Archive for ecology

Foolishness and Generosity in Gorkhi Terelj, Mongolia

Posted in Travelogue with tags , , , , , , , , , , , on June 14, 2010 by bawehali

The search of internet access, Giny the generous horseback expedition leader, and John the self-contradicting ass from Montana

I’ve been in China for almost three months now, and had to leave the country in order to satisfy the requirements of my visa. My partner F. and I chose to go to Mongolia because of its wild, largely undeveloped openness. For nature. After the extreme urban clamor of China, this sounded perfect.

We flew into Ulaanbaatar (UB), the capital, from Beijing, and spent two days there before heading to the countryside. I was told by some long-timers that UB used to be attractive when the country was still under Soviet “administration,” but it’s hard to believe. Today, it’s a dusty and vegetation-free city made of large Soviet-style concrete block architecture with paint peeling off from the extreme cold of UB’s winters. Tourist-focused shops, of which there are many, hawk camel, yak or wool knick-knacks and sweaters alongside various products, from vodka to war helmets, commemorating Chingiss Khaan. (If you spear your tourist bait on the hook of Khaan and the “Great Mongol Empire,” the largest the world has ever seen, it occurs to me that truthfulness might dictate you also have a slogan for Mongolia that goes something along the lines of, “Declining for 700 years and counting!”) Traffic in UB is horrid, and the roads are in various states of decay. Air quality is exceedingly poor, owing to two main factors: the widespread use of coal as fuel for heating, and the unplanned growth of a city built for 300,000 swelling to over a million in too short a time. Mongolia only has about 2.5 million people, and over a million live in UB.

We were happy to head for the countryside. Our host and guide, Bogi, drove us several hours to the northeast, and found a “nomadic” herding family for us to stay with for two weeks. They had a ger (yurt) and agreed to prepare two meals a day for us. Perfect.

I had imagined epic blue skies, and these were definitely present, as the photos in this post attest, but in June, there’s an equal amount of rain and high winds in northeastern Mongolia. After a beautiful first day, it poured for the next three, and I was going a bit stir crazy from sitting in our ger without electricity or any sitting positions comfortable enough for me to write in.

I decided to head out on a day of walking, hoping to find internet access at one of the many camps or couple of restaurants I’d seen when Bogi had driven us in. I wanted to check and write email, and I desperately wanted to know how Game 1 of the NBA Finals, pitting the Lakers against the Celtics, had turned out. I find my love of professional basketball almost completely indefensible, but since I admitted to myself my powerlessness over its hold on me, I’ve been able to accept my shame and more fully enjoy my love of millionaires bouncing an inflated ball around a hardwood floor. For me, there’s majesty in the game of basketball, because at its highest level, it’s a consummate team game, where communication and intelligence must match extraordinary athleticism. And in 2010, the Los Angeles Lakers are a simply gorgeous embodiment of this balance, playing a team in the Celtics who also exemplify the finer aspects of the game. I love playing more than watching, but after breaking my ankle last year, my playings days may be over…

But I digress.

The massive scale of grass floodplains and thin riverine forests here in northeastern Mongolia make them more suited to horseback riding than to walking, but I was a happy speck moving slowly through dung-maculated valleys full of the bleached skulls, spines and other stray bone bits of departed animals.

I walked for hours, sometimes joined by wary-then-playful dogs, passing alongside grazing horses, cattle, and several vomits of dandelion-munching yak (yes, that’s one of the suggested ways to refer to them, and I personally observed their great love of dandelions). Yak are improbable-looking creatures. I feel somewhere in my childhood media consumption that a muppet or an animal from another planet must have been based on the yak, with its wildly variant coat, cropped close to the body in some places and flowing like disheveled mane in others.

When you look at a picture of the landscape of an area like this, you can’t really see the impressively large volume of dung that occupies every slightly level, even faintly vegetative spot of earth. I feel that I have seen more varieties of dung, in more varied states of decay than I could have imagined here in Mongolia, despite having spent some time around ranches and farms when I was growing up.


This is the Gorkhi Terelj National Park, in the Khan Khentee Protected Area, homeland of Chingiss Khan, in northeastern Mongolia. The nomadic herding families here, so heavily marketed as one of the precious cultural treasures of Mongolia, are, in fact, commercial operators who must hold commercial licenses in order to be in this area and who can no longer exist in their traditional lifestyle without the annual infusion of money they get from tourists between the months of June and August. My host family does herd cows and horses, but they are here, in this particular area, for the tourist money. They’re charging 30,000 Mongolia tugriks (MNT), or around 21 USD, for a ger and two prepared meals a day, which thus far consist mostly of rice, fried dough in various forms, and charred animal.

A copper miner on his way from Mongolia to Kazakhstan talked on the plane about how the meat-heavy diet of the Mongols was one of the keys to their conquest of the Chinese back around the 13th century. The Chinese ate rice and a lot of carbohydrates, and therefore had to eat once or twice a day, whereas the high-protein meat-based diet of the Mongols meant they could eat and then go several days before having to eat again.

It’s hard to grow vegetables in Mongolia, primarily because of the short growing season and also, it should be said, because of the herding and not infrequent overgrazing of ruminant animals, which removes quite a lot of ground cover and leaves what fertile soil (loess) does exist to dry out and blow away. It’s very dusty here. It’s been a dry and hot season so far, but it’s easy to see the plains and hills that have been grazed from green to brown where the animals have been set loose. (Below is one of the greener areas to be found in Terelj).

There are also, according to several locals I encountered on my day’s odyssey, lots of corrupt businessmen, mostly from UB, who bribe park officials to allow them to graze their animals in the national park, and my hunch is that if this is true, these businessmen are grazing animals on a far larger scale than nomad families or everyday herders, and thus they may be more to blame for the overgrazing.

Herding in Mongolia is brutally hard work that puts herders and the animals at the mercy of some of the most extreme conditions possible outside of Siberia or the Arctic. Wolves frequently prey on baby horses and other animals (the mother of a baby horse belonging to our host family was taken by a wolf just two nights ago), and temperatures routinely stay below -30 degrees Fahrenheit for months on end. Once or twice a decade on average a dzud occurs and kills millions of animals. A dzud, it was explained to me, is a certain set of weather conditions that turns the top layer of snow that accumulates in winter into an impenetrable sheet of ice. I was surprised to learn that most of the horses, cattle and yak in Mongolia are left outside to forage as best they can in winter. I did not know they could survive in such extreme cold (in California, I’ve seen horses with blankets draped over them when it’s in the 40s). But in Mongolia they can, unless a dzud occurs, and then they cannot find anything to eat and they starve and freeze to death. In 2008, around 8 million animals died.

