Ravalli County Commissioner Deploys See-Through Smokescreen

According to an email that just surfaced yesterday (posted below), our extremist Ravalli County commission has decided that the American Lung Association is simply too radical to be dealt with other than in the most condescending, insulting and inscrutably bizarre manner. How ironic it is that this is exactly how progressives such as us garden-variety environmentalists have been treated by those in power for decades. But more on that in a minute.

First off, let’s reminisce about how these same commissioners accused all of us to the left of them (or Attila the Hun) of being U.N. Agenda 21 dupes trying to send all true patriots in Montana off to labor camps in Seattle. www.RCWatchdog.org/. Never forget the mindset of those displaying inscrutable behavior when trying to divine the motives behind that behavior. It saves time, if nothing else.

More to the point: I’ve often wondered what magical formula these Inscrutable Ones use when they complain so bitterly about natural disasters like forest fire smoke but then attempt to extricate themselves from reality when confronted with evidence that pollution from their own diesel pickups and their own burn piles—things that they can all actually do something about--are just as deadly. My casual observation is that those who complain the loudest about smoke from forest fires are often the first to light their piles of green slash upwind from communites-full of kids’ lung while their piles typically smolder unattended for days and weeks. They are also, like as not,  smokers who don’t believe in either second hand smoke or Santa Claus.  Obviously these observations of mine are unscientific and can be readily refuted by someone who can shout with a louder, angrier voice than myself.

And indeed our local extremists, including the Fosses, have been shouting mad. In fact, they’ve been making loud, angry noises lately that they intend to sue the Forest Service over smoke from summer fires. In the real world, such a lawsuit would squander the wealth of whoever was foolish enough to stake the lawyer fees to attempt it, and if Suzie succeeds in dipping into your tax money to attempt such a foolish project, hold onto your wallet.

But hold off on the real world as we peel back the delusional onion a bit. How about a quasi-real world, where the Fosses et al. actually find a secessionist-minded judge to side with them?  In such a wonderful world, this unleashed precident would  free us all to sue any one of our neighbors at any time over smoke wafting our way from their slash piles, from their unnecessarily-muscular diesel pickups and from the very woodstoves to which many Bitterrooters ascribe the metaphor "Family Hearth". Suing the government over natural disasters starts sounding rather un-American when you follow it to its natural angle of repose, doesn’t it? But never mind. In the quasi-real world of selective hypocracy, the sky would literally be the limit for all of us who desire litiginous relationships with our neighbors, which in statistically-significant cases has been shown to be a contributor to unwanted pregnancies(*).

But wait! Let’s peel the onion back one more layer, to the fantasy-world of irascible extremism where many of these folks apparently reside, a world where everybody knows that the Forest Service is aiding in the U.N.’s  Agenda 21 plan to kill off all “patriots” in the Bitterroot with their communistic, premeditated conflagerations. In this wonderful world, the reason that smoke coming off of public lands is “Big and Bad” while smoke coming off of their slash piles or out of their diesel pipes is “Good and Wholesome” is because (grab your hats, the wind’s picking up!) the smoke coming off of public lands is Big Bad Gubmint smoke (!!) while the smoke coming off of their slash pile is God-Given, “patriot” smoke.

This, folks,  is the best that I can do with the hateful, grammer-challenged email commissioner Foss sent to the American Lung Association last Tuesday in response to their request that the commissioners sign onto a letter urging President Obama to support the tightening  of regulations governing small-particulate pollution from such sources as coal and diesel. I’ve long believed that the longer these out-of-control wingnuts beat up on righteous, mainstream people like the American Lung Association, using the same uglystick the Wise Use movement has been using on environmentalists for decades, the sooner mainstream America will realize that those “radicals” they’ve been sacrificing through neglect for all these years didn’t deserve the beatings. And also that it hurts. And when that empathetic revelation hits home, evolution will begin. Maybe...

 How’s that for hope?

