Oncorhynchus rastrosus or the sabertooth salmon was named after its two fangs which protrude from the snout. This huge species of salmon could grow to 3 metres long!
As climate cooled 40 to 20 million years ago, streams and rivers decreased in nutrient productivity, and so the sciences says that freshwater fish went anadromous and developed a sea-going life cycle as oceans became rich sources of food.
In this part of the America, the salmon’s evolution linked and adapted to the changes in topography. For millions of years salmon have been here in abundance. In the past 100 years, human evolution in the Pacific Northwest has brought some species of salmon to extinction and has impoverished the continued existence of a sustainable salmon ecosystem.
Salmon have been part of the lifeblood of peoples from Finland, Ireland, Norway, Russia, to Japan and British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. Salmon sustain the life of a forest, and this species is the link in the natural gear work and framework of an ecosystem that has grown because of the returning spawning salmon.
From the nitrogen in grizzlies’ bones and hair, to the nitrogen in valley-bottom forests, and nutrients fed to gargantuan trees growing along salmon rivers, the salmon has delivered the lifeblood to the forest.
Of course, this is all ancient history. Wild salmon are threatened, and the techno-fixes devised by one of the most creative creatures on earth will be the salmon’s demise.
A twist to the plight of the salmon is now easily accessible to readers. In Seattle recently, David R. Montgomery, geomorphology professor at University of Washington, cast two intertwining threads of history, Europe’s and New England’s, to show how both salmon histories have been repeating themselves in Washington, Oregon and northern California for more than a hundred years. His quick-paced and humorous style helped to compress his book, King of Fish: The Thousand-year Run of Salmon (Westview Press, 2003), which is part science, part history and part folklore concerning salmon and this species’ struggles and the repeated failings of human action and inaction to “save” it.
“In coming to understand the forces shaping the rivers and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, I learned to see how the evolution and near extinction of salmon is a story of changing landscapes,” he stated.
Montgomery was one of many presenters at a conference on sustainability titled, “Building Community, Healing the Planet,” a two-day affair set squarely in the bedrock of conglomerated fields that see connections and links between human society, the environment, economics, and global ethical alliances as vastly more important in solving such problems as global warming, pollution, habitat degradation, human population explosion, inequitable economies, and over-consumption than the current Western paradigm of exponential growth in markets and technologies as solutions to growing global problems.
Montgomery, however, focused on a single topic, deadeye targeting fish and the interrelationship of three distinct human histories.
The cry of “Salmon in Danger!” is now resounding throughout the length and breadth of the land. A few years, a little more overpopulation, a few more tons of factory poisons, a few fresh poaching devices . . . and the salmon will be gone – he will be extinct.
— Charles Dickens, July 20, 1861
Interestingly, Montgomery draws from the genetic slough in a literary riptide where inventive and clearly literate writers swim: David Quammen, Barry Lopez, Richard Bass, Annie Dillard, Jim Lichatowich and David James Duncan and others have set themselves squarely inside the biotic world, allowing the rich poetry of imagery and laments drive what they write.
Montgomery’s written words dip into that same current, and his book is clearly a story of his own wonderment of geological chronology set against historical time. He gives us an overlay of the practices of migration and settling and harvesting and industrializing as well as meshing the original “old” salmon’s 40 to 20 million year evolutionary period to produce a parental species 6 million years ago that is the forebear of all modern salmon species.
Wild salmon advocates know the heuristic of the “four H’s” and each one’s relationship to the decline of salmon: Harvest (over-fishing); Habitat (mining, logging, agriculture and human land development); Hydro-dams; and Hatcheries (add to that farms/aquaculture).
Montgomery chisels a fifth H — the history of human intersection with the salmon’s evolutionary history. It’s an old story of human culture — that malleable and far-spreading diverse set of laws and actions that are passed onto other generations — T-boning right smack into the biological harmony of salmon’s persistency in nature, a consistently challenging realm of the king of fish.
His book covers the similar human patterns of change to river systems in Great Britain 300 years ago and in 19th Century New England, to those now occurring in the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific salmon (five main species) evolved under the shattered light and verdant shadows of old growth forests. They weathered and adapted to thrive under the stressors of floods, volcanic eruptions, and other major natural disturbances over millions of years. The biological trajectories of Atlantic salmon and Pacific salmon, however, have been shaped by very different conditions of topography.
Yet the Atlantic and Pacific salmon share the same fates. Of the tens of millions of Atlantic salmon returning yearly to pre-settled New England, only 1,000 wild Atlantic salmon return to this region’s rivers and streams.
Today, 90 percent of wild Pacific salmon fish runs are gone:
Main Pacific NW Salmon Region Current % of Wild Fish in Runs Compared to 1820
Alaska 106% British Columbia less than 3% Puget Sound 8% Washington less than 2% Columbia River less than 2% Oregon 7% California 5%
I keep forgetting that the Seattle I know is brand-new, a recent addition to the landscape. Though the transformation from impenetrable forest to modern city happened in a geological instant, the dramatic changes that accumulate from daily experiences seem imperceptibly slow by human standards,” Montgomery writes.
As the geologist, he seeks that long-view of the angle of repose, searching for timeline after timeline perspective for some sort of context to explain how salmon have become so imperiled.
Yet, the short view helps Montgomery appreciate human impact: “The primeval forest that blanketed Seattle for 98 percent of the last five thousand years disappeared in a little over a century.”
Early on Montgomery posits a question a reader might ask: A lot of books have been written about salmon. Why write another one?
The fate of salmon is closely tied to changes on the land. The fall of the Pacific salmon is the direct result of both over-fishing and other actions that subsequently reshaped the landscape. The story is not simple. But the basic connections are clear.
Throughout the book the reader explores with Montgomery the history of the “three full-scale” experiments on the salmon’s adaptability to this altered and obliterated landscape, the cause of which is human land use and unchecked development. “The strikingly similar history of salmon across these regions carries clear implications for modern salmon recovery efforts.”
Today, the blame game seems to be the biggest issue head-lined in the media concerning this story of the obscene decline of wild salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest: Some attribute the decline of salmon on Native American fishing. “The timber industry caused it,” yells the fisherman. The land developers blame the commercial fisherman. Salmon-eating sea lions and birds get scathed by some. “Everybody except dry-land farmers blames the dams.”
Without a doubt, after decades of research and field studies, and after thousands of papers and reports have been written, a general agreement within “scientific circles” makes it clear what the primary factors (those four H’s) are in the salmon’s decline.
[A]ctions to stem known causes remain either mired in institutional, corporate, and societal denial, dissipated by spin-doctoring, or thwarted by political agendas and bureaucratic inertia.
But it’s the history that truly makes Montgomery’s book compelling. The first H, harvest, was addressed in 1030 A.D., for example, when Scottish King Malcolm II closed the season for taking “old salmon” (spawners) at the mouth of any river on their way up to spawn.
Regarding habitat, Richard the Lion-hearted of England in the 12th century declared that rivers should be kept free of obstruction “so that a well-fed three-year-old pig could stand sideways in the stream without touching either side” (known as the King’s gap to allow adult salmon to reach spawning grounds).
Concerning hydropower, Robert the Bruce (1318) invoked a fine and sentence of forty days in prison for anyone setting up “fixtures that would prevent the progress of salmon up and down Scottish rivers.”
Montgomery isn’t writing this book to show a one-dimensional salmon advocacy or preach dam-breeching on the Columbia and Snake rivers. He sees salmon as a natural bank account, and an indicator of the entire human and natural systems’ conjoined health.
A sustainable management plan for salmon recovery means restoring habitats, writing off other habitats that are too heavily populated and developed, rehabilitating the wild salmon populations by stopping fishing for a while, restoring floodplains, and hiring and empowering riverkeepers, he professes.
“We have to plan for a hundred years, adapt how we live on and across the land to better conform to how the landscape works, and then enforce the plan and learn from history,” he told the audience.
At the close of his book, Montgomery asks whether the salmon story will end with the right Sixth H: “Will it be hubris or humility?”
“A world where the salmon cannot live may be a world in which man cannot live either.”
— Anthony Netboy, The Salmon: Their Fight for Survival
The epic journey of some wild salmon species, from homebred gravel beds in Montana, to the Pacific through veins of rivers and streams that hit desert in Oregon and Washington that then empty into estuaries along Northwest coastal waters, and remarkably their ocean vigil of up to seven years traveling thousands of miles, has been honored with tribal passion, spiritual artistry and a sustainable harvest for thousands of years.
The First Salmon ceremony carried out by dozens of native peoples in the Pacific Northwest celebrate salmon people, Chinook, Sockeye, Kings, who come back to home waters to sustain lives through winter and summer. It’s not just some postmodern trip to lure tourists. The Nez Perce, Yakima, and Spokane peoples are just three of many tribal groups who still connect to the force of the salmon, albeit a dying force thanks to modern man’s industrial and agricultural whims.
The wild salmon story has generated a coalition of groups, both native and non-native, in the Pacific Northwest fighting for the salmon’s imperiled existence against the imbalanced needs of humans that require too much ecologically sensitive land for development; that seek to irrigate deserts to grow non-native crops reliant on river water and petrochemicals; and who want hydroelectricity to grow human settlements which hold to an out-of-whack perception of economic growth as an unending cycle.
The Bush administration, some of whom are laser-guided Christian zealots that talk the talk of Jesus but walk the walk of a corporate liturgy of greed and profit at the expense of sane human-scaled living, considers the science of wild salmon protection and recovery as unnecessary or evil, even in the face of billions of dollars already spent over decades of sound scientific pursuit to deal with the quickly vanishing wild salmon stocks. He and his henchmen mock sound science, denigrate native tribes’ treaties calling for salmon fishing rights, and fail to abide by economic principles that say breeching dams can restore salmon habitat to some sustainable level.
NOAA-Fisheries wants millions of hatchery-bred salmon to be included in the total count of Northwest runs. Timber, mining, agriculture, building and hydropower stakeholders (stockholders as well) are high-fiving each other because of this proposal to ease Endangered Species Act protection for native salmon species.
However, we need to be dealing seriously with: the impounded slack-waters behind the four lower Snake River dams; with the rising summer water temperatures of waterways choked by dams; all the sewage and chemical dumping in these rivers; the over-development of human activity such as unwise housing development and under-regulated agricultural and industrial activity; the storm water surges caused by Pavement City USA; and, maybe most importantly, the death of wetlands and estuaries.
The destruction of the associated habitats that make up the natural drainages and river systems should be this country’s first course of renewal. Wild salmon are this region’s birthright, and twisting science to meet current needs with disregard for future carrying capacities of our environment is the true sledgehammer that will destroy the native species. Politicians, especially those who suck on the crack pipe of economic indicators over the wise necessity of preserving the environment, have no concept of what hatchery and aqua-farmed salmon mutants mean to the vitality of a true wild salmon sustainable population.
Additionally, this myopia will certainly destroy the hatchery fish, eventually, sooner than most technocrats will want to admit.
Hatcheries dilute the gene pool of the native stocks and are certainly in many cases a stopgap measure that enables politicians to shrug off their duty to protect this heritage species, and which further fuels resource extractors spreading their dirty deeds in our last reaches of natural habitats in this region.
