Your Money or Your Life
Can We Afford to Work for Peanuts?
I’m currently housesitting at a cabin in Humboldt County, not far from Orick, California. Back in 2015, I wrote this essay, which opens in Orick, at the site of The Giant Peanut. Shortly after arriving here this year, I heard that The Giant Peanut had been destroyed by a drunk driver last summer, which I considered to be disappointing news. Anyway, this essay was the first time I hit a bunch of themes that I’ve never stopped exploring since. It reads a bit dated to me, but I didn’t want to change anything. Enjoy!
[BTW, “Clarabelle” is Nikki Hill. For years, I used that name for her when including her in my essays or books.]
In Orick, California, there is a giant wooden peanut—over twelve feet long, six feet tall and weighing nine tons—carved from a single chunk of old-growth redwood. It was sculpted by local loggers in 1978, during the Carter administration, and brought to Washington, D.C., to protest the proposed expansion of Redwood National Park. Their message: “It may be peanuts to you, but it’s jobs to us.” To the loggers’ chagrin, the peanut was ignored and the Park expanded anyway, removing 48,000 acres from the reach of their saws. Now the rough-hewn sculpture sits unceremoniously at the south end of town, steadily wearing away under the effects of vandalism and the elements. No plaque tells its story; you have to know what you’re looking for.
In the Spring of 2014, my farming partner, Clarabelle, and I unexpectedly lost our lease on a piece of land we were planning to farm. This was a harsh blow that simultaneously took away our livelihood and made us homeless. Not knowing what else to do with our unexpected free time, we hit the road to lick our wounds in a 1985 Toyota van (aka a “lunar lander”). Both of us are genuine lovers of plants, animals and nature, so the trip was a pilgrimage of sorts and we hoped it would bring us some joy. But the condition of the environment being what it is, we also experienced many sad revelations.
Our travels took us on a zig-zaggy route from Port Townsend, Washington, in the north; to Bakersfield, California, in the south; to Austin, Nevada, in the east; and to—yes—Orick, California, in the west. I had researched the story of the giant peanut there, so we made a point of locating it when we passed through.
The sculpture, despite its size and besides its deterioration, is uninspiring. It embodies a short-sighted viewpoint one could call, “Jobs über alles”: jobs over trees, jobs over rivers, jobs over animals, jobs over human health. Jobs over everything, really. This viewpoint reigns supreme all along the conventional political spectrum in the USA, from right to left, from libertarian to liberal, from CEO to worker. Only a handful of radicals try to stand outside and take in the wider perspective. Over the years, many well-meaning thinkers and activists have genuinely sought to create a magic balance between jobs and the environment (and many political and corporate entities have claimed to provide one) but that hoped-for state has remained elusive because—as our travels showed us—it is an impossible dream. Capitalism’s imperative for “growth” is antithetical to the environment’s essential health.
Everywhere we journeyed in 2014, we saw the ravaged landscapes left behind by the pursuit of Jobs: clear-cut forests, drained wetlands, dammed rivers, trampled deserts and mined hills. But this destruction is not the whole story. What we also saw everywhere—during what turned out to be the hottest summer on record up to that point—was something global in scope: Climate Change.
The Forests
From the Olympic Peninsula in Washington to the southern Sierras in California, the forests of the Western USA have been relentlessly clear-cut, in many places repeatedly. Of the old growth that existed in these areas before the European invasion, less than 10% remains. For particular species, the number is even worse: Over 96% of the coastal Redwoods that existed in the mid-1800's are gone. As if this isn’t bad enough, the logging of old growth is not a legacy of the past; it continues to this day. The sections that remain are besieged islands, surrounded by plantations. Tree farms takes up most forested landscapes from horizon to horizon.
Clarabelle and I camped in a patch of old growth near Oregon’s Mt. Hood which I had first visited in 2002 when it was on the chopping block as a proposed timber sale. Forest defenders had built a tree-sit in one of the Douglas-Firs, 110 feet off the ground, and this action prevented logging while a legal battle was waged. In a story that's far too rare, the activists eventually won and the timber sale was canceled. The spot is one of my favorite places in the world. Just standing among a group of such big, tall, old trees is awe-inspiring. Because this particular site is off the beaten path and not marked on any tourist maps, it also has solitude.