Here’s the full text

From: Suzy Foss
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2012 1:19 PM
To: 'jfirehammer@mrss.com'
Subject: RE: Still hope you can sign Montana elected officials letter for Lung Association

 I am sorry but until the EPA recognizes the impact of particulate matter from Forest and Grassland Fires I cannot go along with this letter.  Montana has clean top quality coal that not only produces hundreds of jobs, it heats our communities inexpensively and efficiently.  Our farmers, ranchers and trucking industry depend upon diesel fuel for their jobs.  The tons of dangerous material that hovers over the west and in the case of north to south valleys like our and Salt Lake City, not to mention that the smog from the fires eventually hits the east coast and beyond, this issue is going to kill our western citizens far sooner than the impact you talk about.  Wildfires at the intensity we experience today are new to our environment due to the totally misguided management by the Federal Government.  Overgrown forests, thick under stories of fuel and a let it burn policy has destroyed the health, economies, culture and ability to safely live our lives.  The soot you worry about does not even begin to drive us from our homes and way of
life (**).

Thank you, 

Suzy Foss

Ravalli County Commissioner

Ravalli County Commissioners Office

215 South 4th Street, Suite A

Hamilton, MT 59840

406-375-6510 phone 406-375-6507 fax

(*) Just kidding.

(**) What a wonderful, wonderful world these people live in. Praise the lord and pass the Thorazine, please

How to Regroup at the Gates of Mordor

12/7/12
Two days ago I attended a Legislative Summit in Helena put on by a long list of Montana groups concerned about the makeup and direction of our upcoming Tea Party-infested 2013 Legislature. AARP, American Cancer Society, MEA/MFT, Montana Conservation Voters, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, Montana Human Rights Network, Western Native Voice and Montana Small Business Alliance are just a sampling of the advocacy groups who sponsored the summit and who will be fighting a defensive battle to retain YOUR rights that will be under a full-court, well-funded attack by this rogue legislature (*). We all need to first of all pay close attention and second of all be prepared to give of our time, money and efforts to go to Helena and support YOUR allies in person. It’s going to be bad for them, and they will need you. Also, given the ATP-rigged make-up of the House and Senate, a governor’s veto of bad bills will be much harder to sustain than it was last session. Here’s my first attempt to help you in the former, and inspire you to participate in the latter. I’m talking car pools to Helena and rally organizing etc. Of course phone calls, emails, letters etc. are also essential: http://www.leg.mt.gov/css/Sessions/63rd/roster.asp?HouseID=0&SessionID=107

But this session they need to see as many of us face-to-face as often as we can personally manage. Please start the process of considering what you can give. This looks like it’s going to be a nasty session. Right now most of the declared bills don’t have text yet, so the specifics are yet to come. Be prepared for ugly surprises and I’ll try to provide details as I get them.

Here’s a partial recap of what I found out and networked on last Tuesday:

·         Bitterrooters: Know that Family Planning will probably come under attack again, probably under the gigantic budget bill, which makes it harder to see. Please consider attending House and Senate Taxation Committee hearings, even if you don’t have all the numbers in your heads. This is how they get away with their defunding/privatization schemes. They confuse us and plow ahead with their ALEC-written corporate agenda (**)  http://billmoyers.com/tag/alec/  Show up and let them see your face, hear your voice, even on seemingly arcane issues, let them know that you know what these discussions mean to programs you care about and that you are paying attention. Don’t let them bully you with numbers.

o   This state-wide attack on Family Planning will probably be accompanied with another attack on our local program by our commissioners, either during or right after the legislative session. Get angry and get ready.

·         “Revising education laws” looks like the main topic of draft bills currently in the hopper. This is bad, bad news for parents and educators. Look for ALEC –written Creationism bills (euphemistically-dubbed “Intelligent design” and school privatization bills (euphemistically-dubbed “school choice”, “charter schools” and “vouchers”) They’re surfacing as I write. Our local legislator, Nancy Balance, has submitted at least one of them so far, and will surely be involved.

·         Fringe Militia tenets such as county-Supremacy (euphemistically-dubbed “Coordination”), anti-govt./ secessionist screeds such as state sovereignty (10^th Amendment canards) and going back to the gold standard are already in the hopper as well. Wording  for 10^th amendment/Coordination bills introduced in past sessions have come boiler-plate straight from ALEC’s “model bill” fashion plates they serve up to our private (not “public”) servants with their steak and lobster bribes.

o   This is important to remember: much the official jibber-jabber you’re going to hear about “constitutional principles” , “freedom” and “2^nd Amendment solutions” can be traced straight back to mutli-national corporations, including money from Saudi Arabia and Dubai, through ALEC.