Scientists and researchers currently have doubts about “hatchery supplementation” as a course of bringing back salmon runs, “[A] hypothesis which is being tested, but which is not yet scientifically proved or disproved.”
Millions of fingerlings from hatcheries compete for food with the few native species during their life cycle in freshwater streams and during the journey to sea. Hatchery fish that interbreed with wild fish create all sorts of problems that have been brought up time and time again in news articles, editorials and scientific reports. Just reading Jim Lichatowich’s book, Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis, written by a fisheries scientist in the field for three decades, can illuminate for those who know little about the wild salmon their biological reality.
The interconnectedness of wild salmon with the robust preservation of habitats that sustain them and the mutualistic human endeavors are what is missing from Bush’s bonehead anti-science school of illogic. The mentality that advocates “new advanced management techniques that would soon result in salmon without a river” (Washington Department of Fisheries) is the sort of thinking that will move us closer to the complete crash of both wild and hatchery fisheries.
The public — statewide and transnational, connected to shared watershed and biological regions — needs to have greater input on the strategic plans for saving salmon and returning the native habitats to a level that will bring economic advantages to recreation and fishing enterprises and sustainable cohabitation of managed hatchery salmon and robust wild runs.
Sustainability is not a new concept for planning our future, but if we allow policy to be designed and promulgated by the powerful timber, agricultural, hydroelectric, and development lobbies — who do not see the vital interplay and connectivity of this triumvirate of Culture, Economy and Environment that is the superstructure for what some call an Earth Charter — then the Northwest faces losing a truly important link in its distinct environmental, cultural and economic heritage.
An indiscriminate hatchery program treats fish like interchangeable parts in a large machine. The first precaution of intelligent tinkering, counseled conservationist Aldo Leopold, is to save all the parts. Neglecting this precaution, we have unbalanced an intricate system and placed the salmon in danger, Lichatowich states.
Washington Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray joined Representative Norm Dicks and weighed in on the argument at the beginning of May 2004 by sending a letter to the Bush EPA addressing many concerns they and their constituents have about this new unscientific counting system’s implications for salmon and steelhead recovery.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a timely and ecologically sound response to the Washington politicians’ demands because the Bush administration’s goal is to de-list as many endangered salmon species as possible.
first published a long time ago, in Covid-19 years — September 5, 2005
“You will often meet with characters in nature so extravagant that a discreet poet would not venture to set them upon a stage.”
— Lord Chesterfield
“My strength is from the fish; my blood is from the fish, from the roots and berries. The fish and game are the essence of my life. I was not brought from a foreign country and did not come here. I was put here by the creator.”
— Chief Meninock
Zen and the Art of a Water Ethic
The Buddhist nature, as argued by Chinese philosopher Chan-jan, verifies that even inanimate things possess the essence of being, the spiritual core that connects us all to the universe, a creator. The Buddha spirit is in the stone, the branch, the waterfall. Chan-jan writes, “The man who is of all-round perfection knows from beginning to end that no objects exist part from Mind. Who then is ‘animate’ and who ‘inanimate?’ Within the Assembly of the Lotus, all are present without division.” This tenant is the core of all tribal wisdom for the peoples of the Americas; and for communities throughout the west, including the Northwest, planning strategies have to embrace an old ethic — essentially a new application of old wisdom — if we are to gestate a visionary strategy in our land ethic. Sin-Wit-Kit is from the Yakima meaning, “all life on earth.” These are simple words yet all encompassing. If we are to reestablish that connection to the land that John Wesley Powell, Wallace Stegner, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry and countless others have written about as they have established the syncopation of nature — land, animals, plants, air, water and people — with cultural harmony and success, then communities in the west, both urban and rural, must go beyond the economic development packages, growth management plans and environmental analyses to build good earth, air and water for people.
We have moved farther and farther away from knowing nature, yet in the same breath we profess closeness to the beauty, the land, and the water that makes the West a split-open geode of varying ecologies, geologies, climates and cultures. Gary Snyder is advocating a new type of pioneer spirit, for humans to “move inside the self as well as reach out in a non-possessive way to the natural world.” Snyder comes from pioneer stock as his paternal grandfather settled in Kitsap, Washington, and his mother’s clan established roots in Texas, Kansas and Colorado. He understands the nature of conquest and how the invaders into Turtle Island continued to fragment their links to the native life, values and way of seeing land:
“As the discriminating self-centered awareness of civilized man has increasingly improved his material survival potential, it has correspondingly moved him farther and farther from a spontaneous feeling of being part of the natural world.”
Gary Snyder’s work in poetry and prose underpins the theme that humanity has to conquer the self and learn to live in harmony with earth and each other; he wants to journey into the self in addition to connecting to the natural world, all seamed to an ethic of non-possessiveness. Bert Almon from Boise State University sums up the ethos of the conqueror, as Patricia Limerick eloquently writes in her book, The Legacy of Conquest, by drawing awareness to the failing of our manifest destiny and harnessing of the wild: “We thought that we had conquered the land, but we discovered that we had defeated ourselves.” Thomas J. Lyon draws a corollary to this by illuminating the idea that the American West is the terminus of Walt Whitman’s Open Road . . . the traveler must “move toward the examined life.”
Awareness is the bedrock of Snyder’s poetry. Seeing into one’s own nature helps us gain the clear perception of the self and the external world. This philosophy must be embraced by the Americans who have moved into the American Western wilderness. What better confluence of wisdom, change and reunification which can help us with strategies for planning in the West than allowing the ancient waters of the land and clans to resurface and define the communities of the 21st century. Will planners be able to re-educate politicians and industrialists and the common citizen to take into account the human ability to experience a “deep sense of communion and communication with nature and with specific non-human beings,” as Snyder writes, by allowing rivers to run free, to run through it all? Can we go beyond the linear analytical and scientific study of nature — a complex, evolving, spiritual and profound circle — in order to re-enter the circle so we can once again sing, dance and greet the salmon, bison and whale?
Can we truly attempt to inculcate the ancient rhythm and earth beats of the free flowing rivers into the pragmatic city and rural planner so he or she might consider the old way and real lay of the land — undammed rivers, creeks and streams — as a dynamic, practical, economic and cultural modus operandi for bringing the West back into harmony with nature, people, spirit? As a poet who sees his language, his song, as the only language to access the shamanistic view “in which all is one and all is many, and the many are all precious,” I believe many out of the 6.5 billion humans living off of the bounty of 57 million square miles of earth will redefine themselves so as to recapture the harmony within and external existence only available through diversity. So we must reeducate so no one goes through the West again without recalling that all land is part of a river basin or watershed. All is shaped by the water that flows over it and through it.
Empire of the Watershed
“To write history without putting any water in it is to leave out a large part of the story. Human experience has not been so dry as that.”
— Donald Worster
A river is so much more than the water coursing toward the sea or lake. A river basin is an orchestrated interconnected shifting of forces: the crumbling, moving banks and beds and the seepage below, the groundwater upon which most communities in the West depend. Meadows, forests, marshes, backwaters are linked to a river’s floodplain. A river is a carrier of hopes, dreams, life and death, as well as sediments, nutritionally rich detritus, and dissolved minerals. A watershed emanates from mountains and hills. Rain and snow drain into rushing streams. Tributaries and groundwaters build the river’s volume. “As they leave the mountains, rivers slow and start to meander and braid, seeking the path of least resistance across widening valleys, whose alluvial floor was laid down by millennia of sediment-laden floods,” Patrick McCully writes in his book, Silenced Rivers. The Oxford English Dictionary puts the definition of a river succinctly: “a copious stream of water flowing in a channel towards the sea … A copious stream of flow of (something) … the boundary between life and death.”
We in the colony of the west have four major “bathtubs”: the Missouri, the Columbia, the Colorado and the Great Basin. The main river in each of the first three basins collects water that falls in its natural boundaries and dumps it into the Atlantic, in the case of the Missouri, and into the Pacific, in the cases of the Columbia and Colorado. With the conquest of the west came the Prior Appropriation doctrine in 1848, and since that day our rivers have been diverted, stripped, dammed, channeled, tunneled and pumped into shadows of their old selves in a water-grabbing scenario that has literally reshaped ecology, environment, culture by exploding populations into areas where the fragility of life — the beauty and the essence of the land — has been pummeled into submission and non-existence.
Features of the Columbia
The Columbia is more than 1,200 miles long, birthed in the Canadian Rockies. The river’s rumbling surge pushes a branch of freshwater more than 400 miles out to sea. These estuary ecosystems are fecund, nurturing one of the more biologically grand portions of the river. The estuarine habitat provides humans with most of the fish catches because these species are tied to this nutrient-rich habitat for part of their life cycles. Snyder puts it simply here in a statement for the Rivers of Words project:
The water cycle includes our springs and wells, our snowpack, our irrigation canals, our car wash, and the spring salmon run. It’s the spring peeper in the pond and the acorn woodpecker chattering in a snag. The watershed is beyond the dichotomies of orderly/disorderly, for its forms are free, but somehow inevitable. The life that comes to flourish within it constitutes the first kind of community.
For the Columbia, where river meets sea, numbers of freshwater and marine fish species thrive in this unique habitat. The sturgeon is an important recreational fish, as well as a stable commercial catch. This web of ecosystems is the feeding and breeding ground for clams, oysters and mussels as well as Dungeness crabs. Over 175 species of birds occupy and intermix with the habitat of the lower Columbia River and the estuary. Blue heron, gull and tern colonies are supported by the river and estuary. Peregrine falcons, hawks, owls, ospreys, and eagles nest and hunt in this diverse habitat. The lower Columbia is also an important area for more than 150,000 birds that migrate along the Pacific Flyway. Shorebirds use the estuary, and wintering waterfowl in the area of 200,000 birds occupy land and islands in the Columbia area.
Nursery and rearing areas for young salmon and steelhead are found in the Columbia River Basin, producing some of the world’s largest salmon runs — 16 to 18 million annually in the past. Changes in the environment, loss of habitat and continuing degradation of the basin account for the huge decrease in salmon runs — wild stocks of salmon, steelhead and sea-run cutthroat trout are virtually gone in some areas. Chum salmon stocks have declined to less than 1 percent of original levels. Habitat for sockeye salmon has declined to less than 4 percent of its historic level.
Big RIVER
Without sufficient water to ensure the survival of anadromous fish, the mutual interests of both the Indians and non-Indians will be defeated. —-Eugene Greene, Sr.
Our communities need to reappropriate the myths, histories and salvation of river culture and the potentiality of growing economies, recreation, cities that have a balance with the diverse nature of rivers and watersheds. A belief in “river keeping” should inoculate our northwest population of water-grabbing energy consortiums, farmers, manufacturers and urban consumers against unchecked and all-out consumptive growth, and it should be woven into a strong fabric of place ethic, place understanding, as Charles Wilkinson points out:
An ethic of place respects equally the people of a region and the land, animals, vegetation, water and air. It recognizes that westerners revere their physical surroundings and that they need and deserve a stable, productive economy that is accessible to those with modest incomes. An ethic of place ought to be a shared community value and ought to manifest itself in a dogged determination to treat the environment and its people as equals, to recognize both as sacred, and to insure that all members of the community not just search but insist upon solutions that fulfill the ethic.
