Environment/Climate Crisis archives

A Clear-cut is a Clear-cut

March 6, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

As regular readers know, critiquing the “invasive plant” narrative is one of my main themes here. The name of the Substack is, after all, “Speaking for the Trees, No Matter Where They’re From.” Usually I choose to approach the topic in of two ways: 1) scientifically, drawing on the peer-reviewed literature, often from the field of invasion biology itself, to bust popular myths, and 2) culturally, pointing out how the current and historic prejudices of our society shape our worldview, saddling us with mistaken impressions about how nature really works and how we should be relating to it. This is basically how I talk about “green” energy too.

I use those two approaches because I hope they might be effective at reaching people, and not because they’re the whole story for me personally. For me personally, emotions also play a part. Namely love; love for plants particularly and for all life on the planet more broadly. And rage; rage at those humans who kill things needlessly.

So no matter how I choose to communicate about these issues, love and rage are what motivate me, and they are intertwined. In the early 2000s, when I was involved in the forest defense movement in the Pacific Northwest, I was inspired by my love for the breathtakingly beautiful old growth trees I met, and by my rage for those who cut them down. Likewise, my opposition to lithium mining in the Great Basin (at Thacker Pass and elsewhere) is driven by my love for the Sage Brush Sea, and all its flora and fauna, and by my rage at the people and the industries that want to tear it up. Anywhere I go at any time, I feel love for the plants I see, regardless of their origins, and I feel rage for people who treat them like inanimate objects or like enemies to slay.

So when I focus on the science and the culture, I’m being diplomatic. More diplomatic than I want to be all the time, I will admit. Perhaps someday I will grow weary of this soft pedaling and take more direct action in defense of mother earth. We’ll see.

Emissions Are So Not the Only Problem with Cars …And EVs won’t solve them

January 8, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Massive cloverleaf highway interchange with surrounding car-centric landscape, aerial view

Cars with internal combustion engines (ICE) spew an array of pollutants from their tailpipes including carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen monoxide, sulfur dioxide, various volatile organic compounds and particulate matter (not a complete list). All these substances inflict many adverse health effects on humans and other living things, and environmentally they contribute to air and water pollution, acid rain, ozone depletion and climate change (also not a complete list).

As bad as all that is, emissions are only one negative aspect of many. In fact, I’m going to list twenty harms altogether. I’m spelling them out because the push to replace ICE vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs) typically focuses exclusively on emissions, and if we continue to pursue this goal blindly, we and the planet will still be stuck with all the other downsides, a few of which will actually worsen.

Because it’s not just about the car as technology, it’s about the car as culture-shaper. Car-centric values and policy have manufactured physical landscapes designed first and foremost for driving and storing cars. These places are hostile to anyone or anything not inside a car, whether that’s pedestrians, cyclists, animals or other more-than-human life. Such places make up most places in the contemporary urbanized environment, from downtowns to suburbs to exurbs to small towns. It’s a tyrannical infrastructure and the only reason most people don’t think about it that way is because they don’t know anything else, which totally isn’t their fault. As I’ll lay out here, so much of what’s wrong about cars has nothing to do with their mode of propulsion.

The damage done by “invasives”—the word, not the plants

January 1, 2025 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Oxeye Daisy (Leucanthemum vulgare), as observed along a rural road in an agricultural zone in Yamhill County, Oregon, a species considered “invasive” by some.

The widespread use of the word “invasive” to describe certain plants has done great damage to the public’s understanding of plants and ecology, more than any other narrative in the last generation I would argue.

The word “invasive” is at odds with the reality of what plants are and of how life on the planet works. A vast world of complexity is flattened into a grossly oversimplified drama of good vs. evil. The multifaceted, nuanced interplay of response and adaptation among countless species with each other and their fluctuating conditions is reduced to a single perceived side effect misrepresented as a cause. Worst of all, the word manufactures a perspective that distracts us from threats to biodiversity that are, in contrast, unequivocal (with habitat destruction at the top of that list).

Copper Mining: Totally Not Green, But Totally Needed for “Green” Energy

December 17, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

This is a photo of the Morenci Copper Mine, the highest production copper mine in the United States, and third-most in the world. For scale, the tires on the dump trucks in the photo are 13’ (4m) high, meaning the vehicles are as large as small two-story houses. Mining started there underground in 1871, and then became an open pit in 1937. [ Morenci Mine at Wikipedia | Atlas Obscura ]

I’ve been there. In fact if I hopped in my truck right now I could be there in an hour and a half. Highway 191 goes right through the middle of the mine, going one from low desert Creosote Bush scrub in the south into mountainous Juniper woodlands in the north. I took that route in March 2021 to access National Forest trail heads in the vicinity. Here are wildflowers blooming in the highway divider from that trip. The lighter-colored areas on the mountains in the farthest distance, upper left, are part of the mining operations, where the vegetation and top layers of soil were removed decades ago.

Desert Margiolds (genus Baileya) and some species of Penstemon — Desert Margiolds (genus *Baileya*) and some species of *Penstemon*

The drive through the open pit itself is like being on another planet. The landscape doesn’t feel earthly. For me, it is the single most Hellish place I’ve ever been, even worse than clear-cut forests. Stripped, blasted, and scraped out, the mine is one big open wound, frightfully ugly beyond description.

“Green” Energy vs. the Mojave Desert: interview with Kevin Emmerich of Basin & Range Watch

December 2, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Mojave Desert collage from my photo collection: Clockwise from top left, Sphinx Moth. wind farm, solar farm, Desert Tortoise

I interview Kevin Emmerich, co-founder of Basin & Range Watch, a non-profit environmental organization based in southern Nevada that educates people about threats to public land from industrial development and energy extraction in the Mojave Desert and the Great Basin. These regions have been ground zero for “green energy” due to their plentiful sunlight, strong winds and lithium deposits.