§  Really??? Really.

·         LGBT issues will be assuredly attacked, and any local and state gains will be retained by fighting for them. Expect no new gains. Anticipate losses. Federal gains will be challenged under “10^th Amendment” bills. Look for creative variations and downright fights.

·         Under the federal expansion of Medicaid, Montana has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make sure tens of thousands of citizens have health care. This will also bring tens of millions of dollars into the state and create tens of thousands of jobs, as well as help assure there’s a healthy workforce to take advantage of those jobs. This expansion, as well as the Affordable
Care Act, with similar clear benefits to the state and its citizenry, will be under extreme attack on many fronts, including the disingenuous (and frankly seditious) interpretation of the Constitution in general, and the 10^th Amendment specifically (***).

·         Again: many horrible bills were successfully vetoed last session. That’s because Schweitzer had enough votes in the legislature to sustain those vetoes. Two things here:

o   We need at least half a dozen Republican legislators on each and every horrible bill who will help sustain vetoes from the governor’s office this session. Think “personhood”, “creationism”, privatizing schools, “coordination”, the “gold standard” and the flock of other ugly issues you don’t want to see codified into law by these corporate stooges (*). Plan on showing your face or plan on being the laughing-stock of the country.

o   The end-run around democracy used in the last session was the resolution to put a bill on the ballot as a referendum. This only requires a simple majority vote, which the extremists have, and avoids the governor’s desk all together. ALL of their referenda passed this last election, and it is certain they will do this again. We may see a ballot in 2014 with as many as 20 extreme initiatives on it, sustaining that national laugh at our painful expense. Mitigation of this certainty calls for rallies and other “getting-out-on-the-street” activities, such as Wisconsin saw in 2011.

§  Really??? Really.

The above are my educated predictions. I’ve been researching for the sake of folks in the Bitterroot who are gonna need as much info as they can get on the doings of the likes of Thomas and Ballance, and I’ll do my best to be accurate. If something doesn’t jibe, please let me know and I’ll pass it along. I think most of my underpinnings are correct, and a lot of what I’m warning about will come true.

Or...you can prove me wrong by getting seriously involved. I don't mind eating crow, but it's best eaten served up warm. That’s all I ask. Don’t let ‘em mainstream their roadkill agenda til the crow gets cold. I’ll be right by then,  and then I won’t eat it.                               

*My personal analysis, but look at how much money was pumped into Ravalli Co. Republican primary races last Spring by ATP, look at Fred Thomas’ picture on the MT Legislative website, and please prove me wrong.

**In a nutshell, ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) is energy-billionaire Koch Brothers’ corporate vehicle for secretly-buying state legislatures with junkets and other trinkets in exchange for corporate-written policies that undermine democracy and have the ultimate goal of privatizing our country’s every function, including education, prisons, state and federal legislatures. These huge corporations, of course, in many if not most cases, are either trans-national or not even based in the United States.

*** To simplify: Militia-corporate style interpretations of the 10^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution claim that any rights or duties that weren’t SPECIFICALLY spelled out in the Constitution, any rights or duties that have been interpreted over 200 years of case law are null and void, and therefore those rights and duties revert back to the states. Hence the term “nullification”. In the past as well as the present, the cause of “Nullification” has been taken up by such groups as the Montana Freemen, Posse Comitatus, Oathkeepers, and various other gun-bristling outfits whose philosophies pretty much trace back to pre-Civil War “Bloody Kansas”, the training grounds for the likes of Quantrill’s Raiders, the James Gang and the Younger brothers. Pseudo-legal 10^th Amendment/nullification canards were a major component of the “paper terrorism” strategy these violent militia groups used in threatening and harassing local officials. Up until this last Tea Party spectacle, “nullification” was considered so extreme no serious politician would dare mention it. Now, we’re getting corporate bills underwritten by out-of-country money promoting it and being proudly introduced by our “patriot” legislators. Really??? Really.

On Reagan, Bigotry and Evolution

“I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

                                                                                    Mark Twain

  

In August of 1980, a former California governor chose to do an odd thing. Originally, before he was a governor, he’d been an actor in westerns portraying men with easy access to guns working out Civil War-era post-traumatic stress disorder. He was telegenic, he knew his part, and the rich loved him.