Can planners and communities in general codify a holistic approach to sustaining our growth (with built-in controls tied directly to the stream flows and habitat requirements of unleashed — dam-breached — river basins) while allowing for influxes of populations and industries, into the urban environmental reaches without taking into account the lifeblood of what defines the west (or defines it through the substantial lack thereof): water? Can we hold sacred the force of river ecology and river magnificence while still compensating for our consumer-driven economies that depend on water for this American lifestyle? The answer to these questions rests in a redirection away from the practices and excesses of lifestyle. Denver’s average daily household consumption of water is 750 gallons. Las Vegas averages 350 gallons each day for each resident. More than 60 percent of water used in places like El Paso, Phoenix, Vegas and the like goes for lawns and landscaping. Beef-raising takes from 2,000 to 6,000 gallons of water per pound off the hoof. Microprocessing plants in Albuquerque gobble up 5,000 gallons of water per 8-inch microprocessing chip. We know our needs and our wants, but can we realign the limits of nature, the ethic of our contribution to our place’s harmony?
The second-longest river in the United States is the Colorado, at 1,700 miles; however, its banks are not heavily populated — no big city stands on them. Yet it is one of the most diverted water systems in America. In River: One Man’s Journey down the Colorado, Colin Fletcher speaks of his trips down the Colorado:
Because all but the headwaters flow through the desert, and the river is the area’s prime source of water — that lifeblood of existence on this planet — it has attracted prodigious attention, both political and engineering. We humans now control its flow so iron-fistedly that my friend Philip L. Fradkin called his book about the Colorado A River No More. … It does not grow steadily bigger: after an early maturity it receives no major permanent tributaries. In its final stages — largely but not entirely because of human interference — it tends to taper away. For years on end it may never reach the ocean.
The Wanapum Indians on the Columbia River called it, Chiawana, or ‘Big Water,” and there is evidence of habitation by tribes along the Columbia dating back 10,000 years. They used a systems way of thinking, that is, seeing the whole, recognizing patterns, and learning to act accordingly. They relied on river-to-mountain migration patterns, and their total physical and spiritual existence was tied to the vast water and land ecosystems. Salmon was the tribes’ lifeblood, their subsistence crop — culturally and spiritually linked to the region’s economy.
At the Edge of the Water
A hominid jawbone (Ardipithecus ramidus) and settlement gathering scraps have been excavated from Ethiopia’s Awash River, dating more than 4 million years before the present. Our ancestors foraged the banks of the same lake, and human life developed within the reaches of rivers and lakes. The Tigris and Euphrates, the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Nile; they all provided transportation, fishing, mammal and bird hunting, bathing and drinking before they were diverted for agriculture. They became the sustainers of life and fertility: Mother of the Land. The word for river in Thai, mae ran, translates literally as “water mother.” The floods of the Nile are associated with the tears of the goddess Isis. Ireland’s River Boyne was worshipped as a goddess by Celtics. Of the life sustained by rivers, salmon are associated with much myth, as much as any animal. “The Salmon of Knowledge, legend had it, swam in a pool near the source of the Boyne. Anyone who tasted the fish would acquire understanding of everything in the world, past, present and future.” For the Pacific Northwest natives, “the salmon were superior beings who ascended rivers for the benefit of people, died and then returned to life in a great house under the ocean where they danced and feasted in human form.”
Rivers provide life and death. Irrigation is about 3,000 years old as a technology — in 1900 40 million hectares of cropland were under irrigation worldwide compared to 248 million hectares in 1993. Rivers have served as roadways — “all great historic cultures have thriven through the movement of men and institutions and inventions and goods along the natural highway of a great river,” writes Lewis Mumford. We owe so much to rivers, to the unchained movement of water from landscape to landscape that the world should be imbued with the word “riverscape” in describing our geographic locations. “To trace the history of a river … is to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body,” wrote Gretel Ehrlich.
for every real lock there is only one real key and it is in some other dream now invisible
it’s the key to the one real door it opens the river and the sky both at once it’s already in the downward river with my hand on it my real hand and I am saying to the hand turn open the river
— W.S. Merwin
Damnation the Dams
For a bit of boasting, Washington lays claim to the fact that the Columbia River is the most hydroelectrically developed river system in the world, with more than 400 dams, producing 21 million kilowatts. It comes from two lakes between the Continental Divide and the Selkirk mountain ranges. It has ten major tributaries: the Kootenay, Okanagan, Wenatchee, Spokane, Yakima, Snake, Deschutes, Willamette, Cowlitz and Lewis. The most important, the Snake, is 1,100 miles long and runs through North America’s deepest gorge, Hell’s Canyon, at 7,900 feet deep.
The world’s rivers are forever altered by dams. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that 70 percent of U.S. riparian habitats have been lost or damaged by damming and diversion. In the Pacific Northwest, more than 100 stocks and subspecies of salmon and trout have gone extinct and another 200 are at risk, mostly due to dams and loss of riparian habitat. The Nile is the world’s longest river at 4,132 miles but because of irrigation facilitated through damming, less than 10 percent of the river’s flow reaches the Mediterranean Sea. Damming has brought significant change to watersheds. Nothing alters a river as completely as a dam. A wild river is dynamic, mercurial, transforming itself and the land and flora and fauna around it. A slack reservoir is the complete opposite of a river. Still versus flow. “A dam traps sediments and nutrients, alters the river’s temperature and chemistry, and upsets the geological processes of erosion and deposition through which the river sculpts the surrounding land,” writes McCully.
Dams and river diversions do not produce new water. The amount of water on earth has remained constant for 2 billion years, and while 70 percent of the earth’s surface is covered with water, only 3 percent is fresh water, and out of that amount, less than 1 percent is easily available for human consumption. Water planners, governments and international agencies have touted the theory that the 21st century will be fraught with wars over water, which in effect justifies water diversion projects and damming. Of course, the pipelines and pumping stations usually are built for the least frugal, the rich, and take away water, power and to the people, from those who use the least amount of water, the poor. Damming can reduce potable water supplies through tainting water quality and evaporation in those huge reservoirs.
The world has 40,000 large dams that have displaced 60 million people, leaving them poorer. An area larger than California — 400,000 kilometers — has been covered up by dams’ reservoirs Excessive irrigation has destabilized the soil through salination. Dam projects force poor nations into huge debt loads that destabilize economies and put more pressure on the poor populations. The World Bank is the largest financial backer of dams, funding 26 dams a year from 1970-85 (now it’s 4 per year, a sign of change on many levels). Malaria and schistosomiasis — incubated in the canals and still waters created by dams — outbreaks kill tens of thousands of people a year.
A dam is a momentary human bash to the midsection of a river. I like to know that, to put it in simple terms, the river will win. Like a rabbit and a tortoise: dams are put up quick, but the constant pressure of the river, beating and whirling, will break through. This is an idea beyond energy watts produced, beyond conserving water for drought. It is the original plan for the flow of water.
–S. H. Semken
Restoration, Healing, Health
Water use in the past 90 years has increased exponentially, and we’ve witnessed a 200 percent increase of per capita water use, accounting for a 566 percent increase in withdrawals from the freshwater sources around the world. This water grabbing has also played a large role in lowering the amount of water available for humans, wild and domesticated animals, and plant life because of the pollution cased by industrial and agricultural methods. Planners and technologists may see the building of dams and diversion systems as ways to neutralize the “war for water,” but evidence shows that the past century’s dam building mania still put 1.3 billion people without access to fresh water, and more than 1.7 billion are without minimal sanitation. Add to that 2.1 billion people without power, and we might draw the conclusion that dam building doesn’t benefit people — the people of the land, of the regions — but rather dams put money into the pockets of corporations, despotic governments, and multinational banking concerns.
So following a land ethic adopted by Stegner, Leopold and Wilkinson, a few questions arise in relationship to human communities and their associations with river systems: Who owns a river? Is access to clean water and adequate food a human right? Is cultural integrity best ensured by environmental integrity? Groups like International Rivers Network and American Rivers have generated great local interest worldwide in facing off the discriminatory practices of dam builders. We have already seen various forms of exploitation in this damming history: displacement of farmers from good alluvial soil (farmers who are subsistence, usually non-white with strong cultural ties to their land). Ray Dasmann sees the ecosystem-based or biosphere-based cultures as the strongest in terms of holding to the land ethic — societies whose life and economies are centered in terms of natural regions and watersheds. Wendell Berry writes about the “unsettling of America” through an economic pogrom penalizing us if we try to stay in one spot and do anything well there. This is the overarching idea of inhabitory people who see their land as sacred … all land is sacred. And urban elites have scoffed at, overtaxed, marginalized and vilified peasants, paisanos, paysan, peoples of the land, as Snyder points out. Now is the time to heal the land and its people by unleashing the river.
As Heraclitus wrote, we cannot step into the same river twice because the river is constantly changing — the very nature of water. As westerners moving into this great landscape, we need to link to our rivers beyond the potentiality of more golf courses and shopping malls. We need rivers as more than emblems; we need healthy watersheds so people can learn to control their own needs, control a community’s growth and urban decay, control the factory farming and unchecked ranching that the west has come to symbolize. Valerie Rapp in her book, Water the River Reveals, discusses many aspects of the rivers of the Northwest in this simple but telling book; the chapter headings reveal much about how the river must be engaged: “Going Upriver,” “The Elegant Connection,” “Disturbance and Resilience,” “Respect and Transformation,” “Broken Connections,” “The Simplified Landscape,” “Uncoupling the Ecosystem,” “The Landscape of Salmon,” “Restoration,” and “Refuge.” Her book ends with a call for a regional vision for rivers and watersheds — linked watersheds:
In the Pacific Northwest, all the rivers are missing at least some pieces. The best we have are the almost pristine rivers, the healthy salmon stocks, the key watersheds. The connection that should bind the pieces together in a resilient web are severed or frayed. But the Pacific Northwest rivers have more pieces than the rivers in the rest of the country. They have enough pieces that healing is possible.
Alternatives to the Same Old River Song
“The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.”
— Suquamish Chief Seattle
According to Sandra Postel, international water scarcity expert, water demand in industry could be cut now between 40 and 90 percent with existing methods and technologies. Combine this with a 30 percent drop in water use for cities and between 10 to 50 percent drop in agriculture’s use of water, and we have hope that the future will see more and more self-imposed river saving conservation programs. These conservation measures and technologies do not generally impede economic output or quality of life. Water management is part of a United Nations conference charter established in 1998 for freshwater management policy. The main points include the philosophy of an inhabitory land ethic:
safeguard the rights of access to water for future generations
limit water demands
ensure equitable distribution
protect the environment
maximize the socio-economic output of a unit volume of water
increase the efficiency of water use
Organizations like International Rivers Network develop advocacy and information clearing houses of information about projects worldwide where rivers are being unleashed and water use is being reinvented. They also provide technical assistance and economic aid. Here are just a few of the alternatives to damming and high consumptive demands put on water:
The greatest potential for water conservation in the west rests in increasing irrigation efficiency. More than 70 percent of the world’s fresh water withdrawn from rivers, lakes and underground aquifers is for agriculture uses. Traditional water harvesting technologies include rain- and groundwater harvesting, micro-dams, shallow wells, low-cost pumps, and moisture conserving agricultural practices, all of it sustainable. Permaculture is a sustainable agriculture technique (way of thinking) based on working with natural systems, rather than against nature. Desalination projects don’t lead to displacement of indigenous peoples, changed agricultural lifestyles or serious ecological effects. Recycling wastewater is largely an untapped technology for irrigation and groundwater recharge.
