I Didn’t March for Science

A couple of weeks ago they held the first national March for Science. I love science, and I have a deep appreciation for science and scientific inquiry. I don’t trust scientists, however, and I’m very suspicious of their political agenda, so I did not feel inclined to join them in this demonstration. For as much as I love science, I don’t worship it. In fact, I think it’s kind of a bad cultural habit, but it’s one I picked up early, so I try to make the most of it.

I understand the science behind the Climate Crisis, and I know why ecologists say we have entered the sixth great extinction event in the history of life on Earth. I appreciate that many scientists recognize the grave threat we face from these crises, and I know that they hope to raise awareness about why we should pay attention to this kind of science, but I also know that scientists led us down this road to ruin in the first place, and their siren song continues to seduce us at our peril.

A lot of people tell me that they think science has made us smarter, and that the technology it spawned has made life better, but they could hardly be more wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. Science may have changed our cultural mythology, but it has failed to reform our culture in any significant way. Meanwhile, technology has unleashed the deadliest holocaust on planet Earth since an asteroid strike wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That’s what science tells us about science and technology.

The objective evidence gathered in the field of ecology should disabuse us of any delusions of grandeur we derive from the mental masturbation we call quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. According to the World Wildlife Federation’s Living Planet Report of 2016, global wildlife populations, declined by 58% between 1970 and 2012, due primarily to human activity. That means there are less than half as many wild animals on Earth today, as there were on the first Earth Day. Science and technology had a large part in making these numbers a reality. Does that sound smart? Does that sound like an improvement?

Far from an intellectual advance, science has merely replaced one ludicrous myth with another. We replaced the myth of an omnipotent deity who created the world and molded humanity in his own image with the myth of a giant bomb that exploded out of nothing. They’re both stupid, and they’re both wrong and neither of these myths have made us any smarter. We’ve merely replaced the guys in monasteries who wore robes and studied ancient texts with guys in universities who wear lab-coats and peer into microscopes. Beneath them both lies the same pathological, ecocidal culture we call “civilization.” Instead of bestowing wisdom, science usurped the power of the church, creating a new religion based on the same old stupidity.

Here’s an example that illustrates how scientists dress up the same old medieval religious stupidity in the new clothes of secular science: Darwin theorized, not that we humans descended from apes, but that we are apes, and that we are but one specialized species of animal in a great pantheon of specialists. This, generally accepted, scientific theory of the origin of species, should have laid to rest the religious idea that God made man in his own image, and blown that “dominion” shit right out of the water, but these Medieval ideas remain as strong as ever, especially among scientists, because universities continue to teach scientists to view human beings as the only intelligent species on planet Earth, and the only ones capable of determining our own destiny. Most scientists still presume the superiority of the human intellect, and believe that the millions of other, “inferior,” species upon this planet exist purely for our benefit, to study, displace, or even kill for sport, just because those creatures don’t share our particular specialty. How is that different from any other form of chauvinism?

 

Businessmen and politicians use science in exactly the same way they used religion in medieval times: to control the masses and to give them an advantage in war. Instead of buying indulgences, they now invest in clean technology, or hire a panel of experts. Instead of asking the Pope to bless their military campaigns and inspire their troops, the military now pays universities to research and design new weapons, including psychological ones.

Both scientists and the clergy gained power over the masses by performing magic tricks, and promising salvation. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, while scientists point to “Trinity,” the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. Christianity promises life after death. Science promises a brighter future through technology.

The fact that we still fall for this BS, even though industrial technology invariably creates much bigger problems than it solves, demonstrates our willful ignorance and cultural intransigence. In reality, we’re no closer to understanding how the universe works, today, than we were 500 years ago, or even five thousand years ago, and modern Americans are probably the stupidest creatures to ever walk the face of the Earth, thanks largely to science and technology.

When you consider science from the perspective of how it has affected our culture, I hardly see science as an improvement over religion. Trading religion for science is kind of like trading The New Yorker for Penthouse. Religion incorporates literature, poetry, art, music, dance, architecture, and more, into a framework that advises people on how to live and addresses most aspects of human life, whereas science just says, “Show me what I want to see.”

Where religion teaches kindness, charity, decency and humility, science presents endless possibilities, stripped of morals, ethics or aesthetics, like doors that open dark rooms full of unforeseen consequences. Science loves unforeseen consequences. “Unforeseen consequences” is where science gets all of its new material. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of medieval Christianity, but I’d no sooner march for science, in the way it is practiced today, than I would march in support of the Inquisition.

We Sent an Invitation to “Big Pot”

I had a nice chat with Linda Stansberry about “the Greenrush,” and it got me thinking about how ridiculous it is for so-called “Mom and Pop” growers to complain about it. First, it is hilarious to watch people, who made their living, for decades, by evading the law, complain to the Sheriff and ask why he isn’t doing more marijuana eradication. They’ve been completely blindsided. Even they had no idea how big the marijuana industry really was.