He showed up in an obscure town named Philadelphia, Mississippi, where he was to give his first speech after winning the Republican candidacy for president.

As we all know, many Americans still can’t point out Iraq or Afganistan on a wordless map, nor can they attach meaningful words to Philadelphia, Mississippi today. So, as we labor through our various manifestations of post-election depression, as we wonder mightily at where all this hatred is coming from and struggle with our very memories, the following are a few meaningful words I would like to attach to Philadelphia, Mississippi, which I fear has become yet another blank spot on the low-information map which we Americans seem to prefer these days for navigating around painful issues.

Philadelphia, Mississippi was the town where three civil rights workers--James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner--were murdered by the Klan only sixteen years before Reagan showed up, in 1964, the same year Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. In fact, the murders of the three young men during the civil rights action known as Freedom Summer was one of the big straws that finally broke Jim Crow’s back in Mississippi and the South, and compelled the nation’s first Southern president since the Civil War into finally passing any civil rights act at all.

Freedom Summer, in turn, was organized by a lot of groups, but the main one was the now-legendary Students’ Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC was a group of young people who believed in doing things that were seen as presumptuous and threatening to the powerful. Sit-ins, freedom rides, marches on Washington, things that would get them jailed, beat up, killed. They were willing, in other words, to put it all on the line in a commitment for justice we provincial citizens haven’t seen the likes of since. Not surprisingly, these kids became more powerful than the seemingly-insurmountable powerful interests they opposed, and in the process they invented concepts and phrases still widely held in contempt by those who would still keep them down. For instance, one of SNCC’s presidents, Stokely Carmichael, popularized the term “Black Power”, a phrase that defeated segregationists in the South found presumptuous at best.  And the presumptuous goal of Stokely Carmichael and the murdered men during the Freedom Summer of ’64?  To register eligible voters.  

That shadow you may be sensing peering over your shoulder is the ghost of madame Déjà vu. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

As with so many other campaign speeches coming from freshly-minted presidential candidates, Reagan’s speech was a calculated one, carefully crafted to set the tone for the candidate’s trajectory into history, and, as in real estate, armed conflict and other human endeavors, location was considered important. Reagan obviously chose Philadelphia, Mississippi out of approximately four million square miles of word-challenged United States territory for a specific reason: to aim his trajectory into history, and he did not mince his words. In an open ploy to woo working-class Americans away from paying attention to their own best interests, Reagan declared that “states’ rights” and truncated interpretations of the U.S. Constitution that would shrink the government’s power to regulate those who felt entitled to unregulated wealth, bigotry or both would be his central themes. Of course these were the very themes the South had used a century earlier to defend their “peculiar institution” and to forever justify the resultant Jim Crow century.

Reagan didn’t quite go so far as to call for a rebirth of the Confederacy, but in the eyes of all the white voters who openly resented the Civil Rights Act, “Black Power”, and who secretly carried the murders of Philadelphia, Mississippi within their own troubled souls, he did a good job of acting like he did. Madame Déjà vu was running a full-on cathouse, selling memories if nothing else.

Bigotry, like nuclear war, is a revelation you can rely on. The dread of both will sit there unexposed, invisible until it’s stirred and forced to the fore, floats for a while like sun specks on the skin of your eyes, temporarily annoying. Then gone just as quickly, denied and forgotten even though it’s swimming right before your eyes, like a shark, or sun specks.

Follow the thread of the cloth and it’s easy to see why we disengage before we trace the subject home. Be thankful, I guess, that it all comes so easy for us, but I still have a couple of questions. Is bigotry uniquely human and if not, does our uniquely-human bigotry necessarily steer us towards environmental catastrophe to the point of our own extinction? I mean, is it natural to be a bigot, or are we really the only beings on this planet hell-bent on destroying ourselves? Are there any studies? Ants, maybe? Wasps? Didn’t the Nazis have ‘God Is With Us’ stamped on every German soldier’s belt buckle? 
In other words, if we’re so smart, shouldn’t we evolve or something?