The idea that dams produce irreplaceable energy is one of the toughest to alter, especially in hydroelectricalized Washington, but the U.S. is making progress. Since 1973 we have gotten four times as much new energy from demand management savings as from all expansions of domestic energy supplies put together. That’s $200 billion in savings each year on energy bills. Many other ways to get power or water that cause less damage to ecosystems are available to planners, even as a replacement for their favored large infrastructure projects. Solar is the second fastest growing energy in the world. The earth each year receives 10 times as much energy from the sun as is contained in all the known reserves of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium combined. While wind power may not produce 100 percent of the time, it still could provide a larger proportion of energy in places with good winds. Fuel cells produce electricity, heat and water without combustion by reigning in the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen. Small-scale hydropower projects better serve local economies and help develop local skills. These are small dams — under 10 megawatts — that are less harmful to the environment and surrounding communities. Biogas and ocean power are technologies of the future with much potential. In developing countries most organic waste like dung is burned directly for fuel — biomass energy. Biogas is practical and economical for recycling large amounts of organic waste. Burning biomass puts 700 million women at risk for developing serious health problems in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization (1992). Wave power harnessing devices are already available — economically competitive and efficient as well as clean. One such device used in the United Kingdom is one-third cheaper than coal with the additional benefit of no carbon emissions.
Green Shadows in Water Deliver Our Hope
“Consider this water which flows toward the city. … See how pure and fine it is! But when it enters the city … people wash their hands and faces and feet and other parts with it, and their clothes and carpets, and the urine of all the quarters and dung of horses and mules are poured into it and mixed up with it. Look at it when it passes out the other side of the city! Though it is still the same water, turning the dust to clay … making the plain verdant … disagreeable things have been mingled with it.”
— Rumi
In the process of writing this brief overlay of ideas, I find hope. In just a two-hour look-over of the Internet, I found group after group dedicated to restoring rivers, breaching dams, cleaning up watersheds, reclaiming the land — all with the idea of the Wilkinson land ethic embedded in their mission statements, that balance of human life and nature, culture and economy. One bibliography on dam removal found on-line contains more than 200 sources from around the U.S. and world — titles like “Restoring Southern California Steelhead: Dam. Why Care?” or Instream Flow Protection: Seeking a Balance in Western Water Use or River Dammed, River Redeemed: Dam Removal and Salmon Recovery in the Pacific Northwest point to a new direction, a new ethos (new to the conquerors, not the Chief Seattles) for dismantling the systems and philosophy set forth by the Lords of Yesterday. The IRN list of Washington River Organizations covers more than 220 individual groups fighting for their fisheries, their watersheds, their wild and scenic places.
Native American cultures and environmental practices can be easily linked to other inhabitory peoples around the world. Snyder is one of the leading voices, a poet, “formulating a concept of international bioregionalism based on traditional and innovative practices of inhabitation and re-inhabitation.” Solutions rest with the people who read and continue to understand what Deep Ecology is and how we all must engage ourselves in studying the overlay of other people’s ways of the land (and water) and other countries’ solutions to the watershed management and ecological wholeness. It takes an understanding of the interconnectedness of all lives on this planet, not just a “think locally, act locally” mentality. We can change the course of the rivers’ futures in our lifetimes through belief, discipline and ritual. We must understand the fragility of refuge and the toughness of nature. Leopold tells us we must expand the boundaries to make this new ethic applicable to those of us living west of the 98th meridian: the land as a collection of soil, plant, animal and water ecologies. We are part of the biotic mechanism, and sometimes humanity must make some hard-boiled points — like the trees and water are more important left whole rather than lumber and diverted water. It all connects to the very idea that the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals leads to global warming. Forests and water and species and humanity — it seems like an easy lesson for urban and rural planners to grasp and run with.
It’s all about water in this new Next West of ours, where we can restore old rivers back to new acclaim so we all can have the sense of community the rivers have always led us to believe we could find amongst teeming masses and isolated subsistence farmers. Rivers connect cit to city. Their force generates a connectivity to land, animal, heavens. Most rivers running through cities have been harnessed, muddied, polluted, drained, or pooled. But this movement to break down dams so rapids return, so communities built on or near the river can gain a sense of nature even within a heavily demarcated urban space, seems to take into consideration nature and humanity creating an adjusted or abbreviated livable place. Rivers fulfill their promise to enchant, enrapture and entertain; yet their basic lifeblood provides humans with the vitality of life through the energy inside their very ions. Moving along the river path as recreationists or fishing aficionados or along its banks in public spaces like parks and wildlife zones generates the psychological salving our communities’ need. Major cities throughout the U.S. use rivers as their centers or their boundaries. Rivers are in an hour’s reach of most urban spaces. How can planners not incorporate river thinking in planning our cities’ growth patterns and long-range community health? The river and systems that grow with them prove to be the most unusual solutions to some of the destructive forces of urban decay, sprawl, and sociological abandonment.
“Eventually all things merge into one … and the river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops … under the rocks are the words . . . and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”
“I can’t think of anything that harms nature more than cutting down trees and burning them,” said William Moomaw, professor emeritus of international environmental policy at Tufts University.
Oh, the number of top 10 or top 20 stories flooding the cloud servers delivered to us promptly, nanosecond speed, over the fuck-you Three-Face-Book, or on your email server, on the Dumber Dumbed Down Smart (sic) Phone, and of course, on the telly. Imagine, instantaneous fake news, falsified un-News, the entire suite of topics New York Times covers, LA Times feeds, and on and on.
Delivered instantnesouly, and yet, water is getting shut off, electricity is being turned off, roads are buckling, and that old time religion — privatizing everything until all shit breaks loose — determined to give USA a D-minus in infrastructure. Rebar in bridges, dikes, buildings, and the like, going the way of rust, baby. Reinforced concrete, crumbling, and the entire wasteland that is Auto Nation USA, all of that endless trucking back and forth, like a fucking spider web from space, it is what we have in this broke-back country.
I’ve talked with old folks (80 years plus) and with city and county “politicians.” I’ve talked to numerous people who just can’t get that reality out of their craw — so–sosch — ehh-cism ! The end of humanity is, well, on the horizon. Thanks to that Socialism Derangement Syndrome (SDS). It is built into the systems in the USA, and the DNA of USA-USA-USA, well, over generations of murdering Indians, slaves, and that checkerboard of people in countries from sea to oil slick sea, it has turned most of USA into a whack — job: undereducated, under curious about the world around them, dumb as dirt, compliant, cancelling ideas/discourse/thinking/pushback/socialism on all ends of the right-left divide. The wounds in this serial murdering society can’t be cauterized.
There has to be immediate amputation of the gangrenous rot coming from all 50 states. The rot of consumerism/retailism/financialization/indebtedness is spread like a a million species of bacteria and viruses and other diseases that are indeed resistant to any medicine-goop-treatment.
There are so many deplorables, that term that Hillary hacked up, she being one of millions in the deplorable camp of neoliberalism. Deplorables who would gut you for stumbling into them on a sidewalk. Deplorables who are armed to the tooth who would shoot anyone stumbling into their backyard.
Think about it. People at a bloody concussion fest, UFC, chanting USA-USA-USA with this subhuman and his other subhuman followers traipsing into the stadium with their potbellies and juggling jowls as they take a load off their sagging asses in their multi-millionaire seats.
There is no deep outrage with this sort of optics that runs the USA prime time attention span. No outrage here, that the sweetness of all those sodas have yet more and more of a price, in that shit-hole Florida, run by those shit-hole Diaspora from all over, especially the East Coast, Trump and Company no less.
It is environmental racism, and alas, this stinking country can’t keep the water on, can’t feed the farms with irrigation, can’t give out stinking fans to dying folk in this heat wave. Imagine, all those toys, those trillions to the DoD, and those men and women in uniformed, also called the Armed Forces, where are they? No triage or MASH tents or massive pouring out of USA tax dollars to mitigate and solve the unfolding problems wrought by Capitalism on Crack. Story after story. Burning cane fields, yep, that’s good for the air. And this story was the same in 2001 when I went from El Paso to Spokane: massive fires lit by wheat farmers to burn stubble. Oh, the irony of Capitalism on Crack. Good old time stupidity. But stupidity and compliant people, well, that combo makes them trillions.
Then these Nordics, these putrid white saviors in Europe touting their carbon neutral smoke and mirrors fake science. Again, tearing down forests, in this case, North Carolina, brought to us by CNN.
Northampton has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state — which almost doubled during the Covid-19 pandemic — and nearly 22% of its residents are living in poverty.
“If the wood products industry and biomass were a way of growing strong rural economies in the southeastern region, these rural communities should be some of the wealthiest on the planet,” said Smith. “We are in the world’s largest wood producing region. But you don’t see any evidence in these rural communities of thriving rural economies. The opposite is actually true.”
Enviva currently employs 98 people at their Northampton facility and pay roughly 37% more than the average wage in the county, the company told CNN in a statement, adding that they strive to hire locally if workers have the right qualifications.
Imagine, the scams, and, in the end, these communities, again, pay the price of environmental racism:
Pretty, unh? Would love to have this in your backyard, right?
The EU, which aims to be climate-neutral by 2050, is set to revise its Renewable Energy Directive this summer and is expected to update sustainability criteria for biomass. Critics hope they will restrict biomass imports from overseas, exclude whole, living trees as “waste product” and properly account for carbon emissions from cutting and burning wood.
But a draft document that surfaced this past spring does not suggest substantial changes are coming for Europe’s directive.
I live in a state where the Democratic weak kneed governor got stiff knees and shut down everything, and this is the reality of stupidity around the planned pandemic. The lack of rural and inner city clinics, and just a lack of a massive movement to treat people with the common cold, gut diseases, the flu, and the bioweaponized SARS-Cov2, that’s what the Kate Brown, self-described bi-sexual, is all about. And, the reality is, this privatized medicine (sic) needs ending. Imagine, ending CEO and CFO and stockholder dividends. Oh, it would be easy to turn hospitals into cooperatives, employee owned outfits. On a sliding scale, before single payer health care.
But the reality that the shinanigans of the hospitals have killed thousands. Not because of the batty virus, but because of delays, and no treatment. Now? Oregonian, read it.
After 18 years as a nurse, much of it in the emergency department, Jeremy Lail considered himself a battle-tested veteran.
But last week, he asked his bosses at Providence Portland Medical Center if he could go on leave. Lail said he’s overwhelmed by the horde of patients seeking treatment at his ER and unnerved at the erratic, angry nature of many of those patients.
“I dreaded going to work,” he said. “I found myself thinking, is this the day someone is going to pull a gun and shoot me? We’re seeing how society can devolve right now. I’ve been dealing with a lot of anxiety and depression.”
For months, hospital workers have wanted nothing more than for the pandemic to end and life to return to some semblance of normalcy. But the much-deserved respite has yet to begin. Instead, a combination of understaffing and a tidal wave of seriously ill patients who have deferred health care for months has made life in the ER as bad or worse than the height of the pandemic.