 

Second, after all of the wrangling about big grows vs small grows, the terms of the new county medical marijuana ordinance don’t seem to matter nearly so much as the fact that we were the first to adopt one. Because Humboldt County passed the first industry-friendly ordinance, we painted a target on ourselves. While they worked so hard to craft an ordinance that would keep prohibition-era farmers in the game in a legal market, they unwittingly wrote an invitation to every major drug syndicate in the world. We constructed our ordinance with an eye towards keeping out “Big Tobacco,” but we completely forgot about “Big Pot.”

For large-scale black market distributors, Humboldt County’s ordinance offers low-risk vertical integration as well as an opportunity to “go public” when the time is right. Who knew there were so many big fish lurking in the murky waters of the marijuana industry, just waiting to devour Humboldt County. Now we face a feeding frenzy that threatens to displace most of our community. As large distributors take over production, marijuana money will increasingly flow out of the area, while long-term locals fall into poverty and homelessness. Property becomes even more unaffordable, housing even more scarce and good paying jobs go extinct because big distributors cycle through temporary help, none of whom want to live here long-term, rather than hire locals.

Since these operators work the, still strong, global black market, they pay no taxes and ignore regulations, while they suck the rivers dry and level the forest with impunity. They don’t care about this place or the community. They got the invitation and now that they’re here, we’re going to have a hell of a time getting rid of them, especially if we’re not willing to say good bye to the marijuana industry too.

 

We should have said goodbye to the marijuana industry years ago, back when Anna Hamilton asked us to think about “What’s after pot?” People just couldn’t imagine an “afterlife.” If we had worked as hard to build a diverse economy based on cottage industries, arts and crafts, ecotourism, hospitality, and who knows what else, as we did to expand our marijuana production and lobby for price supporting regulation, we wouldn’t be in this mess. What’s our excuse for not investing our pot money in education, skill building or starting legitimate businesses while we had the chance?

Instead, we put all of our eggs in one basket and naively told our Supervisors that we wanted to protect the marijuana industry. So, the Supes passed an ordinance that created another real-estate bubble, and with it, one more opportunity for agents, brokers and appraisers to get obscenely rich, while the rest of us lose our homes, the fish die and our forests become an industrial wasteland. Not only have we failed to protect our livelihood, we’ve insured the destruction of our community and the environment, just because we couldn’t see beyond marijuana, and because we wouldn’t change.

Change happens. Either we make change, or change happens to us. We became obsessed with marijuana and money and “marijuana money” as a community, and the more obsessed we got, the more our world shrank. Instead of thinking beyond pot, we decided to become the center of the legal marijuana industry. We asked the Board of Supervisors for an industry-friendly ordinance, because we thought we were the industry. We should be more careful about what we ask for.

Now that we have passed the ordinance, the industry doesn’t really need us anymore, it just wants our land. The people who used to send guys to Garberville to sit in the Humboldt House Inn and buy your weed all day, now send people here to buy property all day, and then send more people and equipment and money to level the forest, sack your homestead and blow-up another mega-grow.

Whatever reputation Humboldt County growers have earned, that reputation gets transferred, along with the title of the land, to new owners from all over the world, whether they know how to grow weed or not. One or three (or none) of them may even come out on top of the legal cannabis market, when the dust finally settles, proudly bearing the “Made in Humboldt” label. Several more will quietly amass vast personal fortunes in the these chaotic transitional years. The rest of us, on the other hand, will have to find something else to do. We should have done it years ago, but even at this late stage in the game, the sooner we face it, the better.

Balancing “The Economy” with “The Environment”

Everyone seems to be looking for the right balance between “the Economy” and “the Environment,” as though they could find some sweet spot there. As if lawmakers could craft a policy that spurs economic growth, prevents habitat loss, and promotes biodiversity, all at the same time. Even our local environmental groups want to get in on this balancing act. They preface their appeals for tighter environmental regulation of the marijuana industry with the admission that they recognize the importance of the marijuana industry to our local economy, and ask for a “balanced approach.” In truth, they aren’t asking the Supes to balance the needs of “the environment” with the needs of “the economy.” Instead, they’re asking the Supes to balance the demands of growers, for less regulation, with the demands of the environmentalists who support their organization, for regulations to protect endangered species, preserve forest ecosystems and limit pollution and other impacts.

We should remember that when we talk about “the Economy” vs “The Environment,” we’re not talking about two parts of a whole. “The Economy” and “The Environment” are two opposing ways of seeing the world. Scientists, educated people, and people who watch The Discovery Channel recognize that the natural world functions as its own economy.

In nature, every creature takes what it needs of what it can find in the world around it, and in death, every creature returns those nutrients to the system that gave it life. That’s how the natural economy works, but that’s not what we mean by “economic activity.” The world’s natural economy has nothing to do with “the Economy” at all. All of that natural economy stuff happens in “the Environment.”

For most humans “the Economy” is also an environment. When a businessman talks about “the business environment,” he’s not talking about the forest; he’s talking about “the Economy.” If you live in the city, very little of what you see, belongs to the natural world, and almost everything you see is for sale. Even in the suburbs, people largely inhabit “the Economy.” Most people have to spend money to visit “the Environment” in person, but most just look at it on TV, which they also pay for.