The Sounds of Silence

There’s a book out now. I haven’t read it but I think I should, and I think you should, too. It’s written by a professional musician, Bernie Krause, whose work on the soundtracks of iconic movies like “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Apocalypse Now” as well as his regular work with iconic musicians like Bob Dylan, the Byrds, George Harrison etc. have made him a household name in households that hold professional musicians. He knows his way around recording equipment, in other words, which flags his other work of recording natural sounds in pristine habitats as particularly poignant and important. His book is about how the natural world is demonstrably and unequivocally quieting down due to environmental degradation and resultant extinctions. What stands out are some numbers: over the last 40 years, Mr. Krause has collected 4,500 hundred hours worth of sounds emitted from 15,000 species. He now estimates that half of those recordings are unique archives, impossible to repeat due to extinctions of habitat, species or both. 

Eminent scientists have been telling us for a long time. Eminent social malcontents even longer. Now it's our eminent musicians’ turn. It’s about time. Read about Krause’ book here, and see what you think. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/05-2 Thinking’s good, I think.

Speaking of thinking, I was driving home from town the other day, making my way west up Bear Creek Road where I usually get a good look at one of the clear and majestic Bitterroot canyons that remind me why I’ve chosen to live in Montana on short wages for so long. This time, however, I couldn’t make out the canyon a mile and a half away due to poor visibility from the smoke belching out of the giant fires to the west of us, in the wilderness, and to the south of us, from the Salmon River drainage in Idaho. The whole visible world was cloaked in an eerie, greenish-orange sunset. Quite weird and, in a perverse way, very beautiful. All I needed was a Bernie Krause soundtrack to cap it off, cinematographically-speaking.

But of course, this is no specially-effected movie of a future, fictional, degraded world a future, fictional, degraded society is struggling within like we throng to theatres to horrify ourselves with these days (“Hunger Games” just for example). My family, including our six-year-old daughter with still-growing lungs, has been breathing this off-color smoke for the last month. It’s become commonplace and expected this time of year now. I’ve lost count, but for the fourth or fifth time the Lost Trail ski hill on the Montana-Idaho border will be saved by the government the owner of the hill hates. Eventually, the deafening sound of extinction will waft over that hill, too, and for all his anti-government posturing, the well-meaning owner won't be able to stop the government from saving him, or find anyone else to blame when the ski hill finally burns other than himself and his tea-soaked cronies. Nice guy that he truly is, he’s willfully provincial. Been here too long to really understand, I guess, or to give a damn where all the meadowlarks went.

We talk much of future calamities caused by a heating world and, as a corollary, we like to scare ourselves with movies about bleak worlds that we don’t think apply to us. But we in Montana and throughout the West are just like that frog in the slowly boiling pot, who doesn’t notice she’s being boiled to death until just before the final degree kills her, and it’s far too late to jump out. Indeed, by that time, she’s quite forgotten how to jump.

These times are when Wilderness shines as the enlightened concept that it has been right from its early-20th Century start. Because we preserved some wild areas, a lot of people developed a yearning to go and see them. And because a lot of people heeded that yearning here in the Northern Rockies over the past decades, there's now a critical mass of people who might understand when someone like my humble self asks you to visualize those delicate, fairy-land tairn-ponds and wet areas up in the high country in August, fringed with pink elephant-head and purple gentian, whose primary late-summer contribution to the Whole is to ooze out the last of the melting snows into the headwaters of our creeks, which in turn are the headwaters of our rivers. Imagine now twenty years hence, more or less, when those high-altitude sponges dry up because all the snowfields disappeared in July, and there is forevermore no snowmelt to feed the creeks and rivers we paid so dearly for to call home. Imagine what’s left of our trout-laden rivers, slowing and warming to the no-return point where they can no longer support cold-water-dependent trout populations. Then ask yourself: will those living here in fifty years accept the resultant sucker holes to be the norm, and will they therefore find them beautiful. Or will they realize that there is some huge piece of themselves missing, that they are living in a horribly degraded world, forevermore? And then what?

I have a background in forestry, native-plants restoration and living large parts of my life outdoors, which doesn’t make me any kind of an expert. Just savvy enough to tell you definitively—and with profound sadness--that this is not only going to happen. It’s happening. To us. Right now.