But the entire canceled timber sale was small: only 167 acres, broken into eighteen mostly non-contiguous units. That’s just a quarter of a square mile. You can’t even get lost in such small pieces of forest. Just outside their well-defined boundaries are stumps and tiny trees. Though active logging has not happened in the area for at least 20 years, the areas of old growth are constantly decreasing in size anyway; because the edges of the groves are over-exposed, the wind takes out trees over time. In the decade I have been visiting, the ground in some areas has gone from mostly open to being an impenetrable clutter of enormous logs.
Driving through the forests of the West, most tourists don’t see past the “beauty strip,” also known as the “idiot strip.” This is the buffer of trees along the road that screens the clear-cuts from immediate view. But Clarabelle and I were looking more carefully and we couldn’t miss what was really going on: a vast patchwork of tree plantations, laid out with straight-lines and right-angles regardless of terrain. In each section, all the trees were of uniform size and shape, in contrast to natural forests where a mix of ages are present. Forty foot trees will be followed by saplings and then twenty-footers, each in their own well-defined parcel like fields of corn, alfalfa and soy. You don't have to visit the West to see how bad it is; look at satellite photos on your favorite mapping application and the dividing and conquering is clearly visible.
This is “forest management” as prescribed by the National Forest Service, which—as most people don’t know—is part of the US Department of Agriculture. The trees are being farmed the way any other crop is: by wiping out the native ecosystem with machinery and chemicals, breaking it up into countless individual parcels, and maintaining that state of fragmentation through continual disruption.
The Fields
Most people don’t think of Agriculture as being destructive to the environment. After all, compared to the concrete and glass jungle of the city, farm fields are green and open and look, well, “natural.” But this is hardly the case. Our trip took us through California’s Central Valley, from Red Bluff to Bakersfield, and frankly, I was shocked. The completeness with which the native landscape has been removed and is intensely managed for farming—leaving no room for anything else—was not something I had expected.
The orchards in particular were an impressive sight. On either side of the I-5 or the 99 (both of which run north-south through the Valley), ruler-straight rows of trees stretched into the distance, as far as the eye could see. Every tree was pruned to the same shape, to better allow machine-assisted harvesting. The ground below was absolutely clear of any vegetation. The only way to keep out weeds like that in an orchard is with herbicides; the trees' roots are too close to the surface to allow tilling under unwanted vegetation. This dead-zone under the trees extended to the fence along the freeway and on the smaller roads it came right up to the shoulder.
The fields of grape vines and row crops were kept up the same way, all in huge sterile blocks. For long stretches of highway, we would see only one species of plant at a time. We wondered what the native flora of the area might be but we had few clues. Could there be more diversity of plant life growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk in the city of Sacramento than in the fields of the Sacramento Valley? Maybe.
But it’s not just plants that have been eradicated from farmland; animals, too, are victims. Where are the herds of ungulates who grazed when these field were grasslands? The predators who hunted them? The birds and amphibians who thrived in the wetlands? The butterflies and insects? Rachel Carson warned us over fifty years ago that we were risking a “silent spring.” Now, a greater dearth of wild voices is nearly upon us, replaced by the growl of machinery, in a landscape nearly empty of wildlife. But the tourist exclaims, “I love driving out to wine country on the weekends!”
One could respond that, “We have to eat, don’t we?” and of course we do, but this style of agriculture is not the only one available to us. A study sponsored by the U.N. found that small-scale agriculture of mixed crops using no pesticides produces more food, acre-for-acre, than large-scale monoculture.1 Historically, the farming methods used by the original human inhabitants of the Americas were far less destructive and successfully fed many millions of people. (For a good survey of some of these, see Charles C. Mann's book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.)
Big corporate agriculture as exemplified in the Sacramento Valley (and in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, and across the entire Midwest), is used so extensively not because it is the best way to feed people but because it is the most profitable in the short-term. Not figured in are the costs of the long-term effects: topsoil degradation, aquifer depletion, air pollution, species extinction and Climate Change. Mainstream economists refers to such factors as “externalities.” “’External’ to what?” one might rightly ask. Only to the standard theoretical models. They are not external to the thing called “the Real World.”
The Mountains
In Kernville, near Bakersfield in southern California, we visited Clarabelle’s brother, a wildland firefighter stationed there that season. He and other military vets on the crew referred to the area as “Little Afghanistan” because the scrubby, treeless hills had a similar appearance.