Kevin enjoyed a career in the National Park Service for 20 years in seven different National Parks and Monuments, including Death Valley National Park since 1991 (now retired). He has also worked as a field biologist for research on desert species such as the Panamint Alligator Lizard, Desert Tortoise, and Mojave Fringe-toed Lizard.

I’ve been following Basin & Range Watch’s work for over a decade, since I saw Kevin quoted in an LA Times article about a “green energy” project in California. I’ve interviewed both Kevin and the organization’s co-founder Laura Cunningham a number of times for print and podcast. I appreciate not only their knowledge and experience, but also the love they both so clearly have for the Southwest, a love that I share. So when I had questions how the incoming Presidential election might affect “green energy” projects in this area, my first email was to Basin & Watch.

Too Much Focus on Carbon; Not Enough on Habitat Destruction

November 18, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Sonoran desert habitat in southern California being wiped out for a solar facility, October 2022. This site is in the range of the Desert Ironwood tree (Olneya tesota), a long-lived species that in exceptional cases can reach 1500 years in age, making them old growth treasures of the desert. [Photo by author]

On right is the unbulldozed habitat, of a type called “Creosote Scrub.” The predominant plant species is Larrea tridentata, known as “Creosote Bush” or, in Spanish, Governadora, which is “governess plant,” so-named because she acts as nurse plant for other plants by providing shade. Known in herbalist circles, oddly, as “Chapparal” though “Chapparal” is an entirely different landscape type with a different suite of plants.

I recently had an exchange with a climate specialist on Substack that illustrated one of the major problems with current climate discourse. It doesn’t matter who; they do a good job calling attention to important news, and the limitation of their worldview I am highlighting here is not at all unique to them, so I won’t name them. They had put up a post enumerating many of the threats to the environment posed by the incoming Trump administration and its Project 2025, which I certainly appreciate since the more people who call attention to these threats, the better. After expressing that appreciation for their contribution the the topic, I commented:

For the record, a possible silver lining of a Trump administration for some of us is that wildlife habitat, especially in the western deserts, might face fewer threats from industrial green energy projects. For example, Trump’s cancellation of the Crescent Peak Wind Project preserved a site that’s within the area that became the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument under Biden.

I was pointing out the paradoxical fact that Trump’s strike against a wind project ended up sparing an area that Biden then saw fit to protect, though Obama had sought to degrade it. I went on to say:

Read More…

“Invasive Plants”: Immigrants Who Nice People are Allowed to Hate

November 11, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

A Salt Cedar / Tamarisk tree (genus Tamarix, species unknown) at an undisclosed location in southern California. (Photo by the author)

When I first started hearing the rhetoric of the “invasive plant” narrative in the early 2000s, I was living in the progressive bastion of Portland, Oregon. I was taken aback by the vitriol being dished out by people who were otherwise prided themselves on being accepting and nonjudgmental. I concluded that many secularists, lacking a religious dogma, needed a Devil to hate, and “invasive plants” fit the bill.

I find that conclusion overly simplistic now, but it certainly contained a big nugget of truth. Through my research into the topic of “invasive plants” over the last few years—which has included a deep dive into the scientific literature, my own field observations, and many discussions with other people with varying views on the subject—I’ve come to see that the “invasive plant” narrative is more a product of culture than it is of science.

Learn How Project 2025 Threatens the Environment

November 7, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Four Corners Generating Station in New Mexico. Photo taken prior to installation of emission controls equipment for removal of sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. (Credit: National Park Service)

In our corporate-ruled system, which only allows candidates who put profit over planet, those of us who care about the environment had our work cut out for us no matter who won the presidential election. (See my 10/7/24 post: “The Environment & the Election.”) But with Trump at the helm, we know specifically what we’re up against: Project 2025.

We all need to familiarize ourselves with Project 2025 because the time to start resisting it is now. Below is a list of educational resources I recommend, in article, video and podcast form.

The broad strokes: Project 2025 is a 900-page document put out by the right-wing Heritage Foundation that’s intended to guide policy and staffing in a Republican presidency. It covers all areas of governance, with environmental topics taking up a full 150 pages. The main thrust of Project 2025 is to dismantle the administrative state, which will include weakening or eliminating regulation that protects the environment.

Paraphrasing a summary by Earthjustice, Project 2025 proposes to gut the Endangered Species Act, repeal the Antiquities Act (which empowers the president to declare national monuments), weaken the Clear Air Act and undermine NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act), which is one of the best tools that environmentalists have for pushing back on environmental destruction in the US. It also seeks to maximize fossil fuel production, cut EPA funding for studying toxic pollution, shut down climate research, and reject the concept of environmental justice. (Their full summary: “What Project 2025 Would Do to the Environment – and How We Will Respond.”)

That’s the tldr, but we need to know more than that, hence the list of resources. But before that, I want to address the feelings of despair or helplessness you might have about both Trump’s vote total and the harrowing details of Project 2025. Let’s put these things in perspective.

Autumn in The Gila, 3 of 3: Insects (& one fish)

November 4, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Queen butterfly (Danaus gillipus). Closely related to the Monarch.

This is part 3 of a 3 part series. See part 1: Trees and part 2: Wildflowers. I took all these photos in the upper Gila River valley in southwestern New Mexico.

Autumn in The Gila, 2 of 3: Wildflowers

November 2, 2024 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Spear Globemallow (Sphaeralcea hastulata)

This is part 2 of a 3 part series. See part 1: Trees. I took all these photos in the upper Gila River valley in southwestern New Mexico.

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