We are living in the slowly-boiling pot. Living through our lungs in this case, viscerally, just like the frog does with her skin. We just refuse to admit that we are so confined, that we have so confined ourselves. Egocentric critters that we are—and I’m no pschycologist either--I’m guessing our degraded day-to-day reality is too much like being the star in a scary movie where the screenwriter goes on strike due to poor working conditions and refuses to save us from impossible odds. Too scary to look at.

I’ve often said that Denial is a great human tool for getting ourselves out of the woods with a broken leg, but it's also a tool that devolves into dented monkey wrenches used inappropriately as hammers when applied to politics and other social disciplines where you actually have to acknowledge the Pain in order to do anything about it.

We have all the information on Global Warming we need to compel us. Our leading scientists have been warning us for a quarter-century that it’s an observable, replicable and therefore-scientific fact that we are living far beyond our means, that catastrophes and gothic-cloaked, degraded environments await us all, rich and poor.

Now it appears even our leading musicians are willing to speak with the same irrefutable authority. And yet here we are, a quarter century after scientific officialdom felt comfortable enough with its data to declare to political officialdom that we simply must quit shitting in our nest or else, and political officialdom has not only done nothing, but has willfully shifted the state vehicle in reverse, causing the first dire predictions to become either increasingly more dire, or true. In the course of human evolution, this reversal is predictable, significant and worth examining by every one of us. The fact that bigotry—racism, religious zeolotry, apocalyptic teabaggery, war, you name it--blends so seamlessly with earthly destruction is one of the huge and impossible Pains we must acknowledge if we’re going to get ourselves out of these woods. To put it even more bluntly, our current pathetic behavior is a Pain that every single one of us denies at great peril to our children, our grandchildren and to ourselves.

Poor frogs. Poor us.

How about we evolve or something?

On Calling Myself a Progressive

I figure the word “progressive” has a pretty good pedigree but is subject to abuse through overuse.

I would claim it in the sense of an objection I have long held, that “environmentalists” such as myself are opposed to “progress”. I’ve always countered that charge with one of my favorite counter-points, which is that while I’m in no way opposed to progress, I’m just not seeing any lately.

Speaking of clichés, we progressives didn’t invent the six-syllable mouthful of language corruption that now effortlessly rolls out of our mouths through overuse and abuse: “environmentalist”. I think corporate media hung that hat on us and we were collectively too out-of-tune with Poetry to voice offense. If I were to describe myself with a comparable six-syllable insult to the English language, I would follow Montana writer Rick Bass’ lead and identify myself as a “human-f---in’ bein’ ”.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party; Dan Happel, Our Planning Board and Agenda 21

When Madison County Commissioner Dan Happel made his “Agenda 21” presentation to the Ravalli County Planning board last month, he defined himself. He told the board—and us—that he was a qualified expert on “Agenda 21” because he had been involved in the “liberty” movement most of his life. Chairman Jan Wisneiwski  further qualified Happel’s  claimed “expertise” on the topic-at-hand by allowing fundamentalist prayer to be presented before the proceedings, liberally sprinkled with “citizen comment” that fundamentalist prayer, as well as this “educational” presentation on “Agenda 21” were relevant to planning board discussions about clean air and water because “we are a Christian nation” and that President Obama is a “critter” http://www.bitterrootstar.com/2012/03/27/planning-board-hears-about-agenda-21/  .

Okay. It’s true. People have a perfect right to claim that the moon is made of green cheese. It says so right in the Constitution—not that the moon is made of green cheese but that one has the right to say it is.

But when these people start citing “studies”, “reports” and “experts” to back up their “green cheese” claim, Us the People—the ones who are footing the bill for such discussions to be allowed on the public’s dime under the guise of being somehow relevant to county business--have the perfect right to demand a forthright answer from them as to what dark hole they’re pulling this stuff out of.

If you’re not content with dismissing the whole Foxnewslandia mess our commissioners have brought down upon our taxpaying heads as Freeman/Posse Comitatus/ “patriot” (and dangerous) nonsense—which it is--and you’d like to know just where people like Happel and Wisniewski are acquiring their superior knowledge of the shadowy, comic-book world of super-villain environmental Stalinists trying to take over the world through mind-control and zoning, here’s some samples from the horse’s mouth for your examination:

In 2008, a “Freedom 21” conference was held in a Dallas, co-hosted by the far-right, conspiracy-oriented Eagle Forum and the far-right, conspiracy-oriented American Policy Center (APC). Other “patriot” organizations presenting  at this “educational” event included the far-right, conspiracy-oriented Freedom Advocates, the far-right, anti-U.N. Soveierenty International, and of course the far-right, conspiracy-oriented John Birch Society, who once insisted that President Eisenhower was a communist.