I’d walked around 8km, pleased that my surgically-repaired ankle was issuing only minor complaint, and stopped into two camps to ask after internet access when a woman in a white Honda slowed on the road in such a way that made me think she was slowing to offer me a ride. But when I got closer to the road, she appeared only to be checking her cellphone, so I began walking back down into the valley before she honked and waved out the window and I walked back up again. In Mongolia, most of the steering wheels in cars are on the right, but hers was on the left, so I got in on the right side, smiled, and she began speaking to me in Mongolian which I, of course, had no comprehension of at all. I pointed forward, down the road, and said: Internet? She didn’t understand me until I said it with a trilled “Russian” “r,” “Inter-r-r-net?” Ah! She understood. I tried to explain, slowly, using my hands, that down the road, there was a hotel – hotel?, yes she knew hotel – and that I thought there was inter-r-r-net there.

She began driving. With our severe communication gap, I wondered where this might lead. Within fifteen minutes of driving, I calculated that I would be too far from our ger to walk back before nightfall, and I wasn’t sure if she understood what I was seeking.

“Ulaanbaatar-r-r?” she said? No, I did not want to go all the way to UB, where I would likely be stuck for the evening, with no way to let F. know that I was fine and not to worry. We drove and then drove some more. I learned that her “English” name was Giny, and that she had a daughter, 15, a son, 13, and no husband. She handed me a thick presentation book for a Mongolian Horse Expedition Outfitter, and by pointing and smiling, explained that this was her business. One of the pictures showed her smiling astride a lovely chestnut horse with a thick mane. She pointed to other pictures in the book, and said “Kree-un.” After she said it again, I understood she meant “Korean.” Then she pointed to her mouth and said “Mongol, Kree-un. No English.”

Giny was wearing a snug-fitting plush pink top, and unlike most of the women I’d seen out here so far, her skin was smooth and clear – her hands looked well-moisturized and not nearly as rough as I’d expect on a woman who rode or trained horses for a living. I learned that she was 38, and had a moment of small shock when I realized I was older than she was. I’m not accustomed to seeing myself as older than people with 15-year-old children, even though if I do the math, that’s not terribly noteworthy, and this is clearly a case of my not updating my own self-image to match my actual age of 39. If I make it to 60, I bet I’ll still be having moments of mild displeasure or shock when someone refers to me as “sir” or “mister.”

Giny called her daughter on the phone, then handed it over to me. Her daughter spoke some English, and I explained to her what I was looking for. Then she spoke to Giny. Then Giny drove on, ever farther from where I was staying, giving no sign I could recognize that she had hope we’d find any internet.

I was beginning to feel very foolish for having been so keen to find internet access when I was in the middle of a national park in Mongolia. Still, I was enjoying this adventure as well, and I had a feeling that Giny would not strand me in the middle of nowhere. I thought perhaps I’d be spending the night in the home of strangers, and the idea held some appeal.

Giny pulled over. She looked at me. She said something in Mongolian. I asked her in English if we should go back, pointing back the way we’d come. We stared at each other for a moment, and I thought that Giny was really quite lovely.Then we both laughed and she turned around and we headed back. She made a few more calls. After the third one, she let out a celebratory sound and said “internet!”

We drove back, past the spot where she’d picked me up, and I thought that it was remarkable that this lovely stranger had now driven 50 or 60km to help me. We came to a sign that said “Ayanchin,” and she made a turn and we drove up a long dirt road, where I eventually saw a large white 3-story Western ranch-style house, about half a dozen white gers, and a three-story geodesic dome. This would have been noteworthy under any circumstances, but it was particularly unexpected in a place predominated by blocky Soviet-era concrete structures and the soft circular rising shapes of canvas and wool felt gers.

When she pulled up in the driveway, she looked for her business card for maybe ten minutes, then finally just wrote down all of her information for me. I gave her mine in return. She refused my offer of gas money or compensation of any kind. I hoped I might see Giny again, and mentally resolved to look her up for a horseback riding excursion.

The place she’d dropped me off at looked like someone’s home. I walked up to it. The door was open, and there was a mat that said Welcome. I stepped inside and a woman who looked Mongolian walked by. I said hello, feeling awkward at having stepped into someone’s home, and she pointed behind her, to my left. The dining room was, in fact, a restaurant, with six tables and a well-stocked bar at one end.

As I came in, I asked the bartender if they had internet, and he said they did, so I took a seat by a window, plugged in, and surveyed the menu.

Traveling sometimes makes me exaggeratedly appreciative of some simple comforts of home. I am embarrassed by this fact, especially when I’m in a place full of ex-pats, as I often am in China. For example: In Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, where I’ve been based during my travels in East Asia, I sometimes find myself at an Irish-themed ex-pat joint called The Shamrock, with an all-Chinese staff wearing green shamrock-festooned vests and serving poor fascimiles of Irish and American food at inflated prices. I always feel a sense of embarrassment at being in the place, and I like to hunker down in the least visible corner and enjoy my precious internet connection (which all the ex-pat places have, in contradistinction to most Chinese places). I try to be enormously polite, almost to the point where I’m conveying a kind of apology.

Still, here in Gorkhi Terelj, I was thrilled to read a menu in English, and even more thrilled to see that it listed salad. Two different kinds of salad! With lots of vegetables listed! Oh happy day! I ordered one with beets and carrots and cabbage and cucumbers, along with a beer, and I opened up my netbook and deepened my happiness even further when I read that the Lakers had taken the first game of the series with a display of serious defensive grit and superb offensive execution. I sat there, enjoying my salad and beer, reading about basketball and checking my email and writing down and emailing to myself as backup as many details about Mongolia as I could remember.

On my way out, I saw a very tall, white man smoking a cigar and folding his arms over the top of his big belly while he surveyed three Mongolian workers who were hammering strips of tar paper onto the plywood roof of a new structure that looked like it was shaping up to be a garage. He was eager to talk.

“John,” he said, extending a big hand. He had a predictably firm-to-the-point-pf-painful grip. I have large hands and, as a holdover of my upbring in the Midwest, I know to look men like this directly in the eye, and to shake their hands with a firm grip, as if I might take pleasure in crushing someone’s knucklebones. He told me about this thing they were building – “they don’t know a damn thing about this kind of construction, but I just have my way of doing things and I tell ‘em how it’s gonna be done,” puff puff…

I’ve encountered lots of men like John. So I wasn’t surprised when a great deal of his conversation turned to a reflexive and all-encompassing hatred and distrust of government.

The government in Mongolia, John said, was corrupt, and they “stole everything.”

This made me think of an article I’d read a few days earlier, in the English language Mongolian Messenger. The title of the article was “Officials Defend False Income Declarations,” and here is one choice paragraph from the article, detailing a state servant who made false statements about income and property:

“The Anti-Corruption Agency found that Dornod Aimag’s Governor Ts. Janlav did not declare his private house where he now lives, four apartments which are owned by his family members, building with purpose for small-enterprise, [MNT]50 million income from selling his two-story private house, as well as 23 percent of shares of Dornod Company that is owned by his wife… MIAT Executive Director R.Bat-Erdene did not declare shares of Araknids Company, which is owned by his wife, a Nissan Murano car which was purchased for USD 24,000, a two-story private summer house and USD 6,500 in income from selling his Mercedes Benz C-180.”

