Viewpoint: Timber empire plunders public forests
Steve Kelly
Here in Montana, early mining claims at Benetsee Creek (1852); Bannack (1860); Alder Creek near Virginia City (1862); and Last Chance Gulch in Helena (1863), located along streams and gulches where gold was dredged from riverbeds.
Watersheds are still polluted with toxic mining waste. Avoid drinking ‘privatized’ water!
Timber mining is Empire’s latest scorched earth policy. Settler-colonialism thrives on raping and subjugating land, water, plant, and animal life, including current populations of human inhabitants. Today, plunder is a highly mechanized, automated, industrial process. Empire’s war against forests, wildlife and native fish began during the Reagan years. All lifeforms are the enemy and must be imprisoned, enslaved, or killed.
Remember, fascism is nothing more than capitalism in crisis. Perpetual war and genocide are not limited to Gaza and Ukraine. Genocide during the colonization of the Americas echoes today in other genocides, including genocidal intent against non-human victims like Yellowstone buffalo, wolves, bears, beavers, spotted owls, goshawks, and “undesirable fish species.” Pinyon pine, juniper and other conifers are murdered before they can ‘encroach’ into heavily subsidized, overgrazed public grasslands.
Forest demolition is aimed at further enriching the already filthy rich while kicking the rural poor, immigrant labor, most women, and Mother Nature while they’re down. Psycho-killers always ‘kick down.’
Republican propaganda is now saying housing costs will come down if clearcut logging is increased 25%. Brilliant! These clowns in silk suits fail to comprehend that only 2% of the timber the U.S. consumes comes off public lands managed by the USFS-USDA.
Make forests conform! Conform to what, utopian legal fantasies featuring hierarchy, domestication, sanitation, cultivation, and subjugation enforced by psycho-Puritans and military violence? Sound familiar?
What is a ‘healthy forest’ anyway? Forest health is a euphemism for oversized clearcuts, forest liquidation, and agency-planned arson. Trump’s USFS and BLM are gearing up for Empire’s final assault on America’s remaining roadless landscapes – the last refugia for wolverine, lynx, grizzly bears, moose, elk, and migratory songbirds. Fragments of amazing old-growth habitat occur in these isolated, roadless territories.
The government’s prescription to restore ‘healthy forests’: Sterilize and domesticate all wild land, which means mass death to anything and anyone in the way of neo-feudal, imperial “progress.”
Serilize, (verb transitive). 1. To make barren; to impoverish, as land; to exhaust of fertility; as, to sterilize soil or land. - Webster’s, 1828.
Just as forced sterilization culls unfit human individuals and genocides entire races, forest eugenics (“active management”) is rapidly evolving mechanically and genetically to “…make forests healthy again.” See above: Montana’s governor (screen shot). Of course, Gov. Gianforte’s sterilized mind has no idea what he’s talking about. A tree plantation is never a forest.
Plunder has been the mindset (cognitive model) of ‘God’s chosen people’ since 1493, when Pope Alexander VI granted the royal families of Europe the divine right to steal ‘discovered’ lands without fair compensation – lands inhabited by sovereign Indian nations for thousands of years.
We’ve all witnessed much too much ritualized indiscriminate killing lately. Don’t wait for neoliberalism’s all-out war over against everything wild and free to invade a national forest, national park, or BLM forest near you.
Will the Divine in forests, wildlife, water, and native trout be made barren by psychopaths and their machines, or will we rediscover in time that ‘Promethean fire’ that burns inside? Be the resistance. With all the positive energy you can muster fight like hell to protect our sacred public forests.
Steve Kelly is an artist, gardener, and environmental activist living in Bozeman, Montana.