The subject of the conference was the new catch-all, Far-Right conspiracy theory: an obscure 300-page non-binding (read: toothless) document presented at the U.N. Earth Summit in 1992 that discussed and offered help to local communities in areas such as energy efficiency, clean air and water. This document, one of literally millions of similar obscure public and international documents that float around in our info-age world, was named by some similarly-obscure bureaucrat “Agenda 21”.

And there you go. That’s all you need to know to be as “educated” about “Agenda 21” as Wisniewski or Happel, other than some spin that came out of that 2008 conference that have since become common coin and litmus test combined for all of those who’ve felt threatened by the existence of the first non-white president’s right- leaning administration, including our own Celebrating Conservatism phenomenum here in the Bitterroot:

·         Agenda 21  is "an anti-human document, which takes aim at Western culture.
Sustainable development policies will require "a police state" and ultimately "turn America into a globally governed homeland where humans are treated as biological resources."

·         "Sustainable development can exist only when people are controlled by government."

·         Agenda 21 advocates have drafted an Earth Charter which they compare to the Ten Commandments and keep in an Ark of Hope”.

·         "The major goal of the sustainable development movement is to disarm Americans."

·         "Feminism has destroyed society,"

·         Schools should "spend more time on prayer than putting on condoms"

·         "Diversity is a code word for teaching homosexuality in schools."

·         "This is not some nice little debate…this is war."

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2012/spring/behind-the-green-mask  http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2008/winter/earth-worship

So we can use the Far Right’s own chosen metaphor: War, usually the worst expression of American xenophobia and nativism, and by extension, the worst of Montana, your home. These folks, including our local government officials, are feeling comfortable enough now to declare war on the environment (and environmentalists), women, our schools, our courts, public employees and anyone benefiting from public services of any kind that they don’t approve of.

This is crazy, destructive stuff brought to us by people who have chosen not to be reasonable, that is picking up steam every day throughout the country and here in the Ravalli County commissioners’ meeting room every time it isn’t filled with angry citizens demanding our elected officials and the boards they appoint to represent us stick to reality when doing our business.

How about us striving to be part of the best? Let’s counter this stuff. It’s dangerous. It’s crazy and you gotta show up. Otherwise, they win. 

Again, your commissioners now apparently think it’s proper county business to discuss whether anyone advocating for sustainability, a clean environment, or even zoning are in reality Stalinist operatives working to send everyone in Montana to work camps in Seattle.

Here are the links to last Wedensday’s commissioner meeting:
http://www.rcwatchdog.org/
Part 1 Video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCpsxXzySBQ
Part 2 Video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNCTNzWMM5Y
Part 3 Video -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1rWH7I7lqQ

On Fukushima Debris Washing Up on Remote Beaches in Alaska and Washington

I have a blue glass globe sitting on my shelf, along with other nick-nacks and mementos from my past that I consider "cool". It’s a hand-crafted Japanese fishing float from the latter part of the last century. I found it on a deserted beach in Western Washington when I was working there in the wild salmon industry. At that time, the mid-seventies, there were no other salmon industries other than wild ones, but that’s another rant.

It was unusual to find a lot of manufactured flotsam washed up on the beach in those days. What you did find oftentimes fell under the category of “cool”. When you found this cool flotsam, you were considered to be “beachcombing” because you were actually searching for “cool” things, like blue glass globes that ripped off of Japanese drift nets far out at sea, floated through untellable adventures and end its mystery journey landing magically at your feet.