It’s a recipe for disaster that is unfolding at hospitals across the country: Blend emotionally exhausted caregivers with emotionally disturbed patients, throw in a wave of street violence and the departure of some of the most experienced workers on the wards due to fatigue and burnout, and voila, America has its latest health care crisis.
Many employees argue there is another key ingredient added by the hospitals that makes the end result particularly toxic: A penny-pinching mentality that allows the understaffing to develop in the first place.
Oh, now we can see god in the science of trillions wasted on artificial (sic) suns (sic). You have this sickness, about limitless and green energy sources. Makes no sense, really, when billions are on the brink of starvation, polluted slow and fast deaths. Imagine that, no solutions NOW for farming collapses, fisheries collapses, broke-back poverty and chronic illnesses, and just endless droughts. Nope. We have all these resources and mental lifetimes in the tens of millions working on this?
These stories never-ever look at things from an ethical point of view. From a life cycle analysis view. From the view of the hoards of us, useless breathers-eaters-breeders. This news coming out of Europe or China or Israel or USA, well, no one looks at the reality of how land is desiccating and desertifying. All those satellites for 6 G internet of nanotechnology. None of the real humans are the tables of power looking at, well, all these issues tied to enviornmental racism, structural violence, reparations, land theft, and the like.
Because, these stories will go the way of the stories to dare valorize Palestinians, or debunk the lies of the murderous Jewish Israeli Regime of More Than Just Apartheid:
Another casualty of Israel’s war on truth: ‘Canadian Journalists for Free Expression’ fired a staffer for publishing a routine letter that criticized Israel for killing journalists… By Kevin Metcalf
In May, Israel bombarded Gaza for 11 days, killing 256 Palestinians, including 66 children. [Additional info here.]
In the midst of this attack, hundreds of journalists in Canada signed an open letter calling for fairer coverage of Israel and Palestine. CBC then barred reporters who signed the letter from covering the region, claiming that doing so made them appear biased.
I was one of those who signed the open letter, because I believe the media should report fairly. I also expected there’d be a backlash to the letter within newsrooms, especially at the CBC, due to my own experiences: Years before this letter was released, I was fired from my media job for writing about Israel’s killing of protesters and journalists.
With help from the state broadcaster, over the course of a few weeks in 2018 my career was destroyed and my life’s work was completely uprooted. I now work as a landscaper for a living. (Source)
If my fellow writers haven’t already experienced this, well, not just criticizing Israel or the Jewish mentality of many Jews who are as racist as any Steven Miller or Donal et al Trump LLC.
Try having conversations with people in workplaces about bioweaponized SARS-Cov2. Any discussion about therapies that would have saved hundreds of thousands from oxygen-depleted, intubation death. Cancelled big time. I am an educator, so, that one is out the window to dare question masks and lockdowns. Dare question USA from a truly communist lens? Question Trump? Cancelled. Question Biden? Cancelled. Question the rapaciousness and profit motives of medicine and pharmacy and virology/ Cancelled. Question how some or key points of the company you work for? Cancelled. It’s a sickness this society, so, again, the “Israel Policies Are Monstrous and Murderous” critique gets you cancelled.
Read this science story. Of course, anything tied to all the chronic illnesses, or we call them intellectual-developmental-psychiatric disabilities, is good to see how things can be mitigated (of course, the idea for both left and right elites is to say, “Hmm, useless eater, well, abort-abort.”). But this sort of story below is another form of colonizing. There are millions of people working on learning how the forever chemicals, all the hormone disrupters, all those additives-chemicals-pollutants-particulates-drugs-GMOs-et al, can cause a storm of epigenetic issues down the line, and, yes, autism spectrum disorder is just one area of massive numbers of younger and younger people developing DD-ID-PD disorders. A magnitude of 100.
You will not see these scientists looking for the genetic cause looking at all the synergistic causes of depleted sperm, wombs of wild chemical storms, none of that, of course. Nope. They are getting paid to look deep at all the causes of Autism-Autism like disorders.
An increase in the incidence of Type 2 diabetes, obesity and autism has been reported in Scotland. Similar increases have been seen globally. The herbicide glyphosate was introduced in 1974 and its use is accelerating. The manufacturers claim it to be safe, but none of the Regulatory Agencies are monitoring glyphosate levels in groundwater.
By courtesy of independent researchers around the world we present evidence that glyphosate interferes with many metabolic processes in plants, animals and humans, and glyphosate residues have been found in all three. Glyphosate is an endocrine-disruptor (as are many herbicides) it damages DNA and it is a driver of mutations that lead to cancer. We present graphs from the US which correlate glyphosate application and the percentage of GE soy and corn crops to the incidence and prevalence of various diseases in those on a Western diet. The Pearson’s correlation coefficients are very strong and highly significant for obesity, diabetes, autism, thyroid cancer, liver cancer, deaths from Parkinson’s, Senile Dementia and Alzheimer’s, inflammatory bowel disease and acute kidney failure. We present Cancer Research UK graphs of upward trends in cancer incidences between 1975 and 2009, which are in line with the US graphs.
Other consequences are gastrointestinal disorders, heart disease, depression, infertility, birth defect s and other cancers. The data for the amount of non-agricultural use of glyphosate in the UK appear to be confidential. Parts of South Wales, in former mining areas, Japanese knotweed and Himalayan Balsam abound. The local Council does not hold glyphosate records. Instead it contracts out to a commercial organisation to supply industry approved vegetation management techniques. A quote from the contractor: “The glyphosate we use called round up has a hazard free label.” The level of glyphosate in a river draining from areas of Japanese knotweed was 190 parts per trillion (ppt) and local tap water was 30 ppt. These were of the order of concentrations found in a study in 2013 which showed that breast cancer cell proliferation is accelerated by glyphosate in extremely low concentrations: “potential biological levels at part per trillion (ppt) to part per billion (ppb).”
Oh, this is big, no? The Nile? Egypt and Ethiopia? You think this water story is not the issue of our times? Oh, that Artificial Sun will save us. Think water wars all over the planet:
A dispute over the Nile, the world’s longest river, is coming to a head. At stake are the lives and livelihoods of millions of people who depend on its water.
Egypt is objecting to efforts by Ethiopia to start operating a $4.8 billion dam on a major tributary of the Nile, a hydroelectric project that it hopes will power a social and economic transformation of the country, without a binding agreement that preserves Cairo’s rights to the waters.
Then, well, we get to the Zoom Doom story, the post planned pandemic story. Apple of course should be shut down, taken over, and the entire honchos put on that Epstein Island. Or Musk’s. Take your pick of billionaire islands. But this is the new abnormal. Working in your underwear, latte chilled, all those airplane and spider plants, and the puppy underfoot and four-pound beef-lovers pizza at the ready. These people who are threatening to leave Apple, well, I guarantee you they are dream hoarders, Hillary-Kamala lites. Believers in social distancing for life, masks on everywhere, and these are the ones who are ramming digital and cloud and satellite surveillance and AI and robotized tech up our asses.
The state of news (sic):
Apple stood its ground last week in the face of employee protest against its new requirement that they work from home only two days a week. Both the policy–which came directly from CEO Tim Cook–and Apple’s comments about it betray a striking lack of emotional intelligence. That’s a bad idea in today’s tight labor market. The approach is one no small company or startup can afford to take.
Our story begins about a month ago, when Apple announced its new return-to-the-office policy in light of widespread vaccinations and falling Covid-19 infections. In an internal email, Cook announced that, beginning in early September, employees would be required to work in the office at least three days a week. Specifically, those days would be Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, with the option to work remotely on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Finally, the top 10 or whatever stories, prompted by my friend, Joe the Farmer from Merced:
How long will it be before we start seeing adds for front end Protest Protector guard bars for F-150’s, Chevy Silverado’s and the Amerikaner favorite, Dodge Ram? What good fascist could possibly pass up the opportunity to keep protesters blood and body parts from damaging their radiators and having expensive body shop repair bills? I’m sure some enterprising asshole is already marketing “Protest Protectors” as I write this. Only in Amerika. The land of opportunity.
He was reacting to a Counterpunch story, pulling this quote from it:
Talk about “fascism with American characteristics”! “In the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests,” VOX’s Cameron Peters noted last April, “Republican lawmakers are advancing a number of new anti-protest measures at the state level – including multiple bills that specifically make it easier for drivers to run down protesters… If the recent spate of anti-protest measures in Florida, Iowa, and Oklahoma is disturbing on its face, however, context does little to make it better. There is a specific history in the US of the far right using cars as weapons, and it’s not hard to see how bills like the one that is now law in Oklahoma might only make things worse…The most notable example is from August 2017: Heather Heyer, 32, was struck and killed and at least 19 others were injured when neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr. rammed a crowd of counter protesters in Charlottesville. Fields has since been sentenced to life in prison…But it’s more than that single incident. According to Ari Weil, the deputy research director for the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, there were at least 72 incidents of cars driving into protesters over a relatively short span in 2020, from May 27 through July 7… Examples aren’t hard to find. There’s even a Wikipedia page specifically dedicated to ‘vehicle-ramming incidents during George Floyd protests.’ And as Weil explained in an interview with Vox’s Alex Ward last year, ‘there’s an online environment that for years has been celebrating and encouraging these types of horrendous attacks’” (emphasis added). From Iowa Nice to Iowa Nazi: a Report from the Friendly Fascist Heartland
These are examples in USA and UK of how we help the sick, tired, overworked, the useless eaters, useless breeders, useless breathers, useless resters: “OH, JOE — The White European and White United Snakes of America and Klanada, they are all worthless scum, and we are useless breathers, useless eaters, useless breeders, useless one and all, unless there are fines/levies/penalties/tickets/violations/tolls/taxes/triple taxations/surcharges/fees-to gouge the poor and lower classes to death in their operating systems.”
The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. — I. F. Stone
by Paul Haeder / July 7th, 2021
I am of the opinion that people have the right to decide whether to accept vaccines or not, especially since these are experimental vaccines … My concern is I know there are risks but we don’t have access to the data … We don’t really have the information we need to make a reasonable decision. — Dr. Robert Malone, “Inventor of mRNA Interviewed About Injection Dangers“
No, it is not the sky is falling overreach. Any leftist worth her or his understanding of Capitalism’s History, of the entire project of this country’s Indian Removal campaign, the entire force of slavery then and slavery now, and the dirty murderers in every aspect of American government and corporate prostitution of government/politicos, knows this new normal policing of the Internet is just another variation on a theme of USA Surveillance Central: snitches, Scarlet Letters, superstitious Skull and Bones antihuman Ivy Elites, House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HCUA), COINTELPRO, CIA Murder Inc., Confessions of Economic Hit Men, Chicago School, Edward Bernays School of Pulling the Wool Over the Sheeple’s Eyes.
Note that the YouTube interview of me has been scrubbed, and Andy Libson thinks it’s Artificial Intelligence doing it, though I am surfing the internet all the time for jobs, and many remote jobs are in the pipeline, and there are humans doing $20 an hour gigs surfing the internet with those tools of oppression provided them to, well, scour the internet of ideas! Here, Andy’s email to me:
Hey Paul,I thought this might happen…and it did!If you want you can post your episode up on bitchute.I actually wonder if they got all bent out of shape about the comments. Who knows with these creatures.