John, who’d said that this “lodge” was really just his way to have a second home in the country, claimed corrupt officials were “scamming this ‘nature preserve,’” and getting free grazing for their livestock out of it. In UB (which he pronounced so it would rhyme with Darth Vader or masturbator), he snorted, the government was getting aid money from the U.S. to build the roads. In one breath, he disparaged the Mongolians in this area of Terelj for not paying taxes, but in the next breath, he was praising the Chinese economy for being great because “they don’t pay any taxes!” In similar fashion, after pointing to overgrazed hills in the distance and saying the government ought to just get rid of all these herders, because they didn’t “know shit about the land,” he told me he’d been the first to put up a fence around here, and that people hadn’t liked it. Mongolia proudly advertises in much of its tourist literature that it’s a land without fences, where people can ride and walk freely wherever they like. Then he said since he’d done it, others in the area had started putting up their own fences, and that it just “broke his heart.”

As he said this, I imagined John’s heart as a giant ham, beating away greasily somewhere above his belly.

At one point, John also talked about “squatters” all over the natural park. “Squatters?” I said. “Yeah, they say they’re indigenous and have a right to it,” then snorted. “There aren’t any indigenous people almost anywhere in the world. Just go back far enough and you’ll see what I mean.”

I changed the subject and asked him about mining. Mining’s the biggest business in Mongolia. He said yes, that was the big business, but that it still wasn’t shit. I mentioned that it seemed like a big deal, and he said “Listen, you know how much coal they mined in all of Mongolia last year? 20 million tons [actually more like 5 million metric tons]. They don’t know real mining here. They took 240 million tons out of Colorado last year [actually more like 32 million tons]. You can’t even find a mine here – just try!” Mongolia is the least densely populated country in the world, and it’s hard to find anything if you don’t know where it is beforehand, but this hardly seemed worth pointing out to John.

I mentioned that a guy from Nova Scotia I’d chatted up on the flight into UB worked for a Canadian mining company setting up a camp in the Gobi, and that he’d said they were spending $40 million this year alone on the operation. John said “Oh, that one’s not going to be up and running for 5, 6 years. Peanuts. Mostly metallurgical grade coal they make steel from.”

I said the guy from Nova Scotia had told me it was a copper mine.

“Yeah, yeah, they’re all over the place,” he said as he threw the butt of his spent cigar on the gravel driveway.

I commented on how surprising it was to me that a country as sparsely populated as Mongolia had such a high literacy rate. I’d read and heard from several people that the rate was around 98%, and I’m pretty sure that exceeds the literacy rate in the U.S.

“Oh yeah, 100%. You can’t find a Mongolian who can’t read,” John said nodding vigorously. “But that’s all changing. The Soviets used to run the school system, and they were–” he brought one hand down in a chopping motion across his other forearm. “Serious.The Mongolians learn their old language and their new one, just for starters” he continued, “then a lot of ‘em also known Russian, Japanese, Korean…”

I said that I was amazed by it, and impressed at how many Mongolians I’d met who spoke four or more languages.

“Yeah, my wife speaks four languages. But I’m lucky. I been here ten years and haven’t learned any Mongolian.” John said this with pride as three of the 450 Mongolians he claimed to employ labored away on his new garage.

John had also told me that he never had foreigners at his place, except for a few Chinese, who “always want to buy the place.” At just that moment, a dark late-model 4-wheel drive Nissan Murano, one of the vehicles of choice for police and Communist Party officials in China and, from what I’d observed in UB, for officials in Mongolia as well, pulled up and stopped. It was too clean for this environment, with an elegant looking Mongolian woman behind the wheel and an all-business looking white guy in the passenger seat, who rolled down his window. He had a gray contemptuous look on his face that reminded me of the fish-hook sneer Dick Cheney has, owing to nerve damage from one of his many heart attacks. The gray man and John stared at each other for a full ten seconds or so. The woman in the driver’s seat looked mildly alarmed. John finally said “What’s the good word?” to which the gray man replied flatly, “This the place? You got the works, the house, the dome, some yurts?”

I took that moment to say good-bye, thanking John for his time and saying I had to hurry back. He waved feebly as I departed, preoccupied, like the wave was merely an afterthought.

The hike home was long but rewarding, despite the blisters forming on my feet. Knowing my route, I went farther from the road this time, through alpine tundra and over great loping hills with statuesque stone outcroppings at their peaks. Marmots occasionally emerged from holes in the ground and darted away, but I saw no wolves or roedeer, which are said to be common in the area. I read that brown bears, also once common to the area, are on the decline in the Khan Khentee, mostly because of a Chinese and Korean-driven thirst for bear gall bladders, which fetch upwards of $300 USD per, and are used in Asian medicine.

Many birds, including Daurian redstarts, Siberian blue robins and black kites flew near to me along my way, and perched on rocks and branches near enough to reach with my hand, looking inquisitive and unafraid. I also saw maybe a half dozen Steppe eagles and hawks, but they kept their distance. After rolling hills, and with the sun sinking perilously low on the horizon, I descended through birch and larch forest and picked my way through moist lowlands, where tufts of earth had to be stepped on like lilypads to avoid sinking into what I amused myself by thinking of as “the grimpen myre,” where some prehistoric Mongolian version of the Hound of the Baskervilles might be waiting to scare me to death. There were certainly piles of dung large enough to plausibly have exited from a prehistoric beast.

I arrived just before night fell, and my host family brought hot milk tea and stoked the wood stove in the ger for the night. I sat drinking tea while I watched the last blue of the sky fade in the circular hole in the center of the ceiling.

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The Definition of Scary: China’s Cancer Villages (Aizheng Cun)

Posted in Hyper-Essay, Review & Write-Up with tags , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2010 by bawehali

I woke up this morning and considered going outside. Lately, I have been avoiding the outdoors here in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, because I fear the industrial haze and the cough I seem to develop whenever I spend more than a few hours out and about. There are ominous smells here: acrid metallic clouds of gas with something like formaldehyde that have me breathing as shallowly as I possibly can when I pass through them.

Despite this, last night I was reconsidering my aversion to the Chinese outdoors, wondering if I was being paranoid. Sunlight is still moderately healthy. And after all, I drink heavily filtered water, wash any fresh vegetables I buy several times (they recommend using diluted bleach as well, but I refuse to trade one poison for another), and I live, sleep, run and work out in a heavily insulated building with industrial grade air filters going 24/7.

I also drink lots of coffee, which I seem to remember reading somewhere renders me all but impervious to cancer.

But then, after my coffee, any anticarcinogenic confidence I had evaporated when I sat down to check email and a friend of mine had forwarded on a ghastly article entitled “Made in China: Cancer Villages,” by Lee Liu, from Environment Magazine. The article goes into great depth about China’s unprecedented levels of cancer and the “grow first, clean up later” approach to industrial development driven largely by the forces of economic globalization.