We drove up into those hills looking for an out-of-the-way place to camp and found one at the opening of a water-cut ravine on a spur road at about 6000’ elevation. A small but vigorous stream flowed noisily over smooth rocks, under fallen logs and among vehicle-sized boulders, alternately cascading down waterfalls and collecting in pools. A few trees, mostly pines and a few cedars, huddled at the mouth of the ravine, sheltering a small sandy bank. Quite the lovely spot, but marred by one thing: cow manure. There were patties all along the bank and in the watercourse itself. So we couldn’t drink from that stream, and even filtering it seemed sketchy.
Most people in this day and age have never had the experience of drinking directly from a stream, so they don’t know what they’re missing. It is not merely a pleasure, but also a re-enactment of a time when we all lived direct-from-the-source, in intimate inter-connection with our environment. Today, our relationship with nature is us-vs.-them. Always drinking treated water that is piped or bottled must affect us, and not for the better. I can tell when I'm kneeling at a stream bank, bringing my cupped hands to my mouth, that the liquid is not just different for lacking chlorine; more than my physical thirst is quenched when I drink it.
But you can’t drink from a watercourse that’s got cow shit it in, and that’s what you’ll find across most of the West, where ranching rules. Cattle are officially grazed on 70% of public lands in the seven western-most states, though the actual number is higher given that illegal grazing is rampant. Cows tend to gravitate to the wettest places they can find, but in these arid places, riparian zones (areas with running water and wetlands) are a very small part of the landscape, making up less than 3% of the Great Basin, for example. As a result, the damage disproportionally affects places that are rare as well as delicate. Cows and sheep are quite harmful because their behavior is alien; no analogous species existed previous to their introduction, so the flora and fauna are not adapted to deal with them. Habitat destruction results, threatening many native species, including traditional food plants of the Indians.
Ranching and the wild don't mix: fences disrupt migration patterns of wild animals; native predators such as the wolf are hunted nearly to extinction; water is diverted (and often wasted) leaving less for creatures who depend on it. These effects and more are happening over literally millions of acres, but the damage is invisible to most people. Who knows what a healthy sage-brush steppe ecosystem looks like anymore? Ungrazed examples are as rare as old-growth.
Climate Change
Scientists say it’s tricky to attribute a particular weather event like a drought or “super storm” to Climate Change. But an excellent way of understanding the issue appeared in a 2012 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and has since become well-known: The Baseball Player on Steroids analogy.2 Imagine that a baseball player starts taking steroids and hits 20% more home runs that season than the previous one. While it might be impossible to know if any one particular home run can be attributed to his steroid use, the probability of his hitting home runs has increased by 20%. Climate Change works in a similar way. The global rise in temperature is analogous to the baseball player’s steroid use and has increased the probability of extreme weather events. Though attributing particular events to Climate Change might be impossible, their probability has increased.
It is with that caveat that I mention some of the extremes and abnormalities that we witnessed in 2014:
● Smoke was omnipresent in the skies of southern Oregon, from Ashland to Grants Pass to Cave Junction and all places between, high and low, all summer long. Sunsets were stained red, moonrises orange. The “Fire Danger” signs posted at the entrances of the National Forests were all set to “EXTREME.”
● I started this essay in October while sitting on the sandy shore of the Kern River in southern California. The Kern is well-known as a whitewater rafting destination but after a decade of drought the flow was too low. A local camper familiar with the area told us our tent-site near the riverside had always been underwater in previous years.
● In the same area, bear sightings close to town and along the roads have increased. Searching for food, they are coming down from the drought-stricken hills. This behavior puts them in increased danger of being hit by cars or attacked by humans.
● The city water in Harbor, Oregon, was unsafe to drink when we visited in September because of salt contamination. With the lack of rain, the level of the river had dropped and become inundated by the sea at its lower reaches where the intake pipes were located. Water trucks were providing free fill-ups for people who brought their own containers. Moving the intake pipes would be a costly operation and the community hoped to avoid that.
● Nearly every lake we saw was low, and some, like Lake Shasta, were drastically so. We observed more boat docks stranded on dry land than standing in the water.
● Camping at Lake Pillsbury in October, we were entranced by the eerie vocalizations of the Elk. The bellows of the bulls and the squeaks of the cows sound almost like whale song. But the park ranger told us it was unheard of for the bulls to still be in the area that late in the year.