Here, a partial blurb from that Fascist YouTube:From: YouTube Community Guidelines <moc.ebutuoy@ylper-on> Date: Tue, Jul 6, 2021 at 12:54 AM
Hi What’s Left?,
Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our medical misinformation policy. We’ve removed the following content from YouTube:
We know that this might be disappointing, but it’s important to us that YouTube is a safe place for all. If content breaks our rules, we remove it. If you think we’ve made a mistake, you can appeal and we’ll take another look. Keep reading for more details.
It is childish, all “vice principal thuggery like”, suspensions for not standing during the pledge of allegiance, or expulsions for defending oneself with fists when a bunch of thugs jump you in the high school bathroom. The nanny state on growth hormones, and this just is a long line of compliancy, the school system John Taylor Gatto discussed. One hundred and fifty years in the making, until today: Zoom Doom Schools, adult teachers as children, children as infants, wasted thoughts, busy work, coloring and snack-snack-snack, all that school loyalty, mascots on underwear, administrators who sound like two-bit car salespersons: the rise of Consumo Pithecus and Retailosapiens:
Twentieth-century scientific schooling is best described as the social experiment of inculcating into children what Gatto calls the “seven lessons of school teaching.” These lessons of mass forced schooling merit lengthy quotation:
It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials, this programming is similar to the television; it fills almost all the “free” time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
It makes them indifferent.
It makes them emotionally dependent.
It makes them intellectually dependent.
It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.
Or, as Rockefeller’s General Education Board summed up in a 1906 document on scientific schooling:
In our dreams … people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk…. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…. We will organize children … and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
This is the new normal since we’ve had 150 years of Gestapo schooling, even before the words, Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police) were put together in order to exact obedience. You can hear Glen Greenwald’s most recent analysis of the cancel culture, and worse, the libeling and destruction of human beings with a counter thought, contrarian, outside the main paradigm, critical of systems, left, right or center under this fascist state, USA:
On this special edition of System Update, Glenn Greenwald dives into the latest online war to erupt in the Liberal media ecosystem to explore the underlying pathologies driving liberal and Democratic Party discourse. He focuses on two reputation-destroying cancers in particular that have become dreadfully commonplace: baselessly accusing people of being paid Russian agents, and weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.
The irony of my hour and 49 minutes with Andy, Eduardo and Kenny, on their three-year-old show, What’s Left, is that I bar no holds, and actually critique the entire mess that is the echo chamber, the Jimmy Dore’s, Bill Maher’s, Jon Stewart’s, SNL’s, all of them who think they are giving to humankind in their endless prattling and rattling. Millionaires, like Joe Rogan? Really. Oh, the work they don’t do to have $ thrown at them. All the prognosticators, all those making hay commenting on the commenters and the news (sic) and the political whoring that is DC/K-Street/Big Media/DoD/Three Branches of the Poison Tree called Government! It is endless, meaningless, and worthless in the scheme of things, but should never be 86-ed off any platform.
Do we get taken off Word Press for the stories Dissident Voice runs, the fun word play I have with life in the Matrix? Gestapoization connected to YouTube, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, this concept too much for the worldwide net? Do those algorithms and deep boring AI tools go looking for these sorts of juxtaposed concepts by writers, to tally up and then eventually remove?
I’m attempting to get Andy, Eduardo and Kenny to get me in on interviewing THEM at What’s Left, and, the irony is, we can’t talk about bans by YouTube, or discuss this Internet Gestapoization without, well, getting the bloody YouTube video banned, culled, taken down, First Amendment Ripped! Here’s what I just email What’s Left:So, how many times has this happened to What’s Left, Andy? I will be writing a piece on this ASAP, but give me a sense of the times you all got taken down, by YouFuckYourselfTube, so I can frame some of what I write about ties into your work. What are the takedowns about? Just “medical misinformation”?Andy — We’ve had 4 episodes removed.
1. What’s Left came about why?
Andy — About saying the the previous prez election was stolen. And that the “insurrection” was a setup and a fraud. (Yours) … I think it’s the idea that it is a bioweapon. That is my guess at least.
2. What are some of the more compelling topics and issues you all have covered? Why?
Andy — They were about talking about vaccines and maintaining that they were gene therapy techniques and were dangerous. And we were skeptical of them even being vaccines.
3. What topics would you like to cover in the future?+–+
4. What’s your background, quickly (I did see your interview on Left Lockdown Skeptics)?
5. As a socialist, for you and Kenny and Eduardo, what has all of this Facebook and YouTube and Twitter lockdowning, censoring, etc., done to your framing, your perspective?
6. Are you three educators? This sort of culling of discussion and debate and information flow back and forth being culled by ruthless people, the elites and their foot sodliers, it seems like something you all would talk about in HS current events, communications classes, history, no? What would you tell students who might ask you why all the websites and podcasts and videos are coming down.
7. Here you go, Green Peace gets Exxon, but this is business as usual for the elites. And, Green Peace will be sued. Discuss?
8. So much for peaceful protests — how do you frame a story like this to your compadres and students? “In Iowa, a federal judge has sentenced climate activist Jessica Reznicek to eight years in prison for damaging parts of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and ’17. U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger also ordered Reznicek to pay nearly $3.2 million in restitution. In 2016, Jessica Reznicek and fellow activist Ruby Montoya set fire to five pieces of heavy machinery being used to construct the Dakota Access pipeline.”
Harkens to Bidder 70, Tim DeChristopher — “Tim DeChristopher disrupted an illegitimate Bureau of Land Management oil and gas auction in December of 2008, by posing as Bidder 70 and outbidding oil companies for parcels around Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in Utah.For his act of civil disobedience, DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in federal prison. Held for a total of 21 months, his imprisonment earned him an international media presence as an activist and political prisoner of the United States government.”
9. Define what it means to be a human/man in 2021 — your perspective.
10. What does community mean to you?
11. Each of us has the elevator (masked and only two aboard under Covid-19 Craziness) speech on what is socialism, what is communism. What’s yours?
12. Where do you see USA in 20 years?
13. Where do you see the world in 20 years?
14. Are you a pacifist, and if so, why, and if not, then what, and why?
15. Biggest influencers in your life to have gotten you where you are now?
16. And, exactly where are you know? Define!
That’s the idea, at least, to drill down and peel back all the obfuscation and over and covert propagandization and disenfranchisement of real leftists, for sure — revolutionaries, socialists, communists.
Getting knocked off of YouTube pales in comparison to the issues of the day, of the hour, of the second, but it does have reverberations. All the people looking into the fascist states around the world and the fascist corporations and the thugs of the World Economic Forum and World Health Organization kind, well, those stories will be culled, and if you do an Internet search, not only are stories put to the 20th page of a Google search, there are 19 pages of fake articles, faux forums and other variations of mass media mush that hit you/us with countervailing articles (sic) on the very topic you might be writing about and posting/publishing.
They are at war with the people, with ideas, with free thinking, with free learning, with freedoms. The elites and their handmaids of oppression, subjugation and repression are working 24/7, each nanobit and nanosecond we breathe:
2,700 billionaires and 36,000,000 millionaires running through every aspect of life, of communities, families, regions like wildfire, pathogens, cancers, viruses, armies
patriarchy as ham-fisted murderers of the military industrial complex kind
Hollywood (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, too) as the arbiters of the lies, the propagandists, the chosen few — Lies Incorporated
any given minute, read the news feeds of your choice and see the perversions the elites and the mainstream feed the minds of Westerners
digital gulags
educational gulags
economic gulags
environmental gulags
personal gulags
agricultural gulags
health system gulags
pharmacological gulags
legal gulags
AI & Surveillance gulags
It all adds up polluted skies, polluted thoughts, polluted discourse, or lack of discourse, that is!
Finally, the inventor of the mRNA process, Dr. Robert Malone, has been not just scrubbed from YouTube, but from Wikipedia. This is how Gestapo works:
… the adult public are basically research subjects that are not being required to sign informed consent due to EUA waiver. But that does not mean that they do not deserve the full disclosure of risks that one would normally require in an informed consent document for a clinical trial.
And now some national authorities are calling on the deployment of EUA vaccines to adolescents and the young, which by definition are not able to directly provide informed consent to participate in clinical research — written or otherwise.
The key point here is that what is being done by suppressing open disclosure and debate concerning the profile of adverse events associated with these vaccines violates fundamental bioethical principles for clinical research. This goes back to the Geneva convention and the Helsinki declaration.12 There must be informed consent for experimentation on human subjects. (Source; Source)
We interview Paul Haeder, a radical Marxist from the Pacific Northwest with his own ideas about what is going on to drive the 4th Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset. He shares his views with us this week. Check it out!
We interview Paul Haeder, a radical Marxist from the Pacific Northwest with his own ideas about what is going on to drive the 4th Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset. He shares his views with us this week. Check it out! Paul Haeder on Bioweapons, 5G, and Star Wars Other Paul Haeder Articles What’s Left?
It’s not pretty, for sure, how I go all crazy and fugue like, in the interview (man, the lack of teaching 30 students face to face has turned me into a dervish, nodding, head shaking, wacko) But I enjoyed these three socialists, and while I sort of take over the discussion, and I do have a set of nervous ticks and habits [and I can rationalize those by saying I don’t like looking at a screen, an external camera, and in this episode, I had to prop the smart/dumbphone onto the keyboard since Zoom Doom was cutting out on the computer], I think there are harvestable points the four of us made. Again, thanks to Andy, Kenny and Eduardo for the time capsule moment. Reimagining Sanity and Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber is a type of resurfacing, coming up for air, gulping ions and atoms, in a vain attempt to open our eyes wide, baby, wide.
One more bit of evidence on the WWW that points to my complete marginalization and disenfranchisement from the systems — so many systems, left and right, bad and worse. Anyone can go to these articles and podcasts and point the Nazi finger at me and say: “He is not one of us and not one of you and so, time for bedtime.”
Andy Libson asked me to cover the interesting triumvirate of SARS-CoV2 bioweapon/origins; the rush for 5 and 6 G; and weaponized space. I’ve written about that combination here — The Jab, Star Wars, and the Bubble Net of Digital Gulags
It maybe forcing the three into a lumping process, but that is what ideas and brainstorming and plain old historical looks at all the bullshit thrown upon the human race by a sliver of people we call the elite, the beautiful people, the controllers.
It is a fundamental discussion now, we on the left-left, looking at the varioius nefarious activities, plans and invented narratives the controllers have unfolded in the past, currently and for the future. If it feels like Blade Runner or Minority Report , then it must be somehow in the reality slipstream of our times to actually force us to admit the fact that AI and the fascist billionaire club are looking way beyond the horizon of Miami under water. Way beyond disease and viruses and pathogens.
Here’s a fascist — “In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish which eats the slow fish. “– Klaus Schwab
And here’s the reality of the USA and other western countries citizens afraid to look in the mirror or at their own controllers . . . .