The article itself is superb: well-written, clear, and thoroughly researched. Worth reading. Here are some highlights:

Various forms of Chinese media and Internet sources have reported a total of 459 cancer villages across 29 of China’s 31 provincial units, the two exceptions being Tibet and Qinghai.

In the past 30 years, death rate due to lung cancer increased by 465 percent and has become the most deadly cancer in China. Cancer, the number one cause of death in urban China, accounts for 25% of deaths.

Liu’s report continues:

Water contamination from industrial pollution is believed to be the main cause of cancer villages, and there is a close relationship between China’s major rivers and the location of cancer counties.

Because Chinese media and academic journals are governmentally controlled, their reports tend to be conservative about politically sensitive and negative subjects. However, there have been no reports disputing the cancer-village phenomenon.

The lack of reports disputing the cancer catastrophe is genuinely surprising to me, but this does not mean that the press freely reports on these matters, or that citizens have much power to do much about it:

Local protests are sometimes organized and run by village leaders, mostly likely the village’s secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) branch committee, the village’s top leader. Dou Xian, CCP secretary of the Douzhuangzi Village, led a six-village (three from Tianjin and three from neighboring Hebei) alliance to fight against polluters, many of which were later shut down by the government. For telling the media how many villagers had died of cancer, Wang Linsheng in Shenqui, Henan, was fired as Huangmengying village’s CCP secretary and was accused of “leaking State secrets,” a very serious crime in China.

China appears to have produced more cancer clusters in a few decades than the rest of the world ever has. Liu’s report cites several major factors for this: A “grow first, clean up later” approach to development, enormous rural-urban disparities that leave extremely poor farmers and others in the countryside to drink straight from highly polluted rivers, a lack of free media and democratic ability (to publicize the issue and, then, to protest and militate for change), lax environmental laws and corrupt courts that rarely punish polluters, and — this the most relevant for people outside of China — economic globalization:

Industrial pollution would have been less severe if China were not the world leading manufacturer of chemical products. Globalization may also be related to the income and consumption disparity. China’s suddenly wealthy are inspired by the lifestyle of the wealthiest people in the world. High-end luxurious goods are readily available, and their shopping habits and changing tastes are reshaping global trade flows of flashy cars, gold, elephant ivory, and dried seahorses. Availability of those goods and the possibility of migration to a more developed country push for a never-ending demand for wealth, and China’s elite are firm supporters of the “grow first” development policy.

Liu’s fine report stays properly focused on China, but it’s worth noting just how interconnected the planet’s systems are. You cannot have dozens of Grade-5 toxic rivers flowing through a country this large without that poison leaking into the system, seeping throughout the oceans and all marine life, metasticizing through the atmosphere, and permeating simply everything. My point in saying that is not to point an alarmist finger at big bad China, but to underscore how we are all, for better or worse, in this together. We in the Western world honed and perfected the industrial processes most to blame, and we erected the market forces, system of economic globalization, and blind worship of materialism now very much driving the Chinese industrial cancer juggernaut.

Yes, we. Us. We’re to blame. For not using even the feeble democratic mechanisms our badly listing society still places at our disposal. For letting our government sell us out at Copenhagen. For letting rich people and corporations hijack our governments and economies while we all went on participating in this mistakeholder economy. For worshipping a materialistic way of life that’s quite clearly not sustainable in a world without one have for every hundred or hundred thousand have-nots. For driving cars once it’s well-known how hideous they are from almost every angle. For plastic, for television.

I do believe I could rant for pages about all the ways this was utterly predictable and heartbreakingly avoidable. But I won’t. I’ll just say that chickens coming home to roost isn’t just a phrase for Malcolm X to invoke as the inevitable payback for slavery and repression of Black Americans, or for Ward Churchill (among others) to use to describe the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. It’s just about the right phrase for describing how the cancer of us — us being those actively engineering or “merely” participating in globalized industrial capitalism — will most certainly get ours. And we’ll drag millions, probably billions, of poor and largely blameless people (and animals) into an early mass grave with us.

Chickens coming home to roost.

Would that it were not so.

* * *

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The “Capitalist Pyramid” illustration at the top is a famous Industrial Workers of the World (Wobbly) poster from 1911. The IWW was unique in many ways, not least because it was the only union that welcomed women, immigrants, and black Americans into the same organization. I led off this post, ostensibly about industrial criminality and health issues in “communist” China, with the Capitalist Pyramid to make a point about power, independent of facile ideologies or propaganda. China is not a communist state, anymore than the United States, strictly speaking, is a democracy. Sorry: you can call a plutocratic oligarchy where 1% own 99% “democracy” if you want, but I won’t be joining you in such foolishness. I think there’s a lot to recommend an anarchist understanding about states, the nature of power, government, and people: states exist to monopolize force and monetize and extract labor from their subjects. From this perspective, the core distinctions to be made between China and the United States are not about “freedom” but about scale and respective terms of engagement with economic globalization.

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Machiavellian insects evolve bigger, social brains

Posted in Relay with tags , , , , , on March 31, 2010 by bawehali

Discoveries about the brain of the humble sweat bee, with its unusual social structure, have allowed biologists to collect some of the best evidence yet that living in a society can boost brain size.

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The Sunny Side of Armed Conflict

Posted in Relay with tags , , , on March 27, 2010 by bawehali

War — what is it good for? Well, preserving the world’s beaches, for one thing.

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A Virus With Shoes

Posted in Hyper-Essay with tags , , , , , on January 9, 2010 by bawehali

People suck, and that’s my contention. We’re a virus with shoes.

—comedian Bill Hicks

I actually like quite a lot of people, but there’s much to recommend Hicks’ notion that people are viruses with shoes. It’s a fact that well over 40% of the human DNA chain is viral in origin, as Michael Specter writes in a fascinating New Yorker article, “Darwin’s Surprise”:

Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died of the Spanish flu; smallpox may have killed half a billion during the twentieth century alone…

Scientists have long suspected that if a retrovirus happens to infect a human sperm cell or egg, which is rare, and if that embryo survives—which is rarer still—the retrovirus could take its place in the blueprint of our species, passed from mother to child, and from one generation to the next, much like a gene for eye color or asthma.

One scientist interviewed for the New Yorker article, Thierry Hiedmann, contends that the mapping of the human genome project and recent findings about “endogenous retroviruses” show that genes and viruses are not, in fact, distinct entities, and that the concept of virus and humanity as enemies or combatants, rather than as co-evolutionary forces, is in error. Heidmann and others have even suggested that without viral influence, mammals might never have developed a placenta, which protects the fetus and gives it time to mature and led to live birth. “These viruses made those changes possible, [and] It is quite possible that, without them, human beings would still be laying eggs.”

So the stuff of us, the meat of our matter, is partially viral in origin. What of our language, and our culture?

