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Interview with a Tree-sitter

June 17, 2020 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

View from the tree-sit (Photo courtesy Redwood Forest Defense)

On June 9th and 12th, I interviewed Lupine, a tree-sitter who is currently participating in a Redwood Forest Defense campaign to stop logging at a site in Humboldt County, California. We spoke on the phone, and though we were disconnected several times by a weak signal, we were able to have a great conversation. Tree-sitters have always been heroes to me, and I really appreciated the chance to connect with someone from the newest generation to be out there fighting the good fight.

What follows is a partial transcript, edited for clarity. You can listen to the entire interview here.

Kollibri: So where did I reach you? Are you up in the tree today?”

Lupine: Yes

Kollibri: What’s the view like from up there?

Lupine: The tree I‘m in is kind of in the middle of the grove of trees that are still standing. So, it’s nice. There’s Redwoods on one side and a grove of Red Alders on the other side. The clearcut is a little bit down the hill. It’s like 50 or 60 feet away and I can see it. And I can see the ocean from here. If I climb to the top of the tree, I can see pretty far south. I think I’m seeing Arcata Bay.

Kollibri: Wow, that’s a beautiful view. I mean, except for the clearcut.

Lupine: Totally. Yeah, the clearcut is a trip. It means we have really good sunsets here because there’s a really open view, but it also amplifies the freeway noise, and it itself is really horrible to witness.

Kollibri: So you’ve had the tree-sit up since about April 1, I believe?

Lupine: Yeah, that’s right. It’s not a joke. It’s been 70 days today.

For People, Planet & Peace: Interview with Lisa Savage, Ind. Candidate for Senate in Maine

May 11, 2020 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Lisa Savage is running for Senate in the state of Maine, against Republican incumbent, Susan Collins. Lisa is long-time antiwar and environmental organizer, as well as being a public school teacher and a grandmother. Although she has been an active member of the Green Party, Lisa is running as an independent candidate due to restrictive ballot access laws in Maine. The state does, however, boast the advantage of having ranked choice voting, which gives independent candidates a better shot.

I interviewed Lisa for my podcast, “Voices for Nature & Peace,” on May 7th, 2020, and we covered a lot of ground: COVID-19 relief (including her call for a People’s Bail-Out), healthcare, agriculture, campaigning during a pandemic, the recently released documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” the Green New Deal, and US militarism. If she wins, she will certainly be one of the most progressive people to ever serve in the US Senate.

What follows is a partial transcript of our conversation. Listen to the full interview here.

Coming Atrocities

February 5, 2020 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Clear-cut in Humboldt County, 2016, making way for Cannabis cultivation

My perspectives on culture, politics and contemporary life in general have been profoundly informed by the time I’ve spent in rural areas, outside of cities, which has been most of the last decade. I have been in forests and deserts, grasslands and wetlands, mountains and coastal areas. And lots and lots of agricultural zones. One thing has struck me everywhere: When it comes to environmental destruction, most city people have no idea how bad it is. It’s not their fault; they just don’t get out there, and the media doesn’t report it. But the ignorance—however unintentional—has consequences.

We All Need to Be Tree Huggers Now

January 14, 2020 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

The Author in the Oregon Cascades (Photo by N.Hill)

Nearly everything about contemporary human life needs to change if we are to seriously address the multiple environmental crises that are facing the planet, but today I will focus on just one topic: trees.

Trees are amazing creatures.

They are found throughout the world, in a wide range of habitats, from elevations below sea level up to alpine; in wetlands and deserts; standing solo or closely communed. The “timber line” is a clear mark on any mountain; above it, needle-bearing perennials give way to lichen-speckled stone that sleeps under snow or basks in the sun, and is softened ephemerally by blossoming annuals.

Mangroves mark coast lines, Junipers rocky ridges, Cottonwoods prairie cricks, Aspens storm-wracked heights and Pines rain-shadow slopes.

Juniper tree in Klamath County, CA (Photo by the author)

From the equator to the tundra, forests thrive thickly, teeming with life micro and macro, nourishing and being nourished by those who gather on their branches, in their shade and among their roots. A pulse of life runs through the whole system, in bark, flicking tails and toadstool stems.

