and Mother Nature doesn’t necessarily agree with us on that point—then it
follows that the only path toward healthy human societies are healthy
environments, and vise versa. Otherwise, something’s gotta give, and you know
who’s punching above our weight on that one.
To be as clear a banjo player can possibly be
(please refer to above warning) for several decades, Dave Foreman and those
many others who have shared the EarthFirst(!) vision of the Earth coming First[xiii]
and acted upon that vision in their multitude of ways, have continued to be key
voices in America in defense of the Land and Water and I can’t speak highly
enough of them. Suffice to say that they are clearly as relevant to today’s
discussions as they were back in the good ol’ days when we were more naïve and,
by definition, more hopeful.
And yes, Sally Jewell, for her part, is
better than Gale Norton, which is great for about as far as you can throw a
Prius. I wish her the very best of luck, which of course means that We The
Privileged Ones still have a long way to go, Realpolitik-wise.
Which brings up the key to crystalizing modern environmental
thought-processes that we ignore at our great peril. Most wilderness debates in America to date have resided predominantly within the demographic of those from relatively-privileged backgrounds. The Global Warming crisis has the potential
of turning that demographic anomaly on its head, in a positive, more universal
direction which is where it absolutely must be. Our personal belly buttons are only so interesting. But that’s the very thing. Our boring uniformity invites the very
real danger that the incredibly obtuse academic “neo-greens” coming almost
exclusively from that same overeducated demographic, will prevail against
educated reason itself. Geo-engineering and “eco-gardening” our way out of an
environmental crisis brought on by our very proclivity for that very sort of thing
is not only not rational, it’s dysfunctional. But the neo-greens techno-message
dovetails so perfectly with the very extractive industries that have been the
bane of every intact ecosystem on the planet since the dawn of the Industrial
Age[xiv] that it is
a very well-funded message indeed. Such specious, “balanced” arguments are fetching top dollar these days because the despoilers recognize our weakness if we don't, and they move accordingly in isolating us as activists, seeing an easy split of existing conservationists
right down the middle if they can just aim their “smart” axes cleverly enough
at our heartwood. Please see Ugly Politics 101 above. It’s not rocket-science.
The faces of the Despoilers and their
enablers, at least here in Montana, have not changed, nor has their message,
which is predominantly about bashing anyone to the left of Attila[xv] ,
which includes all environmentalists,
as “eco-terrorists”. In fact our message hasn’t changed either. We talk about the
Land and the public interest. They talk about for-profit death and destruction and
what they’d like to do to “shit-stirring” environmentalists if given half a chance, which, if one regards the Roberts' Court in its full enormity, they've been given. “Let’s
have a grown-up conversation about Global Warming,” we say today, and they
throw an armed fit. Good grief.
I hasten to re-iterate that this screed is as
full of holes as Swiss Cheese, which some people don’t like. But even if you
don’t prefer your cheese with holes in it, you might concede the point that
it still exists within certain sandwiches, which is exactly where it seems we
all are today, ready to be served up…to whom?
Call me a hypocrite, because it’s all so
confounding and hairsplitting anymore I would, from time to time, agree with
you, and I’m O.K. with that. But as all of us who have experienced wave after
wave of reactionary nature-bashing in the Northern Rockies know, there are a
lot of people who will purposely run over a rattlesnake sunning itself on a road, and
who are, sadly, unreformable. You can’t argue with them about it. They want to kill for the mere
reason of the hatred that got stuck somewhere in their system long ago for some
reason that they are probably originally innocent of but should have worked themselves out from under by now don’t you think (!?). As a resident of a rural community in these teabaggy times, I know a few of
them personally and, speaking with that voice of authority, my common sense
urges me to avoid purposely stepping on them. But I tend to ignore this good
advise and follow my instincts instead, by doing just the opposite. What a
beautiful way to exist, if you can get away with it, and kind of fun, too. If
you’ve ever been four feet high above a demurring rattlesnake and had a good
outcome you know what I mean. I’m certain that this is the correct way to live
these days. Step on the stolen image while thanking the snake and offering to
find her a good pro-bono lawyer, like Wilderness Watch does.
The point? For all the human rights aspects
that surround our Category-Five Global Warming disaster, I hereby opine that it’s
not our job to try to understand these unreformable people anymore. Our duty to
them is to say: If Heaven is where you’d really rather be, I wish you Godspeed
and Good Riddance[xvi] and then move on with getting our own shit together. I further opine that, as far as anything goes anywhere, Dave Forman is exactly right on some things, Sally Jewell is mostly right on a
couple things, and the rattlesnake trumps everybody.
How about we tear down these silly silos we
who know the difference between conservation and capitulation have needlessly
built up around ourselves? It’s not all about Wilderness. It’s not all about
Human Rights. It’s not all about War. It's not even about our silly ol' selves, even though we have to pretend that it is in order to get a damn thing done.
It’s about snakes. That’s the point.
[ii] There were many great wilderness lovers and
advocates who made their careers in the Forest Service in attendance and who
made the agency a better place for wilderness junkies like myself to work. I am
critiquing the organization, not those individuals.
[iii] “Libertarian” Secretary of the Interior
under George W. Bush, 2001-2006. Resigned in the wake of the Abramoff scandal,
a beltway criminal scheme where “libertarian” politicians who made careers out
of advocating for less government were paid off in exchange for demonstrating
exactly what they meant by “less government”. Norton resigned before she could
be formally investigated, but not before she gifted a sweet oil-shale deal on
public lands worth billions to Dutch Royal Shell, with whom she miraculously
found herself working for after she left Government. I’m pretty sure Foreman
would have loved to have shared a stage with her, but not vise-versa, and
definitely not a stage in large part paid for by the U.S.D.A.
Armed guards barred Stewart Brandborg, one of
the last surviving founder of the Wilderness Law, from entering the Bitterroot
National Forest Supervisor’s Office in 2005 by Supervisor Dave Bull, a Bush-era
agency operative pandering to the “fears” of the local Wise Use crowd he had
gathered inside for a photo-ops to promote a massive logging scheme. A portrait
of Stewart’s father, Guy Brandborg (Bitterroot Forest Supervisor from 1935-55)
hung from the entrance wall.
[vi] I just made that up (I think) and if I did I
hereby gift it to the Public Domain. Feel free to steal it!
[viii] Previous to her appointment as Secretary of
the Interior, Jewell was C.E.O. of R.E.I.
[ix] Nothing against beasts, but dogs can be seen
as an invasive species. No analogy is perfect. I just do my best.
[xv] Nothing against huns. Just sayin’…Atilla.