Fragmented forests on fire from a climate over-heated by cutting too many trees; rivers and lakes drying up; animals changing their habits; whole ecosystems withering and losing their resiliency: Climate Change is here, but not many people seem to be noticing it yet.
Government, Media & Lies
We picked up the local newspapers as we passed through human habitations between camping spots. The Internet Age has not made newspapers entirely irrelevant yet, especially in small cities and rural areas, and we were able to glean some flavor of the character and priorities of a locale from these publications. Every paper in Oregon and northern California was prominently covering the summer’s wildfires, usually front-page and above the fold, enumerating the acres engulfed, total structures burned and percentage contained. In grocery check-out lines and at gas stations, the fires and the weather were the prime topics of conversation (usually with a wish for rain).
But only rarely, in print or in person, did anyone make the connection between the fires and Climate Change. Variations on the same old “jobs” refrain were much more common in the media. Consider this pair of articles from the Sept. 20th edition of Curry [County, Oregon] Coastal Pilot, both penned by staff writer, Jane Stebbins:
Senate to decide forest bill
For the third time, the US House of Representatives has approved a forestry bill penned by Rep Greg Walden (R), crafted to create jobs in the woods, improve forest health, reduce the risk of wildfire and generate funds for local communities….
[Claimed Walden:] “The legislation in this package… would allow us to put people back to work in the woods, reduce fires and produce revenue for schools, teachers, sheriffs and sheriffs’ deputies, search and rescue—for all these basic services that matter in rural communities across the West.”
…HR 1526 could generate as much as $90 million a year for struggling rural Oregon counties by reopening the forest to logging….
“You want to do something about poverty? Create a job!” Walden told the House. “You want to get America back on track? …We’ll create jobs, generate revenue, and have positive cash flow in this country for once. It doesn’t have to be this way.” [my emphasis]
Is Walden lying or is he sincerely misled? I don't know, but his final words are definitely true. It doesn’t have to be this way. And if Oregonians gave an honest look at their state, they would see that it's no longer rich in resources.
Stebbins had a related article on the same page of that day’s paper:
County eyeing national lands issue
Curry County commissioners are keeping an eye on Arizona and Utah, where legislators are trying to get the federal government to relinquish national lands to the states for use as they see fit.
The issue has been increasingly in the news since the national government has ended federal timber payments to half of Oregon’s counties and other counties throughout the West realize the vast majority of the lands aren’t paying for themselves [my emphasis].
…[In Utah], the BLM is set to auction off 27 parcels totaling 29,400 acres near the Green and White rivers for oil and gas leasing. Recently, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance filed an official protest in an effort to halt the lease operation on grounds that the land possesses wilderness qualities.
But locking up more land as protected wilderness means less control the state has over those lands—and less money it might be able to garner otherwise…
In its heyday, Curry County received more than $6 million from the federal government—funds it paid in lieu of a percentage of tax revenue the county would have garnered had environmentalists not shut down the forests to timber harvests in the 1990s.
The veracity of Stebbins’ characterization of the 1990s as a time when the forests were “shut down” to timber harvests is contrary to the facts. Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan and the notorious “Salvage Rider” put thousands of acres of old growth trees on the chopping block, surpassing the amounts of his Republican predecessors, Reagan and Bush I. Naturally, these policies provoked an outburst of eco-defense activities, including tree-sitting, but for every place that was saved, many were not.
More to the point is the fact that we can no longer afford the ridiculous viewpoint that the Earth needs to “pay for itself”; that it is a collection of resources from which to “garner” (as Stebbins said twice) money. Such a viewpoint is only too obviously rooted in the “dominion” over all living things granted to Adam, and hence all of humanity in the Book of Genesis. Contemporary adherents of the Abrahamic religions who revere that book—Jews, Christians and Muslims alike—need to recast their dogmas and help stop ecological destruction. If they don't, all their temples, churches and mosques will stand empty on a planet that's become inhospitable for human habitation.
Is such a possibility a shrill, Chicken Little exaggeration? Not at all. A report by the Global Carbon Project demonstrated that carbon emissions in 2013 continued to increase at a “worst-case scenario” rate. This is a rate of emissions that will have devastating effects to life on the planet according to the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is considered overly conservative to many in Climate Change circles. As stated on the long-running climate blog, “robertscribbler”: “At the current pace of emission, it will take less than 30 years to lock in a 550ppm CO2 equivalent value—enough to melt all the ice on Earth and raise temperatures by between 5 and 6 degrees Celsius [9-10.8 degrees F] long term.”3
That's a planet that humans can not survive on.