Trees pull water from deepest root tip to highest twig, and transpire it into the sky. They convert sunlight into sugar. They are constantly communicating with each other, with fungus, with insects, and so on and on.

How Blaming Nader in 2000 Paved the Way for Today’s Neo-Fascism

December 9, 2019 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -H.L. Mencken — *Collage by author. Background image sampled from Bin Im Garten, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.*

The lurch to the right by the entire US political establishment over the last twenty years has been both significant and alarming.

I was recently reminded of how bad things have gotten by the 20th anniversary of the Battle of Seattle, an event that sparked a brief period of radical resistance in the US, and which jump-started my own activism. As I sifted through my memories from that time, I realized that a lot has changed.

Ecology & Empire: The Need to Step Aside for the Indigenous

November 24, 2019 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

*Huckleberries in the Cascade mountains of southern Oregon, August 2019 (Photo by author)*

This is the third part of a trilogy made up of “Ecology & Consciousness” and “Ecology & Economy“

Human survival is most at risk from two threats: environmental disaster and war. The two are closely linked, so much so that if you care about one, you can’t ignore the other.

First, because militarism is hostile to the environment. The US is the biggest villain in that department, with the Pentagon being the worst institutional polluter on the planet, more than 140 countries combined. That’s not just from flying drones, driving tanks and moving around fleets of ships; it’s also from heating, cooling, powering and otherwise keeping up nearly 800 bases around the world, and from feeding, clothing and outfitting at least 1.3 million active personnel. Additionally, the military is also responsible for an untold amount of toxic waste, some of it radioactive, at an uncountable number of locations around the world, including 900 superfund sites in the US.

Secondly, US warmongering is a significant roadblock to the kind of one-for-all/all-for-one global cooperation that’s needed to tackle the multiple environmental crises we are facing, from climate change to agricultural pollution to habitat destruction. Everyone is constantly kept on edge by the big bully who doesn’t want to see anybody acting independently. Sanctions, coups, missile strikes and full-on invasions are among the all-too-common punishments for those who dare try, as recent news bears out.

US militarism fits the description of imperialism. That’s an unpopular word in the US, but to any honest student of history, it is clear that the US is a indeed bona fide empire. No, it’s not the same shape as the British Empire, but that one was in turn different from Napoleon’s or Alexander’s or Genghis Khan’s. Each takes its own form.

In the case of the US, “empire” refers not just to the nation’s role in the world, but also to the circumstance of its existence on the North American continent. The area was invaded by several European powers starting in the 16th Century and most of the original inhabitants were killed or driven off and their land stolen. But this is not merely a set of events in the past; it is an ongoing reality. The “Indian Wars” never ended.

What we label as “the United States” is not a legitimate nation but an illegal occupation.

Ecology & Economy: We Can’t Get Something for Nothing

November 21, 2019 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

*Wildtenders harvesting Yampah seed as the moon rises in eastern Oregon, August 2019 (Photo by author)*

You can’t get something for nothing. This is true and we all know it, though we often tend to forget it, ignore it, or leave it out of our plans or dreams.

In “developed” societies like the US, any monetary wealth that a person gains has a material cost in the world, both to other humans and to the environment. For every dollar that exists, labor was exploited, raw materials extracted, or pollution generated.

Our victims did not assent willingly, either. Their position is forced upon them with violence or its threat. The environment is increasingly toxic to life, including our own. In short, we’re bullies and we’re shitting in our own bed. In the interest of justice and a living ecology, then, we must collectively reduce our wealth generation.

This gets tricky though, both logistically and politically.

Ecology & Consciousness: What Must Be Done

November 17, 2019 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Pennaceous epidermal growth of *Meleagris gallopavo*, detail (Photo by author)

There are the things that must happen. Then there are the things we want, the things we believe, and the things we do.

By “we” I mean virtually everybody in the civilized world. This is the collective “we”: not merely a number of individuals, but their sum. A “we” with its own path, in which solitary efforts contrary to its direction are of no material account. A “we” whose existence is a fact quite apart from our thoughts or our emotions about it, or indeed from our very perceptions of it, which are so often inaccurate.