Well. That partially depends on whether or not you believe language shapes thought or vice-versa. Lots of smart people disagree on this particular point. On one side are those like, oh, Noam Chomsky, who say cognition and certain brain structures give rise to infinitely varying, yet universal, linguistic impulses.

On the other side there are linguistic relativists, like the curious Benjamin Lee Whorf, an amateur linguist (Darwin was an amateur biologist) and evolutionary biologist, botanist, theologian, and physicist, who in addition to linguistics, wrote about gravitation, “being,” trees, color theory, evolution, large stemmed plants, electromagnetism, dreams, and even wrote a Hopi-English dictionary.

Whorf grew to prominence and influence through his work, exploring how languages shape the habit and thought of their users.

Presume, as many linguists do, that there’s a middle ground between these two positions, and admit the possibility that language acts on people much as people act on or through language.

“A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts.The notion of the meme—coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins to illustrate the field of memetics—crystallizes this view of the communication process. Georges Bataille similarly argued that communication was best understood from the perspective of contagion. In Bataille any human being is no more than a conduit for communicative process, a channel for ideas which pass through him/her.”If, as it appears to me, a book is communication, then the author is only a link among many readings.” The author is simply a node on a network, through which ideas pass…

Subjectivity is an illusion, one that allows us to operate comfortably in this plane of existence, but which nonetheless masks true reality, in which there is no division between subject and object: “There is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication, but not from one to the other: the one and the other have lost their separate existence”

—Bernardo Attias, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University

Language and humanity itself as a virus were major themes in the work of William S. Burroughs, who employed a number of techniques to explore the murky relation between language and its host. One of his better-known techniques was to employ a “cut-up” method that allowed him to splice, fold-in and reassemble different texts or parts of texts, sometimes to surprising effect. The technique seems not to have yielded much literary fruit beyond that willed into being by Burrough’s own fevered imagination, but when pondering the all-encompassing constancy of flux, and the role of human beings and viruses as co-evolutionary partners, and when wondering at the viral properties of language and culture, it’s worth considering the thoughts of a visionary like Burroughs, who identified as a Manichean, and who believed he was writing mythology for the space age:

“I am advancing the theory that we were not designed to remain in our present state, any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole forever,” wrote Burroughs, suggesting that what human evolution requires is actually a biological mutation away from that which one knows as human.

Burroughs also had some interesting things to say about The Johnsons and the Shits and their epic battle for the very light of the world. Burroughs always did have a way of making profane things like “Get over yourself, changeling,” and “extinction is inevitable” sound somehow like an already familiar pulp novel.

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Revolting Creatures

Posted in Relay with tags , on February 18, 2009 by bawehali

As they ride the wind, vultures seek dead things, not dying things, using a sense of smell far more highly developed than any other bird’s. They can detect a dead mouse under leaves from 200 feet up. They are discriminating, preferring corpses between two and four days dead….Vultures, whose name comes from vellere, Latin for to tear, begin their eating at vulnerable spots on the carcass—the anus and eyes. All that being said, you really wouldn’t want to live in a world without them…

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Here Comes the Ocean (and the Triumph of Slime)

Posted in Hyper-Essay, Review & Write-Up with tags , , , on February 17, 2009 by bawehali

Climate change is causing the sea to rise far faster than expected, potentially a meter or more by 2100. Perhaps that doesn’t seem so dire to you. Perhaps you read that sentence and think: “Pity; there go some beaches and beach-front real estate.” Maybe you think: “You know, I’ve always liked the ocean more than New York City anyway…” If so, you may not be getting the picture, because a rise of just one meter will literally drown cities and towns across the globe, displacing millions of people, creating food shortages, epic political conflicts and disease epidemics.

It is not just the amount of overall rise that is of concern. Storm surges will increase dramatically in strength if baseline sea level is higher. Hurricanes and typhoons have already increased significantly in strength and duration, an effect scientists attribute to climate change, and this is expected to continue. More than 10,000 people have been killed in storm surges in the Bay of Bengal alone in the last 300 years, and such surges could increase exponentially in the coming years. This means that the watery ends of Miami, Tokyo, New York, Mumbai, Shanghai, Jakarta, and Dhaka are not just possible, but actually likely.

Their ends might come from the sea, something like this:

…or from the sky, like this:

(The already disappearing island of Kiribati is, of course, already f–ked.)

Even if we stabilize carbon emissions immediately—an impossible task given global political and economic forces—we will still see significant or even catastrophic sea-level rise for centuries to come.

Many people still consider the anthropogenic aspects of climate change to be merely theoretical, and regard dire climate change forecasts like those limned in this pithy blog post as alarmist, worst-case scenario scaremongering. (Among this group, you most likely can find a good number of people who believe in things like “intelligent” design and Norse origin mythology, too…)

But consider that all modern coastal development and industrialization have taken place under a period of temporary sea level stability, which would not likely have been maintained long term even without the anthropogenic effects of climate change accelerating sea level rise. During the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, sea level was about 120 meters lower than today—and the average temperature then was only four to seven degrees Celsius colder! In the Pliocene era three million years ago (at least 2.5 millions years before homo sapiens even appeared) sea level was forty meters higher than today.

We, you see, are only blips in the deep-time soup of the planet.

Or maybe it would be better to say deep-time slime. Why? Because climate change—largely inevitable and natural, but quickened by human industrial activity—is not only making oceans higher and warmer, but also more acidic, a trend which could have sweeping ramifications. As the pH of the ocean drops, the calcium carbonate creatures that range from zooplankton to shellfish have a harder and harder time making their shells.

(If you’ve never considered the considerable beauty of zooplankton, click below to see a slideshow of images by Ernst Haeckel, many of which depict zooplankton called radiolaria):

There have already been significant reductions or changes in calcium carbonate creatures because of acidification, with effects resonating up the food chain. If this continues, scientists envision the oceans becoming more and more populated with jellyfish, algae and slimy, more genetically basic creatures—it has been called “the rise of slime.”

So taking these trends to their most extreme long-term conclusion, we can envision our terrestrial world being swallowed up by epic storms and the slow-motion apocalyptic rise of ocean waters filled with primordial slime…as humans retreat and fight each other over increasingly scarce food and fresh water.

Kill your horror. After all, it’s only natural and very likely inevitable. Besides, as the always forward-thinking writer, William S. Burroughs once wrote, seemingly contemplating both simple corporeal human death and the possibility of space colonization: “We’re all here to go.”

—with reporting by Kari Lydersen

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“Average American Life” Not What It Used to Be?

Posted in Hyper-Essay, Review & Write-Up with tags , , on July 25, 2008 by bawehali

In July of 2008, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did something unprecedented in its history: It lowered its official estimated value of an “average American life”, from $8.04 million to $7.22 million.

Why?

Mostly because the EPA performs a cost-benefit analysis when evaluating and creating policy and regulation. To do this, they have to agree on the value of a human life and weigh that value against the cost of regulation. The less a life is worth, the less statistical need exists for regulation.