We knew at the time that rogue drift nets were a terrible thing. They captured and strangled non-prey species back then, just as they do now, and we knew that. But there was only about half the population on the planet as there is now, and, in hindsight, that seemed to warrant a more forgiving perspective. I don’t have any other plausible explanation for our negligence. In other words, notwithstanding the preponderance of evidence to the contrary, we considered that since the Japanese were still making these otherwise-deadly fishing floats out of hand-blown glass, and that since those little hand-made blue bubbles would float and bob hundreds, even thousands of miles of wild, open sea before landing, unbroken, on some wild shore, we could therefore allow ourselves the luxury of random blessing. That since there were a few billion less people trashing our increasingly and disturbingly modern world of thirty years ago, the blue glass balls that floated the deadly ghost nets would be considered just short of quaint, something to beachcomb for. This illusion wasn't hurt by the fact that, in those days, we didn’t trip over a lot of actual garbage looking for them.

As we all know now, in the few short decades since then those wild shores quickly, almost magically, became littered with actual Filth. Plastic bags and wrappers, pop and beer cans, disposable diapers, oil slicks, you name it. In a word, anything that you’d find in your neighborhood landfill was now on wild beaches become garbage dumps for cultures and communities hundreds and even thousands of miles away.

Because of our negligence.

The worst was yet to come, and now it has, as we knew it would. The Fukushima disaster is just the latest filth for us to trip over on our "wild" walks. We’ve all heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the pool of plastic garbage in the North Pacific Ocean, estimated at anywhere from twice the size of Hawaii to twice the size of our continent. Unimaginable at any size, but leave the size argument for scientists to figure out. We the People know about this garbage patch because it exists, its existence is logical and it gets a fair amount of press coverage. What’s less well-known but as equally-obvious as the nose on your face is that there are other of these giant monuments to our abusive ways, in every great body of oceanic waters covering our beautiful world where ocean currents gather and trap our floating filth, our cultural disgrace, on a huge, almost unimaginable scale.

And imagination, my friends, is the key to this thing. Thirty-five, forty years ago, a mere half a lifespan, in the post-Silent-Spring environmental awakening, we knew that things were pretty bad and heading south, but we didn’t use our imagination. We couldn’t imagine how much worse it could get how quickly. And now that it has, and our cultural filth encircles us by the simple physics operating within every natural current of our living Earth's breathing mechanisms, we still can’t quite get a bead. We go on, sipping our coffee, smelling the diesel-tinted air around us, scheming about vacationing on a 3,000-passenger ocean liner while simultaneously blanking out the unimaginable thought that a typical ship of that size and type produces about 16,000 pounds of solid waste a week (not counting the unimaginably-copious diesel fumes it belches out 24-7), much of which ends up swirling in one of these unimaginably-huge, toxic toilet bowls. How sad is that?

We used to call them Tidal Waves, back when unimaginable things seemed almost quaint. Now a Tsunami wipes clean the coastline of a modern, carbon-centric culture. What are the real consequences of that? Imagine, if you will, a swath of just one modern city, with its cars and buses, oil slicks and unresolved toxic secrets getting washed out to sea in a matter of hours. Where’s it all going to go? Where else? Just like the handmade Japanese fishing floats, Japanese industrial waste will bob the waves for hundreds, thousands of miles, having their secret adventures we will never be privy to, finally washing up on a formerly pristine beach in Alaska, Washington, Oregon. At our feet. Is anything pristine anymore? Have we ever had the right to think of anything as "wild", since Silent Spring was published in 1962? Are we really that small yet?

What a tiny little world we live in, if we so choose. We can be interconnected in a broadbased, wholistic way, where we imagine and then pay attention to these realities and trends, and respond appropriately. Or we can be interconnected in ignorance and tragedy, sharing only in each others’ toxic flotsam. The former is an expansive discipline from a human perspective.The latter is very small and tight indeed.

Rachel Carson died of breast cancer in 1964, and from that time til now we have quite clearly not heeded, nor even honored the knowledge she gifted us. So barring what we should but somehow can't do, how about we do an exercise instead? Kind of like doing our morning stretches, or practicing on our guitar? Imagine our mom dying of an inexplicable, rare cancer, or our kid born with an inexplicable, rare deformity, or a neighbor’s mom or kid, or some stranger’s mom or kid. Then think of Rachel Carson, and all the other messengers who gave us the clear and unignorable warning decades ago when we could have actually done something with it but instead we blithely ignored. Then let's visualize four decades, an incredibly short span of time to have fit the negligent damage we have done to our ourselves and our Earth within. 

Then let's take a deep, cleansing breath, and act appropriately.