What must happen is no mystery. Consumption must decrease, and decrease drastically, in the interest of a liveable ecology.

Many specifics follow this general principle. We must use less water, land and fuel. We must reduce our manufacturing, our construction, our energy production, our mining, our transportation and our farming. Wasteful or inefficient practices must cease entirely. War must end. We can no longer afford an economic system that requires constant expansion. Further, we cannot sustain any “economy” in the modern sense of that concept.

These facts are fundamental. Any choice made as if they were not is against our own interest. People can debate whether this is also a case of ethics, morality or justice, but what’s beyond argument is that collectively we are making self-destructive choices. Our behavior is ecocidal and ecocidal=suicidal.

Coups-for-Green-Energy added to Wars-For-Oil

November 13, 2019 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

*Salar de Uyuni salt plain in Bolivia. (photo by Lion Hirth, public domain)*

The US-supported right-wing coup against Bolivian President Evo Morales on November 10th was a serious strike against that nation’s autonomy and its people (especially its indigenous, of whom Morales was one). Such meddling has defined US foreign policy in Latin America for nearly two centuries, since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.

“Same song, different verse,” one could say, and that’s true, but each verse has different lyrics and this one features a new element (no pun intended): Lithium.

While Lithium is used as an ingredient in a wide variety of products such as pharmaceuticals, industrial lubricants, desiccants, lenses and even rocket propellants, the fastest growing application is for batteries for electric cars. According to Bloomberg, demand for lithium could “double by 2025.”

Bolivia’s lithium reserves are believed to be the largest in the world. A conservative estimate puts their share at nearly a quarter of the world’s total, though the government has claimed it to be as high as 70% [Lithium Today]. Regardless of the exact amount, Bolivia’s supply is globally recognized to be significant, enough to have attracted the attention of China and Germany, among other countries.

Obviously, US interests in Bolivia are not about democracy, freedom or the rule of law, as Trump disingenuously stated. They’re not solely about lithium either; the socialist politics of Morales are anathema to capitalist elites the world over. Similarly, Iraq was not solely about oil. But with lithium, we’re talking about a substance that could become “one of the most important commodities on earth” so yes, it has some bearing. [See: Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Multinational Firm’s Lithium Deal and Bolivia coup against Morales opens opportunity for multinational mining companies.]

The big dream of “green energy” is that society will just be able to switch from one source to another without changing anything fundamentally. How perversely appropriate, then, that US foreign policy would not have to change fundamentally either. To wars for oil, we’ll just add coups for green energy. That’s not an improvement.

New Mexico Postcard: The Call of the Sandhill Cranes

November 4, 2019 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Sandhill Cranes in flight, Gila River valley, NM

I arrived in the Gila River valley in New Mexico in mid-September to stay at a friend’s property for a few months. Shortly afterwards, migrating Sandhill Cranes began showing up too. I heard them before I saw them, and my first reaction was, “What the heck is that?”

If you haven’t heard the calls of a Sandhill Crane before, you might not immediately identify them as coming from birds. They have been variously described as “loud, rattling bugle calls,” a “deep chesty squawk” and “kar-r-r-r- o-o-o.” I’ll take a stab at the challenge and offer: “a moody trilling trumpet.”

You can listen to recordings online here, here, and here, among other places.

These helped jog my memory as I was writing this piece (since the cranes here don’t vocalize on command) but they all seriously lack compared to the real thing. They might capture the sound but not the spirit.

The first time a group of them flew overhead, I couldn’t help but to stop and stare in awe. Their silhouettes were certainly striking—with necks extended forward and legs stretched out behind—but it was their voices that really took my breath away. I will offer the words “haunting,” “otherworldly” and “preternatural,” though they all fall short. I felt like I was hearing the echoes of dinosaurs (and given birds’ evolutionary heritage, I guess I literally was).

But of course there is nothing alien about these creatures or their noises. It is I, raised in cities by a dominator culture, who doesn’t belong here, or rather, who doesn’t know my place, or how to find it. Such is the tragic estrangement of Western Civ.

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