This and other Bush administration EPA calculations have rubbed some people the wrong way before. Like in 2002, when the EPA decided the value of people over 70 was worth 38% less than those under 70.

The application of seemingly logical economic principles can often make patently absurd or offensive ideas seem, well, logical. Take, for example, an infamous (and shockingly guileless) memo from former chief economist for the World Bank (and current economic adviser to President Obama), Lawrence Summers, in which he says:

“I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that”

(It’s an aside to the topic of the value of life, but in 2005, Summers went on to display more of his mastery of impeccable logic when, as President of Harvard University, speaking at a conference on Diversifying The Science and Engineering Workforce, he suggested that “men’s higher variance in relevant innate abilities” might be a partial explanation for why there were more men than women in high-end science and engineering fields. Outrage ensued, and Summers was forced to step down as President.)

Ill-conceived, false, and harmful suppositions riddle the history of economic theory. Go back to Friedrich August von Hayek, an Austrian-British economist and major influence on free market ideology in the 20th century who was formative for John Maynard Keynes, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and most of the modern neoconservative movement.

Hayek developed a philosophical defense of free market capitalism based purely on individual expressions of self-interest, and with no mechanism or place for altruism or collective problem solving. Hayek’s theories have been used for many things, including the framing of government and “public interest” programs as merely the selfish machinations of governing bureaucrats. Thatcher’s “public choice theory” in England, and later Reagan’s economic policies in the U.S. both relied heavily on Hayek’s rationale.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen explains the pathology of Hayek’s ideas in the form of the following scenario:

“Can you direct me to the railway station?” asks the stranger.

“Certainly,” says the local, pointing in the opposite direction, towards the post office, “and would you post this letter for me on your way?”

“Certainly,” says the stranger, resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing.

Everyone acting selfishly in order to establish a harmonious social equilibrium. That’s the kernel of Hayek’s thinking. Once considered ludicrous and imbalanced, it won influence in the climate of the Cold War era, alongside other paranoid formulations of human nature and strategems for manipulating it.

Game Theory, developed by clinically certified paranoid schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, is most easily exemplified by a logic problem called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. The game basically demonstrates that selfishness and betrayal, rather than cooperation, are always winning strategies for self-advancement.

Nash won a Nobel Prize for his development of Game Theory and the benefits of a perfectly selfish social equilibrium. Problematically, the theory did not work when tested on real people. In one superb example of this, when the RAND Corporation (a think tank, where much of this was developed) ran several game theory scenarios with the company’s own secretaries, the secretary’s tendency to cooperate with each other, rather than acting selfishly, made results wildly unpredictable and destroyed Nash’s theoretical “equilibrium.”

Of course, you can trace wrongheaded economic logic all the way back to the world’s first actual economist, Thomas Malthus.

Iain Boal, an author and social critic, describes Malthusian logic thusly:

“It’s to subscribe to the view that the fundamental problems humanity faces have their roots in the scarcity of the resources that sustain life, because the world is finite and we are exhausting those resources…Notice how this mirrors the basic assumption of modern economics – choice under scarcity. In his notorious essay “On the Principle of Population,” published in 1798, Malthus asserted that population growth, especially of poor bastards, would inevitably outrun food supply, unless the propertyless were restrained from breeding. He advocated that poor people be crowded together in unhealthy housing, as a way of checking the growth of population. Remember, this is the world’s very first economist we’re talking about here…”

In the linked interview above (on Counterpunch, but originally published in LiP magazine), Boal explains that the scarcities asserted as natural law by Malthus (and many environmentalists today) are, in fact, artificial scarcities created by capitalism. The logic introduced by Malthus formed the basis for a move from a world of common land to an absolutization of private property during the expansion of the British Empire in the 1800s. [That's a lot in one sentence; don't take my word for it, tho': read the link above.]

Malthus’s essay was a direct counter-revolutionary response to an essay by William Godwin entitled “An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.” The essay was an early anarchist critique of the state and an exploration of viable alternatives to competitive, coercive state power. Malthus, who would eventually become the world’s first paid economist, had apparently once been part of the same radical circles as Godwin. However, Malthus the “disillusioned disciple,” predicted impending doom because of a geometrically rising world-wide population and arithmetically increasing food supply. State economic power, control, and regulation were necessary to stave off disaster for the working and monied classes.

As Godwin pointed out in an eventual rebuttal, for Malthus’s figures to be true, it would require every family to produce an unlikely eight children…

My point with this scattershot exploration of low points in economic theory and practice is to demonstrate how egregiously wrong and abstracted economic theories and valuations can often be. I suppose I also want to illustrate how such theories, sallied forth as theories to describe existing phenomena or so-called “human nature” are often used in a generative fashion, to actually shape and manufacture human thought and behavior.

Thomas Malthus’s theories provided a framework and justification for the global enclosure of the commons based on the seemingly rational idea that there simply wasn’t enough to go around, and that the ever-breeding poor, left unrestrained, would devour us all, and that this was only a rational response to the excesses of “human nature.” Further economic rationales for selfishness were advanced by theorists like Hayek and Nash, despite the fact that their theories did not correlate to actual observable, measurable human nature. (Recall the example of the RAND secretaries.)

Accurately correlating to observable behavior is supposed to be one of the truer measures of the validity of any scientific theory. Yet in the case of Nash’s Nobel prize-winning work with game theory, this basic measure was apparently not necessary. Nor was such a basic measure of validity needed, by extension, for an entire way of thinking about and conceiving of so-called “human nature” to be used as the justification for an entire raft of economic policies.

Thus, manifest illogic can seem impeccably logical to the likes of economic policy-setters like Lawrence Summers, trapped as they are within abstracted market-defined notions of value. It must seem only logical to some people in the Bush Administration and the EPA that a human life has a certain measurable monetary value, and that certain policy implications unfold from that value.

John Maynard Keynes, the founder of modern macroeconomics (and a big advocate of eugenics), got to the heart of the matter with a telling statement about the logic of capitalism, which is essentially what we’re talking about in all of this:

“Capitalism,” Keynes wrote, “is the astounding belief that the wickedest of men will do the wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

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The Once and Future Blimp?

Posted in Hyper-Essay with tags , , , on April 1, 2008 by bawehali

Mention blimps or, more properly, airships to people and you’ll normally get a bemused reaction: Oh, what an oddball topic! They rarely react as if airships or airship technology exists outside the distant past or whimsical present. But a new class of modern airships — part plane, part dirigible — might change that.

In the 1930s and 40s, passengers routinely flew via airship from Berlin to Rio De Janiero, crossing the span in just under three days. But following the spectacular Hindenburg disaster (a disaster some believe was the result of sabotage), and with the advent of jet engine technology, the popularity of airship travel plummeted.

