At first, it was just the two of us (and, for the first few days, my wonderful fiancée) here. For weeks, we wrote articles, took photographs, recorded video, sent out press releases, and conducted interviews, hoping to motivate others to join us to protect this place.
One of our biggest battles has been against greenwashing. Lithium Americas claims this will be a “green” strip mine that will help decarbonize the global economy by generating batteries to support wind, solar, and electric cars. This is a distraction. We will not strip mine our way to sustainability. Change must be more fundamental, and more challenging to power, than simply changing the energy source for a consumeristic car culture. As the author of a new book Bright Green Lies that examines the failures of so-called green technology, I know these issues well — and lithium is a distraction that allows us to maintain the illusion that a modern, wasteful, high-energy lifestyle can (or should) be maintained, not a solution.
We will not solve the problems caused by destroying and consuming the living planet by further destroying and consuming the living planet.
Our other battles are against complacency, powerlessness, and very agencies supposedly tasked with “stewarding” public lands. After 25 days on the mountain, threats of fines and arrest from the Bureau of Land Management forced Will and I to leave camp—but not before others arrived. Blessedly, our call has been heard.
The “Protect Thacker Pass” encampment has now stood for 37 days and counting.
Saturday morning, I returned to camp, rested after two weeks of sleeping in my small cabin next to the warm woodstove, at home in rural Oregon. I found camp bustling: a fire crackling in the pit, people exploring the land, a 10-year-old girl exclaiming happily as she pulled out a baby tooth.
Beneath us all, the land thrums with energy. The wind blows, the stars sparkle, the sage breathe, the mountains abide. I sink back into this place.
Returning to Thacker Pass feels like coming home, after spending three and a half weeks here.
But over the last 10 hours, I have felt a tension build in my shoulders. It is not the cold, or sleeping on the ground. The tension is the strain of living on, and loving, land that is damned.
It feels as though a headsman’s axe is raised behind me. The axe is sharp, and my skin is soft. I do not know when it will fall. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle.
It is possible that Lithium Americas corporation, the multinational Canadian mining company behind this project, will attempt to start bulldozing and blasting Thacker Pass at any moment. And so, we need urgent support here at camp on an ongoing basis.
While a lawsuit has been filed against the project, we’re not sanguine about it’s prospects. My only faith lies in overwhelming public opposition, led by people on-the-ground, standing in the way of the machines.
Running a campaign like this is like wading across a river, staggering against the current, slipping and falling into hidden depths, soldiering forward through the cold water. And yet tonight, I will sleep warm and well, knowing there is a village around me — a community of water protectors who are also in love with this place. The burden of responsibility is spread among us. The load no longer feels quite so heavy.
And yet, the axe is there, poised overhead, and our strength is more the potential of a stone tumbling downhill than the pure kinetic force of an avalanche. Tomorrow, some of these people will depart, and our strength will be less. We will need to become unstoppable, implacable, to stop this mine—and to save our planet from countless other forms of ruination stalking this blue-green world.
What will come tomorrow, I wonder? Will a bulldozer rumble around the mountain? Will the golden eagles return to spiral above our heads?
And what of you? Will your face be the next we see cresting the final rise to camp? Will you find in yourself that long-buried warrior spirit, dust off your honor, and stand for the living world? Where will you be when the flames are high?
“What will come tomorrow, I wonder? Will a bulldozer rumble around the mountain? Will the golden eagles return to spiral above our heads?”
As a sometimes event planner, I’ve learned that you have to prepare for two contingencies: one, everything goes as you’ve planned, and two, nothing goes as you’ve planned.
If the golden eagles return, I guess you’ve won this round. If the bulldozers rumble around the mountain, make sure you’ve maximized your public education and outreach to the point where you can get the company to commit to specific returns to the local community (such as x% of resource extraction income). Use those funds to connect the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone Tribe of Nevada to gigabyte internet connection so they can train for jobs that can be done remotely, and then call it a day.
I truly appreciate the insight of consumption being one source of our environment problems, which besides temperature, include fresh water, habitable land and arable land concerns (which will probably cause the next series of wars).
Capitalism as an economic system isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In my opinion, the focus needs to be redirected. Corporations need to be established whose goal is not the enrichment of shareholders, but the enrichment of employees and their communities. The reason it needs to be corporations rather than companies is that the tax laws and regulatory guidelines are created through corporate lobbying, and favor corporate business structure. The communities and the employees can be the shareholders (oh, so I guess the goal IS the enrichment of shareholders – oops).
Thank you so much for your comment.
I disagree with a couple of your points. First when destructive companies like Lithium Americas promise funding for projects to marginalized communities in return for being allowed to destroy their land and water, that supports those communities in terms of promised jobs and money, but destroys the very foundation of what those communities actually need for to flourish: clean air, water, soil, and biodiversity. The company is essentially buying the life of communities in return for creating more wage slaves beholden to corporations for their essential needs, rather than supporting the foundation of all life on the planet.
Corporations will never enrich their employees and communities — that’s not how corporations work. Communities can only do that for themselves. And the only enrichment that works long term is a flourishing and thriving land-base. Anything less is not true enrichment.
I believe that rather than capitulating to the land-destroying nature of all corporations (because all corporations destroy land, water, air, and biodiversity, even remote ones that people work for over the internet), instead we must support community efforts to live in harmony with the local environment — helping people understand how to live on and with the land where they are, and to give back as much or more as they get from the land so as to enrich that land for future generations.