I talked a lot about books, about authors, even newspapers of old, in this Interview. For very good reasons —
There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, page 48
The idea is to drum up and initiate and converge people into conversations, and deep analyses, but without a truckload of books under one’s belt, well, the conversation stays shallow, stays controlled, stays right smack in the center of the mainstream mush media’s lies of omission and submission, the controlling media, the media of government controllers, owned and served by the corporations, and the billionaire class who are nefarious, who are the drivers of destruction and culture. That we have to know Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic might “beat” Jeff Bezos into space as a bug-eyed sociopath billionaire, well, that news takes another breath of sanity away from people consuming it and contemplating it and talking about it as a valiant thing. We have to educate the masses on healing, farming, medicine, aging, self-sufficiency, mutual aid, how to rattle the cages and shake the trees and beat these sons of bitches!
These are more of the perversions of our times, and while I touch upon them in the interview above, well, come on folks — all those billions, all those tax dollars, all those S.T.E.M. graduates, all the time and mental energy with satellite constellations and the macho “I am going into orbit first” bravado, man, if that is not enough to occupy real left-left journalists’ shows and mindsets, then I have no idea what does. Because, we are on a planet of forced starvation, forced feedback loops of no water, depleted soils, ag collapses, rising seas, inundation, no infrastructure, housing issues, war-war-war materials/equipment sales. These human scum above should be, well, tanked. They represent beyond hope, beyond humanity. Playing with space trips, and then, the mega constellation, and the telecoms and corporations tying to internet of things/nano things, all of that, it ties into self-indulgence and massive profits beyond anything Carnegie or Rockefeller of JP Morgan of old could have imagined.
It is about total surveillance and tracking and subjugation of man, woman, flora, fauna.
Tax payers foot the bills — triple or more taxation on everything; paying for infrastructure to supply these felons with everything, from roads to communication to air space; then, all the externalities of the fallout of their predatory and casino capitalism; all the trained/educated men and women coming from tax payer funded schools who end up working for these billionaires, in their companies; all the dead-cultural crap these people are infecting the world with; all the lies of Hollywood and others in media propping them up or even covering their lives and their schemes at the expense of the real stories.
These space programs, trips to the moon, man-womxn in the cans/rockets/shuttles programs, take away from the hard scrabble life stories and struggles of the 90 percent of the global population. We can fix and mitigate and compensate/end a world of nukes, forever chemicals, endocrine disrupters, deforestation, ocean acidification, over-harvesting, bad education, bad farming, and the like, including bad medicine, no medicine and even antibiotic microbial resistance and viruses, and income inequality and so much more, maybe even violence.
BUT WE NEED TO GET RID OF THE BILLIONAIRES AND MULTIMILLIONAIRES. Get rid of despots and lords of war. If it takes simple earth-source botulism, concentrated and atomized and aerosolized, sent to their mansions, their yachts, their resorts, then be it. BECAUSE these Bezos and Gates and Branson and Walton, et al characters are plain ice cold murderers who have TV shots, platforms and stolen trillions from the workers, the tax payers. They are normal, their behavior valorized and we are the chumps, expendables.
Lyrics — Whitey on the Moon
A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey’s on the moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill. (but Whitey’s on the moon) Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still. (while Whitey’s on the moon)
The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night. (’cause Whitey’s on the moon) No hot water, no toilets, no lights. (but Whitey’s on the moon)
I wonder why he’s uppi’ me? (’cause Whitey’s on the moon?) I was already payin’ ‘im fifty a week. (with Whitey on the moon) Taxes takin’ my whole damn check, Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck, The price of food is goin’ up, An’ as if all that shit wasn’t enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face an’ arm began to swell. (but Whitey’s on the moon)
Was all that money I made las’ year (for Whitey on the moon?) How come there ain’t no money here? (Hm! Whitey’s on the moon) Y’know I jus’ ’bout had my fill (of Whitey on the moon) I think I’ll sen’ these doctor bills, Airmail special (to Whitey on the moon)
The more a daughter knows the details of her father’s life… the stronger the daughter.
by Paul Haeder / July 2nd, 2021
Balance. Inside out, outside in. From science driven diving, environmental warrior in the 1970s — in AZ, in Mexico, in the Sea of Cortez — to small-town daily newspaperman: Tucson, Bisbee, Wilcox, Sierra Vista, and all these small towns in several rural counties south, on the borderline. El Paso, New Mexico, Mexico, Central America.
Teacher, social worker, mescal-guzzler, photographer, aspiring failed novelist, always moving, always moving on, always distracted.
She’s seen me buoyant and busted. She’s heard me wax poetic and polemic. She’s admired me and feared me. She’s understood me and debated me. She’s heard me embrace her and argue with her.
There is no handbook, no guideposts for being a father . . . or to flip the script: there are no guiderails or throttle governors to learn how to be a daughter of a character like me!
primal scream
her chin lifts air of Chihuahua scorpion stingers sink into corner clouds on wall painted by Mario beer in hand homeless the world his home her room, sanctuary
daughter is innocence listening cicadas odors of cumin green giant chiles desert valley thunderbird on mountain her shadow
protector bird one day a woman alone at night sounds of city harsh, tumbling humanity trapped, concrete prisons she tastes poblano lime gnashing eagle out there stars held on outstretched wings of hope
— Paul Haeder, 7/2/2021
I was in Spokane, helping my amazing daughter get her small business going.
Lots of tough days with her father, me, always on the air, in print, hurly burly, angry at the world, alone writing, man lost of tribe, lone wolf, perfectionists, over college educated. Always flapping his lips.
She asked me, “Are you really proud of me, dad? I didn’t finish college? I am not this politically engaged and active person in Spokane. I am not the daughter you wanted, right.”
Shit, now that takes a 64-year-old know-it-all, big blustery dude like me down a few notches.
The reality is of course I am proud of her. Of course I am not disappointed about lack of a college matriculation. Of course I am not expecting in 2021 that college means much.
It is the father issue, for sure. Divorce. Other things in my daughter’s life that not only cemented her spirit into what we call CPTSD: complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Those are her stories to tell, though my daughter is self-actualized, open, and articulate about her struggles.
“Come to Dust”
Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body that are to come, the motions of the matter that held you. Rise up in the smoke of palo santo. Fall to the earth in the falling rain. Sink in, sink down to the farthest roots. Mount slowly in the rising sap to the branches, the crown, the leaf-tips. Come down to earth as leaves in autumn to lie in the patient rot of winter. Rise again in spring’s green fountains. Drift in sunlight with the sacred pollen to fall in blessing.
All earth’s dust has been life, held soul, is holy.
She is in Spokane, since age six, and alas, at 25 she’s feeling everything I lamented about and wrote about: small town now traffic snarled; pigs/cops hassling homeless; unchecked building (growth); water issues; broken down buildings; homes and rents out the roof; Californians (other big monied folk) swooping into town and the country buying up stuff, and hiking rents.
I was there, June 30, at a 112 degrees, 101 degrees in the dark of night at 1 am. Planned rolling blackouts by the electrical service, Avista. Roads cracking and buckling. Fireworks stands.
The show is over, with unfettered casino-predatory-disaster-zombie-parasitic capitalism.
Shit, how does a guy like me help a gal like her, 25, 500 miles away (I drove the 2006 van, which I have kept up, worked on it myself, called a sucker for having a rig with 230,000 original miles on it).
She’s an on-her-knees kind of photographer, but also right there, with a heart of empathy, for what Eduardo’s poem belies — “the nobodies”. Others call them/us — useless breathers, useless breeders and useless eaters. Makenna is there, in their spaces, and her own heart is so drawn into that unknowable force that makes some people “empaths.”
“The Nobodies”
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them—will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”
― Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America
She’s stayed in Spokane and has enveloped herself in that part of the Inland Pacific Northwest, because of the fairy like worlds in the woods and in mountains and valleys:
The ecosystems — running water, lakes, mists, the dews, soggy soils — those are the victims of climate heating, bulldozers, human incursions. So, combine this formula after formula:
bigger than life father
mother an English teacher
father on the radio, in the news, making it and writing it
dad with full-throttle on boats, kayaks, motorcycles, diving, hiking
a childhood with lots of leeway
exposure to street life, and Spokane has a reputation of having tough lives on the street, and violence
being a vegan and self-styled, she was bullied at k8-12
mother hits the air to move to Australia
father raising a pubescent girl while on his own, dating
always railing against the systems of oppression father, well, not always a good bedside manner raising his only child
father moving away — Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, Oregon Coast!
I look back, and of course, this is not the life I envisioned, the relationship with a child I was banking on. I wasn’t even thinking of children. I cycled through relationships, and that includes four marriages. I am not prudish or Puritan about this at all, but the ramifications are huge. Hell, I am trained on ACES:
I’ve worked with youth for more than a decade as a social services provider. I have worked with adults who are coming out of prisons, are homeless, are facing addictions, and are poor. I know the epigentics of how even bodies (DNA) change under cortisol loads. I am there, understanding why some old guy with no teeth who just went off the wagon again, using meth, is bawling and apologizing. Old guy at 73, one of my clients when I worked with homeless vets. At 73, sliding into Meth in Portland. Everything goes to shit because he goes MIA for days.
I know these men and women, and they have a boatload of influences in their lives. They did not wake up one day, at age 14 or 21, say, “Man, I can’t wait to have all my teeth rot out of my head. I can’t wait to have collapsed veins, psychosis, COPD, the shakes, uncontrolled bowels, living in a box at the back of a warehouse, with a police rap sheet that is 30 pages long.”
My daughter has kept one good thing her old man instilled — “When you see that person on the street, all greasy and broken down, cardboard sign in hands, and shaky, and, wanting to drink or shoot up, with blathering and blathering as his or her SOP, remember, that person once was a baby. And even if it was a nurse in the delivery room, that old homeless adult once had at least a person in his or her life who swaddled him or her and loved. Unconditional love.
It is tough being Makenna since her old man is always out there, putting it all out there for everyone to see, hear, read, view. She’s seen her old man locked up for various things, seen her old man sacked for various reasons, seen her old man broken by this or that slight coming at him from the bureaucrats. She’s seen her old man heart-broken. She’s seen her old man not exactly the ideal of a good All-American Father.
Yet, she has stuck with me. She has held my hand and warmed my cold heart. These are valuable in a time of Covid, post-Covid, Transhuman Dystopia, Unbalanced-Unbalancing world. But she is also one of the world’s vulnerable ones — heart on sleeve, deeply tied to humanity, absolutely through and through in constant ire against the authorities, the systems of oppression, the overlords and the mean as cuss cops/pigs/DA’s/judges/CEOs/Captains of Industry/Colonels of death!
During those last hours I was in Spokane — all that heat the real new normal for most of USA — I was being interviewed by Andy, Kenny and Eduardo for their podcast, “What’s Left.” I was in her pad, and alas, while she was getting an ultrasound for excruciating side aches, I was doing the interview.
The closer I look at the Zoom recording, the more fidgety and disjointed I am now after so many decades of railing, screaming to be heard. I’ll post that interview once Andy and his fellows rap it up. But am I Howard Beale?
All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad.
You’ve gotta say, “I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!”