Which is a shame, because it sure seems like there are a lot of reasons to reconsider jet travel as any kind of viable mass transportation system. Airborne jet-killing volcanic debris aside, the main reason to move away from jet travel is that it’s enormously polluting: A flight from San Francisco to New York puts 2-1/2 tons of CO2 per person into the air. Of course, the cost of that isn’t factored into the price of a plane ticket; if it were, none but the very wealthy could afford to fly. There would be no “commuter” jet travel.

All the same, jet travel is getting pricier these days, thanks mostly to rising fuel costs. And with that unlikely to change, sensible alternatives should be explored.

Enter the airship: Borne aloft by the wildly abundant element, helium (not hydrogen), it requires comparatively modest amounts of energy for propulsion. From a mechanical engineering standpoint, fabrication of airships is vastly simpler; the technology is less specialized, and less expensive, than that of their winged counterparts. (In other words, there’s way less that could go wrong with an than with a jet.) And as for speed, well, would it really be so bad if it took three days instead of one to go from Berlin to Rio, or San Francisco to Australia?

Popular Mechanics published a fun piece about emerging airship technologies: large high-altitude winged airships that could carry hundreds of tons of cargo, powered by little more than the sun. The New York Times also recently published a roundtable discussion about alternatives to planes (“The New Age of Travel: Blimps and Beyond“).

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Native Energy Futures

Posted in Feature with tags , , , , , , , , , , on June 5, 2006 by bawehali

Renewable Energy, Actual Sovereignty and the New Rush on Indian Lands

by Brian Awehali

“Huge investments in electrical power grids, highways, and telecommunications would help Colombia open up its vast gas and oil resources and its largely undeveloped Amazonian territories; the projects, in turn, would generate the income necessary to pay off the loans, plus interest. That was the theory. However, the reality, consistent with our true intent around the world, was to subjugate Bogota, to further the global empire. My job…was to present the case for exceedingly large loans.”

— John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“The ability for tribes to obtain bonds in the hundred-million-dollar range to finance energy projects is now a reality. And the $20 million a year for an Indian energy office at the Department of Energy is something that we started working on years ago under Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.”

— Chris Stearns, former Indian Affairs Director at the US DOE

It all started with a single 750kW wind turbine built by the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota in 2003. At the time, the Business Journal called the turbine “a four-way transcontinental deal in which everyone makes money while fighting global warming, generating clean electricity and helping Native Americans.” In other words, the Journal gushed, the wind project was “a ‘green capitalist’s’ dream.”

The editors at the Business Journal might have been a tad hyperbolic in their assessment, but energy on Indian land is certainly big business. In 2004, some $400 million was split between 41 tribes for the sale of oil, gas, and coal on their lands. According to the Indigenous Environmental Network, 35% of the fossil fuel resources in the US are within Indian country; The Department of the Interior estimates that Indian lands hold undiscovered reserves of almost 54 billion tons of coal, 38 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 5.4 billion barrels of oil. Indian lands also contain enormous amounts of alternative energy: “Wind blowing through Indian reservations in just four northern Great Plains states could support almost 200,000 megawatts of wind power,” Winona LaDuke told Indian Country Today in March 2005. “[And] tribal landholdings in the southwestern US…could generate enough power to eradicate all fossil fuel burning power plants in the US.”

Now imagine, if you can, that you run a US-based energy company at a time when increasing resistance to US imperialism, coupled with rising business costs related to political instability, has made getting the oil, coal, and gas from foreign sources more difficult. Imagine that you’re savvy enough to know that your fossil fuel-based business model is about to get dramatically less lucrative. If you didn’t already have them, you’d probably want to start setting up operations in the more business-friendly, less regulated Wild West of Indian Country. If you were really devious—or maybe just smart—you might want to have your cake and eat it too, by getting tax subsidies and favorable terms for developing your next business model while greenwashing your ongoing fossil fuel operations. Wouldn’t you?

“Consistent with the President’s National Energy Policy to secure America’s energy future,” testified Theresa Rosier, Counselor to the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, “increased energy development in Indian and Alaska Native communities could help the Nation have more reliable home-grown energy supplies. [The Native American Energy Development and Self-Determination Act of 2003] promotes increased and efficient energy development and production in an environmentally sound manner.”
The bill did not ultimately pass, but the idea that “America’s energy future” should be linked to having “more reliable home-grown energy supplies” can be found in other native energy-specific legislation that has passed into law. What this line of thinking fails to take into consideration is that Native America is not actually USAmerica, and that the “supplies” in question belong to sovereign nations, not to the United States or its energy sector.

Rosier’s statement conveys quite a lot about how the government and the energy sector intend to market the growing shift away from dependence on foreign energy, and how they plan to deregulate (by using “efficiency” as a selling point) and step up their exploitation (“development”) of “domestic” native energy resources: by spinning it as a way to produce clean energy while helping Native Americans gain greater economic and tribal sovereignty.

Of course, if large companies can establish lucrative partnerships with tribes, largely free of regulation and federal oversight, then so much the better. In this regard, a look at the Alaska Native “communities” Rosier mentioned is instructive.

In 1971, Alaskan tribal companies were set up by Congress with roughly $1 billion and 44 million acres of land to divide. Although the real reason for establishing these companies had to do with breaking down largely unified tribal opposition to the construction of an oil pipeline, they were pitched at the time as a way to help stimulate tribal economies and mitigate the scale of poverty on tribal lands. “Tribal companies [can] be considered small businesses even after winning billions of dollars in contracts, and there is no limit to the size of the no-bid awards they can win,” reported Michael Scherer in an excellent 2005 Mother Jones article entitled “US: Little Big Companies.”

The Alaska tribal companies have, according to Scherer, “become a way for large corporations with no Native American ownership to receive no-bid contracts, an avenue for federal officials to steer work to favored companies, and a device for speeding privatization.” Evidence for this assertion abounds. From 2002 through the end of 2004, the Olgoonik Corporation, owned by the Inupiat Eskimo tribe, garnered revenues in excess of $225 million for construction work on US military bases around the world. Because of its tribal status, Olgoonik procured this work without having to bid against others for it. It then subcontracted most of the work to the infamous multinational corporation Halliburton.

A November 2004 article in The News & Observer (UK) further reported that “Procurement rules allow native American-owned company, Alutiiq, to provide favored entrée to government contracts and then outsource them to British-owned multinational, Wackenhut.” The article also went on to note that the Chugach Alaska Corp., owned by 1,900 Alaska natives, “was ranked ahead of IBM, Motorola, Goodrich, Goodyear and AT&T in total value of defense contracts in 2003.”

Apologists and professional flak catchers, of course, claim that this state of affairs is nothing more than an unfortunate, and unforeseen accident. But Michael Brown, a major player in the formation of Alaskan tribal companies and the so-called “godfather of tribal contracting,” told Mother Jones that this explosion in federal work was “exactly what he hoped for” when he went to work as the chief executive for a subsidiary of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation in 1982 and pioneered such practices. Arctic Slope is the state’s largest tribal corporation, and the single largest company in Alaska.

