By Paul Feather
(featured image by Travis London)
I never thought I’d be fighting the environmental movement, but here I am. I’m sitting at the top of Thacker Pass, NV surrounded by old-growth sagebrush. This place is in danger, and so are the antelope that greeted my arrival, the meadowlarks that sing me awake in the morning, the golden eagles soaring overhead, and the endangered sage grouse dancing their mating rituals on the ridge above me. There is lithium in the ground here, and all this may be destroyed in the name of ‘green energy’.
The mainstream environmental movement proposes to stop climate change by transitioning away from fossil fuels with electric cars and renewable energy. This requires huge amounts of lithium, so unfortunately these hundred-and-fifty year old sagebrush have got to go. The antelope and eagles too.
That’s not all. I’ve been up here working steadily with locals from the Paiute tribe at the McDermitt reservation, because their water will be polluted by the mine (it says so in the mine’s Final Environmental Impact Statement released by the Bureau of Land Management). The water on the reservation is already polluted from a nearby mercury mine, but I don’t think more is better, and apparently neither do they.
When did the environmental movement start calling for mountain top removal, threatening of endangered species, and human rights violations? Somewhere along the line, we became obsessed with carbon, and anything that reduced carbon became ‘green’. Actually, this mine would spew millions of tons of carbon for about half a century, so it’s not really clear how this addresses climate change, although it will make a lot of money for Elon Musk and his ilk. I’ll refrain from rude comments.
Protect Thacker Pass is occupying the site of this proposed mine, and intends to stop this tragedy from being carried out against the wildlife and human communities that live here. We do not believe it is right to destroy a mountain for coal, lithium, or anything else. We do not believe that our deep cultural problems and disconnection from the Earth can by fixed with flashy technological solutions that make billionaires richer at the expense of marginalized people and the natural world. This Green New Deal we are being offered is neither green nor new. It looks like the Old White Deal to me.
The living systems that support life on Earth are threatened on all sides. It is urgent that we organize ourselves into a force capable of protecting what diversity remains on Earth. We must undertake ambitious, daring, and decisive action that halts environmental destruction whether that destruction paints itself green, red, blue, or any other color.
It is time. It is past time. When will you act, and what will you do?
contact@protectthackerpass.org
#protectthackerpass