Not just small-town newspapers are missing the point, of course. Nearly every outlet in the entire US American media establishment is guilty, almost all of the time. In Ashland, we picked up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle, whose Sept. 24th edition had a front-page article discussing “renewable” energy:
State’s deserts seen as sites for huge new plants
Industrial-scale solar, wind and geothermal projects could be built within a few miles of national parks in the California desert as part of the Obama and Brown administrations’ efforts to combat Climate Change, under a mammoth plan released by federal and state officials Tuesday.
Construction of the plants, many of which could cover several square miles, would drastically alter desert vistas near national parks and wilderness areas, according to a draft [of the plan]…. But that would be offset by the climate-change benefits of allowing large solar and wind energy plants on more than 2 million acres of the Mojave Desert, the report said.
Energy plants covering several square miles are obviously going to affect more than “vistas.” Wind farms are notorious for killing birds by the thousands. Construction of anything that large is going to make mincemeat of the creatures living there, whether plant, animal, or other. The same article mentions the 5.4 square mile Ivanpah solar plant in the Mojave Desert, where “[m]any more desert tortoises were discovered on the site than were anticipated, and problems have emerged with birds being incinerated when they fly in the path of the concentrated solar radiation.” Birds being incinerated? That’s horrific! This is how we are going to mitigate Climate Change? By running heedless over any and every other living thing?
The article quoted one person who is calling bullshit on the plan:
Kevin Emmerich, a former Death Valley park ranger who founded the watchdog site Basin and Range Watch, said officials are “calling this a conservation plan while they are planning on fragmenting up the large remaining sections of the California desert into ‘development zones,’ which ultimately translates to a net loss of desert habitat.”
Emmerich said planners have refused to consider roof-top solar and other smaller-scale projects that “would actually produce energy at the point of use without transmission loss and save habitat.”
Kudos to Emmerich! However, the SF Chronicle article ends with a fundamentally dangerous lie:
But Mark Tholke, a vice president at EDF Renewables, an energy company that has built plants in the desert, said rooftop solar is inadequate to address Climate Change.
“Many of us feel a real urgency to get as many (plants) up and running as possible, as soon as possible,” Tholke said. To slow Climate Change, he said, “we need to do a lot more than rooftop and distributed generation. We need cost-effective, large projects.”
False. In actuality, what “we need to do” to slow Climate Change is a lot less of everything. We must re-localize our means of living, not just for energy, but also food, shelter and medicine. That's a huge project and is enough to keep everyone busy.
We Must Choose the Environment over Jobs
The days of the massive power plant, the 2500 mile salad, the factory-produced pharmaceutical, and the car-centric megalopolis must end. So, too, must go that holiest of holy grails: “Jobs.” Jobs provide people with money; the more money circulates, the more the economy grows; the more the economy grows, the more destruction is meted out on the Earth. Yet, favoring a raise in the minimum wage is considered “progressive.” Typical was this article, from the Mail Tribune (“Southern Oregon’s News Source,” based in Jackson County), Sept. 22, reprinted from Dallas Morning News under heading of “Other Views”:
Congress should pass wage hike
A vibrant economy requires consumers who are able to earn enough to provide for their families as well as employers who are able to make a profit... The Economic Policy Institute estimates that phasing in a federal minimum wage hike would bolster the income of 27.8 million workers, expand GDP by about $22 billion, add 85,000 jobs and most benefit adults struggling in $8 and $9 hourly jobs, who also would probably receive a wage hike. About 75% of Americans, including 58% of Republicans, support increasing the federal minimum wage.
The folks in Orick had it wrong in the Carter administration, and supporters of a higher minimum wage have it wrong now too. We can’t even afford to “work for peanuts”—that’s paying too much. Instead, business-as-usual, techno-industrial society as we know it must be brought to a screeching halt. No more growth. No more debt. No more jobs. It's not that we don't make enough money; it's that life is monetized and it shouldn't be.
The cliché threat of the mugger sums up perfectly the choice before us in these times: “Your money or your life.”
March 16, 2015
The fact that this was written ten years ago is terrifying.
Thanks for spreading the good word about this. ❤️