Now jump forward with me, to April 2003, and the completion of the first large-scale native-owned wind turbine in history—the aforementioned Rosebud Sioux project, built in partnership with NativeEnergy, LLC. During the preceding 21 years, reports ranging from the cautionary to the apocalyptic about carbon emissions and global warming have piled up, and all but the most pig-headed of carbon-emitting industrialists now concede that a fossil fuel-based business model is soon going to be a lot less lucrative.

NativeEnergy, which wants to help consumers “enjoy a climate neutral lifestyle,” was founded in 2000 with a mission “to get more wind turbines and other renewable energy systems built.” There were no Native Americans present in the management of NativeEnergy at the time of its founding. The multiphase wind development initiative, which began in earnest with the completion of the first wind turbine in 2003, was billed as a way to bring renewable energy–related jobs and training opportunities to the citizens of this sovereign nation, who are among the poorest in all of North America.

NativeEnergy’s President and CEO Tom Boucher is an energy industry vet who formerly worked at Green Mountain Energy, a subsidiary of a company now controlled by oil industry giant BP and Nuon, a Netherlands-based energy company. Boucher was convinced there was profit to be made in alternative energy, and the Rosebud project was his test case. Boucher financed the project by selling, of all things, air. More specifically, he took advantage of the new “flexible emissions standards” created by the Kyoto Protocol. Essentially, the standards created tax-deductible pollution credits (or “green tags”) for ecologically responsible companies, which can then be sold to polluters wishing to “offset” their carbon dioxide generation without actually reducing their emissions.

As you might expect from a company staffed largely by energy industry vets, NativeEnergy was fiscally crafty. In a novel accounting move, they bought from the Rosebud Sioux, at deep discount, all the green tag pollution credits that they speculated would be accrued over the lifespan of the Rosebud wind project—a total of 50,000 tons of carbon dioxide—then made a lump-sum, one-time funding commitment to the construction of the project. In an April 2003 interview with the Business Journal, Boucher would not divulge how deep the discount he got was, nor would he divulge the terms of subsequent sales of green tags.

Since their first test case proved successful, NativeEnergy has moved forward with plans to develop a larger “distributed wind project,” located on eight different reservations. NativeEnergy also became a majority Indian-owned company in August 2005, when the pro-development Intertribal Council on Utility Policy (yes, Intertribal COUP), purchased a majority stake in the company on behalf of its member tribes.

Pat Spears, the President of COUP and a member of the lower Brule Sioux tribe, described the purchase as “a great day for Native American people everywhere, because we are demonstrating that living in harmony with our Mother Earth is not only good for the environment, it is also good business. We look forward,” he added, “to bringing in more tribes as equity participants and taking NativeEnergy to the next level.”

It’s probably no coincidence that this purchase coincided with that month’s passage of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which contains native energy–specific provisions in its Title V. Supporters like Tex Hall, president of the National Congress of American Indians, touted the act as “one of the most important tribal pieces of legislation to hit Indian country in the past 20 years. [It] provides real incentives for energy companies to partner with Indian tribes in developing tribal resources.” Keeping in mind that tribal-owned companies are exempt from a great deal of the regulation, oversight, and competitive bidding stipulations that apply to other businesses, and that the legislation increases subsidies for wind energy in particular, the act leaves NativeEnergy ideally situated to exploit its tribal status.

But there are a host of alarming provisions in the act. For starters, Section 1813 of Title V gives the US the obviously dangerous power to grant rights of way through Indian lands without permission from Indian tribes, if deemed to be in the strategic interests of an energy-related project. Other critics have derided the act as a fire sale on Indian energy, characterizing various incentives as a broad collection of subsidies for US energy companies, particularly those in Texas. And, according to a 2005 Democracy Now! interview with Clayton Thomas-Muller, Native Energy Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, the act “rolls back the protections of the National Environmental Policy Act and the protections of the National Historic Preservation Act, both of which are critical pieces of legislation that grassroots indigenous peoples utilize to protect our sacred sites.”

Most importantly, under the guise of promoting tribal sovereignty (leaving out those aspects of sovereignty that have little or nothing to do with economics), the act also releases the federal government from its traditional trust responsibility to tribes where resource development is concerned.

The trust relationship between the US and native tribes has been a crucial way for Native Americans to hold the government legally accountable, as evidenced by the many recent court losses suffered by the Department of the Interior and Treasury during the years-long Indian Trust Case filed by Eloise Cobell on behalf of more than 500,000 Native American landholders. The trust relationship was originally imposed on Native Americans in 1887, after the passage of the Dawes Allotment Act. This act was a fairly straightforward (and successful) attempt to break down tribal unity by dispersing parcels of land to individual Indian “heads of household” who signed on to the government’s “tribal rolls.” The land was not to be managed by Native Americans, however: It was held “in trust,” and the government was supposed to disburse to Native landholders the royalties generated by the leasing of their lands to timber, mining, livestock, and energy interests. But for the most part, the government didn’t disburse the money, and now admits that at least $137 billion of it is simply missing. Without the trust relationship, which among other things makes the government legally responsible for the money it manages, Cobell and her coplaintiffs could not have sued.

The Energy Policy Act also shifts responsibility for environmental review and regulation from the federal to tribal governments. This, too, was promoted under the auspices of increasing tribal sovereignty, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that Native Americans won’t be any more successful in regulating the energy industry than the US government, a host of well-funded environmental groups, and the UN have been. In fact, it probably only takes a village-variety idiot to comprehend the predictably disastrous outcome of this shift for Native Americans.

It’s hard to believe, in light of the relevant history, that an ever-avaricious energy industry—which has been all too willing to play a game of planetary ecological brinksmanship in the name of profit—places any value on tribal sovereignty unless there’s a way to exploit it. It’s hard to believe, after hundreds of years of plunder and unaccountability, that further deregulation, coupled with economic incentives, and even with the participation of some well-meaning “green” players on the field, is going to deliver anything but the predictable domination of Native Americans by white European economic powers.

In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that the emerging Native American energy infrastructure looks more like the beginnings of a new rush on Indian lands than it does the advent of any kind of brave new sovereign era.

But don’t take my word for it. Take it from Billy Connelly, the senior advisor on marketing and communications for NativeEnergy, the company, you’ll recall, that helped usher in the dawn of this renewable energy rush. When asked during a March 2006 phone interview why the demonstration of a potentially viable renewable energy economy on Native American lands wasn’t simply an example of small businesses laying the groundwork for the eventual control and megaprofits of major corporations, Connelly sighed and said simply, “I’d be pleasantly surprised if this didn’t follow that age-old pattern.”

Perhaps, at a minimum, tribes can attain a modicum of energy independence from the development of wind, solar, and other renewable energy infrastructure on their lands. And there may well be a way to ride Native American renewable energy resources to a future of true tribal sovereignty. But it won’t come from getting into bed with, and becoming indebted to, the very industry currently driving the planet to its doom.

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