So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,
she was foreign called a foreigner Shanghai to El Paso small town compared to China counterpart she came with old husband 53 and she 27 father and mother left on mainland, she traveled like billions have seeking something, an idea
one day a family safety, her life of healing small business, son and daughter they had a son the light in the air was warm, he was a prize bundle, tears in her eyes the granny in China father on old piano blasting away at Foucault playing the tired blues as boy comes into gravity
the flip of a coin is destiny played out how can we know the color of our brains, how to coax out words, ideas, conjuring up creativity, our own special way, all of it is a crapshoot life interrupted a thousand times toward the horizon of our dreams, hopes life like a wooden barrel falling over waterfalls we as individuals trapped inside guessing at the drop waiting for the crash endless turning and turning, just fragments of light in the wooden seams
there are no easy answers but love when family loves when friendships define love when communities love even nation states love, and that is the only truth no matter how violent how many deaths from the other end of a gun, all the suffering sadness and suicides it is love holding humanity together, broken, sewn up tattered, fearful, but love is a place inside
hold to it, young man, drive it into your soul, for love combats the nastiness of people, bullies everywhere, the love of a mother is like cobalt, like titanium even when a son or daughter rejects it love is the thing keeping you from falling over the edge without a barrel
This position is located on the Angell Forest Service Job Corps Civilian Center in Yachats, OR.
The incumbent is responsible for providing classroom instruction to students in a variety of academic subjects.
For more information about the duties of this position, please contact BBF at: @usda.govor 541-547-
Responsibilities
Through classroom instruction and guidance.
Establishes a learning environment in which students can develop their ability to make rational and informed decisions relevant to their needs, as well as promote opportunities for students.
Instructs students in the following areas: reading, language, writing, mathematics, life skills, computer literacy, general educational development program, human development, and social studies.
Responsible for planning courses of instruction and lesson plans based on the developmental program and general curriculum guidelines in effect.
Implements plan using teaching methods and techniques appropriate for the skill level being taught, allowing for adaptations to permit individual differences in interests and ability and improve the quality of instruction.
Evaluates individual academic progress through the use of criterion-references, tests and/or other relevant evaluative methods/instruments.
Maintains required records in accordance with applicable regulations, which includes progress reports and accountability reports.
+—-+
This is it for America, for Government, for the entire shooting match. So, I have four decades teaching, man, or more, if you count the scuba diving classes I used to teach frequently in my late teens (18-20).
The entire thing is this job, with the Job Corps, necessitates an Oregon K12 teaching certificate? Amazing. I have been a certified substitute, emergency status, and that was in three states, and alas, I have taught taught taught. However, I have taught: in gang prevention programs for 10th graders; gifted and talented summer program at UT-Austin for juniors in high school; subbing K12, all subjects; running start classes at several community colleges — these are 11th and 12th graders getting to go to community college for their last two years of K12 with extra credit toward college credits; college courses for prisoners, enlisted military, Air Force-Army-Navy-Coast Guard-Marines in an academy in Texas; special education classes; alternative schools; classes in adult basic education; college classes all the way up to graduate writing classes; scuba classes; nature classes; outdoor experiential classes; kayaking classes; photo classes; camping classes; continuing education classes; Life Long Learning classes for older adults. Hell, the list goes on and on, yet I am not qualified to apply to this fucking US Forest Service job just advertised.
You know where I stand if you have read my stuff over the years at Dissident Voice.
Dumb ideas rise to the surface when professional managerial classes determine x and y and z for the masses, for those intersecting with anything tied to government or bureaucracy or top down idiocy thinking.
My application today is null and void because I do not have this piece of you know what “paper.” Teaching certificate, you know, a piece of paper that tells EVERYTHING about the character, life, experience, passion, vision, etc. of the person (NOT). I called the number, and the woman said it wasn’t her job description to write or determine, but the Department of Labor’s requirement. You can’t have much of a discussion with people on the other end of the bureaucratic line, even an HR at a Job Corps.
It is a conversation with a toad. Though a toad is so much more interesting than some person with their $70 K a year job, just holding on, just hanging on, just holding out.
I told her that I was living (in stable housing) 8 miles away from this Jobs Corps site, that I am seasoned beyond seasoned, and that the entire joke of education and these government jobs destroy people, youth that is. Can you imagine which “Oregon/Other State Teaching Certificate” holder might apply? This is the Oregon Coast, and housing is shit beyond shit. Feeling the strain of Don Quixote. Willy Lohman. Walter Middy. Raging against the system, the machine of idiocy.
Here my letter, attached to the application:
RE: Instructor at Angell Forest Service, US Forest Service
To Whom It May Concern:
I am applying for this position with great enthusiasm and interest. I have been teaching youth and adults since 1983, as a graduate teaching assistant working on a masters, in El Paso. I have taught in high school programs, at community colleges, at universities, in outdoor education programs, for youth in trouble, in gang prevention programs, in prisons, and more.
I have designed courses for youth, for refugees, for adults. I also have been a substitute teacher in Washington, Vancouver, Ridgefield and Bush Prairie, as well as in Spokane. I also substituted here in Lincoln County, and for the alternative school in Lincoln City.
I have two master’s degrees, I am a dive master (recreational scuba), a cetacean naturalist (whales), photographer, and communications/English/journalism teacher.
I have taught students in Texas, Spokane, Seattle, and Portland who were going into education for undergraduate degrees. I do not have a state K12 teaching certificate.
What a waste of a job interview, a potential candidate for this vital position. I live in Waldport, have deep ties to environmental communities, and I know youth in Job Corps programs. I had two youth clients in my role as independent living program case manager in Clackamas County with Lifeworks. I went to that Job Corps many times, and even facilitated several presentations with myself as moderator and a professional football player guest.
I have the passion, the training for trauma informed case managing, I have worked with adults with learning disabilities, and I have taught every manner of audience and in many venues in many states, and in two countries (Mexico and Guatemala). I am sure the Department of Labor can be creative here and look deeper at my background, my educational experience and my vision for working with sometimes troubled youth.
I am student and client centered, and understand many aspects of mental health, have a deep knowledge of ACES, and have worked with homeless youth and adults.
Sincerely, Paul Haeder
It is the defining lack of intelligence moment after moment in this bloody country. It is the reason why students have no interest in schooling, unless daddy and mommy have a cool $200,000 a year (at least) income, and all the toys, all the trips to this or that country, to this or that museum. Tutors, and private schools. The people who end up in government, in administrations, and in private business. These people are driven by stupidity and their own cobbled thinking. But they end up controlling the masses with their backward and mean as cuss thinking. They set the rules, and there is no deviation from those stupid rules and guidelines.
No interview with me to see what I might offer youth at the job corps. No deep analysis of what I am as a teacher, mentor, facilitator, inspiration, man, world traveler, thinker, and, well, the list is long. But these outfits do not want innovators and passion and smarts and outside the box thinkers, systems thinkers, deeply cultured and intersectional leftwing men.
Time and time again, the absurdity of this society, that is, western society, plays out in millions of examples DAILY. For me, who is trying to find some home for a few years, some place to do good, to help youth, to learn how young people navigate the world, I get this shit.
Has anyone seen how quickly education is going toward Zoom Doom? How many teachers are dropping out? How charter theft schools are colonizing the “education” field? How the next and the next bioweapon variant, Delta, what have you, will knee-jerk CDC and Biden and Blue Governors for more lockdowns?
These Department of Labor folk call this a GS-09 position. Recall, that retired colonels from the US Army, ending up in civil service, land at least on the GS-14 to start, and I’ve been a writing teacher in El Paso for the US Army, and worked with some numb nuts and numb ovaries at the GS-17 level. Double dipping (retirement from the welfare state military), pieces of human stain. Some of them did real estate calls from their government offices, at taxpayer expense.
No getting to first base here for me, no place to plead my case, no place to enter into a sound argument why a teacher with decades teaching doesn’t need that fucking teaching certificate.
This GS-09 job pay? $53,433 a year!
Not rolling in money, but imagine giving me that shot, for a few years, and, then, imagine the changes that these young people’s lives might experience. This is psycho, insane, breaking of the human spirit, killing of youthful genius. Look below:
Traditional education can be seen as sculptural in nature, individual destiny is written somewhere within the human being, awaiting dross to be removed before a true image shines forth. Schooling, on the other hand, seeks a way to make mind and character blank, so others may chisel the destiny thereon.
The net effect of holding children in confinement for twelve years without honor paid to the spirit is a compelling demonstration that the State considers the Western spiritual tradition dangerous, subversive. And of course it is. School is about creating loyalty to certain goals and habits, a vision of life, support for a class structure, an intricate system of human relationships cleverly designed to manufacture the continuous low level of discontent upon which mass production and finance rely. — John Taylor —Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
This all falls on deaf ears. I have friend after friend who just know I should get a few million bucks from some philanthropy to do what I can do and know what should be done —
Micro-housing for houseless and those disabled and aging in place.
Thirty acres or more with community buildings/kitchens/workshops.
Real community gardens/greenhouses.
College students in nursing, social work, other fields interning.
School youth (K12) coming to these communities for weekend intensive outdoor education encampments: catching salmon; smoking salmon; building teepees; constructing one tiny home on wheels in one three-day encampment; streaming live to other youth in other countries; building fires, making musical instruments, learning basket weaving; elders and others on site discussing the realities of the world from indigenous knowledge; discussing the failures of capitalism, and bringing youth to understand that creating their tribes (friends, elders, others) is the only way to survive the climate disaster, the coming of AI and robotics, and more.
Photo spread for the weekend; filmmaking; learning how to write to politicians, talk before city councils, and how to run for dog catcher or school board and WHY.
Canning and preserving.
So much more.
The reality is this sort of model (I have a much more detailed model or models, that is) is rubber meeting the road. Real learning, real deep thinking, real critique thinking skills, real debate skills, real ways to fight city hall, lobby and form community networks and organizing. In a natural setting. No rows of desks, prison bells, redneck vice principals and yawning PE instructors.
Instead, we get Dollar Tree education and drive-through shit for schools, which are indoctrination camps, macho camps, personality bashing camps, peer pressure dungeons, schools where the turnkeys are not the sharpest pencils in the box!
pulling out honky hankies made in Vietnam cotton expressly Bangladeshi seeds aplenty Bayer Boys Nazi’s aplenty white man’s burdens aplenty reorganizing shuffle got an idea aplenty mix-match genomes mishmash aplenty what if we cook up this idea with that aplenty fish gene a la tomato viral-bacterial-prion experiments aplenty, recipes white man’s burden aplenty if this polymer fluxed into this a great idea aplenty no bomb mixture goes wasted aplenty neurotoxin, defoliant fungicide, fumigant, rodentcide, smashing pests aplenty old time religion Ehyeh, Yahweh, YHVH, Adonai, El, Elohim, El Shaddai ,Tzur old testament Hebrew aplenty Kronos and Rhea fornicating aplenty: Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Hephaestus, Hades, Athena, Artemis, Apollo, Ares, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hermes aplenty Protogenoi, Gigantes, Titans, Olympians, Okeaniks, Khthonics stitching stories mishmash aplenty white man’s burden, slaves aplenty nucleotides nanoparticles EMF’s aplenty, new constellations satellite heavens aplenty ring of fiber optics aplenty, RFID’s, internet of nano things aplenty ideas of Soylent Green, aplenty, own nothing be happy aplenty thespians in white face aplenty dog-eat-dog aplenty, sucker born every second aplenty, smoke & mirrors flimflam aplenty, I got mine yours got nothing aplenty artificial intelligence accumulation aplenty point-zero-zero-zero one percent holding aplenty war is peace death is life lies are truth down is up propaganda is history aplenty
Paul Haeder, Author 