So, “the Environment” is really the ultimate economy, and “The Economy” is the environment most people live in. It’s very confusing. Even though we civilized people inhabit “the Economy,” more than “the Environment” we still, ultimately, rely on the natural economy, for our survival. That’s why people care so much about “the Environment” Get it?

We find this hard to understand because it’s still culturally alien to us. The idea that any part of the natural world should remain unbent by the hand of man, is a very new one, in our culture. Civilization was founded on the principle that the natural world belongs to us, as human beings, to use as we see fit. Religion tells us that God thinks we humans are special, and that he gave us dominion over his creation. Science tells us that we are much smarter than the rest of creation, and that we, and only we, have the capacity to understand how the universe works. Therefore, it makes sense that we would, with our new, secular, scientific, understanding of how the universe works, radically transform the surface of the Earth for our own purposes.

Of course, the harmony, justice and equality we see in cities all over the world provides clear objective evidence of our superior wisdom, and using the very best science, we can demonstrate from our 10,000 year history, as masters of our own destiny, that we have crafted a culture suited for the ages, as sustainable, resilient and regenerative as nature herself, only better. If your sarcasm meter hasn’t gone off, it needs new batteries.

At least religion had the nerve warn us of the current apocalypse. Science remains in denial, choosing rather to search for the Higgs Boson, gravitational waves, or other such angels that dance on heads of pins, even as it reports that civilization has triggered a cataclysmic, era-ending global extinction event, and forecasts dire consequences from, human-caused, global warming.

Whichever of our cultural myths you prefer, they all tell us that the Earth is putty in our hands, to be shaped as we see fit. Unfortunately, the truth of our time tells use that our culture was wrong. For ten-thousand years, our culture taught us to despise nature and to deny our natural instincts. In exchange, it promised us enlightenment, salvation, and wisdom. Today, we see what our culture has really delivered: extinction, pollution, endless technological warfare, poverty, crime, addiction, and global environmental devastation, just for starts. For hundreds of generations, we bet our lives on the myths of this culture. Just look around. Anyone with eyes can see that it’s time to cut our losses and face reality.

 

We inherited a bankrupt culture. Our myths lie and our gods have forsaken us. Our culture, civilization, has been at war with nature for about 10,000 years. Now that we have defeated nature so completely, we realize that we have wrecked our lifeboat. We scramble for survival on an increasingly inhospitable planet, enslaved by the ultra-violent, all-consuming culture we inherited from our parents, and fuel with our lives. The truth stares us in the face, but we have no Plan B.

When we talk about “the Economy,” we’re talking about, our culture, civilization, that machine that turns our lives into toil, and the natural world into waste, based on those lies that promised us wisdom, salvation, enlightenment and leisure time, but delivered extinction, waste, poverty, and addiction. “The Economy” is itself, an addiction. We’ve become dependent on it, and we know it’s killing us, but we can scarcely imagine what our lives would be like without it. When we talk about balancing the “the Environment” and “the Economy,” it’s like balancing the needs of the man, to be cured of his alcoholism, with the needs of the alcohol, to be drunk by him.

It doesn’t make sense to talk about the “health” of “the Economy” because “the Economy” is a disease. The only question that remains is: Is this disease fatal to humanity, or can we defeat it, before it defeats us. “The Environment” is the only thing that can sustain us. We cannot afford to lose another inch of it. These are new ideas in this culture, but their truth becomes more apparent every day.

That’s why we need environmental protection far more stringent than anything we’ve seen before, and that’s why we should not tolerate new development that encroaches on the Earth’s little remaining natural habitat or impacts delicate forest ecosystems. I’ve heard a lot of local dope yuppies say. “Hey, look at the damage the logging industry did. Look at how much water those vineyards use. What’s wrong with my little three-acre conversion? Why are we pot farmers being singled-out for all of this regulation?”

It’s not your industry being singled-out. It’s our whole generation being stuck with the mess left by five-hundred generations of people who chose arrogance over respect, and mistook ego for intelligence. It’s about facing facts, and coming to terms with the truth, or it’s about denial, and suicide, but it’s not about your industry being singled-out. That’s just you being paranoid and egocentric, and those are just bad habits of ours, culturally.

 

Humboldt County’s Nuclear Caviar

We have a long history of shortsightedness here in Humboldt County. I suspect that we’re as eager to throw our long-term assets away for a fast buck as we ever were, and the impending legalization of marijuana gives us another opportunity to do just that.

Right now, the black-market cannabis industry holds this county hostage, politically and economically. The illegal marijuana industry has already brought enough social problems to Humboldt County, problems ranging from poverty and homelessness to hard drug abuse, violent crime and murder. Feeding this disease, and fueling the destruction it causes, the misguided War on Drugs has turned a harmless, easy to grow weed into expensive contraband. Now that the tides have turned on the War on Drugs, politicians and drug dealers will try to convince you that marijuana is nuclear caviar.

Nuclear, meaning that they will tell you that marijuana is so dangerous that it requires as much government oversight, control and regulation as a nuclear power plant. Caviar, because they intend to concoct some scheme to control cannabis production, to keep the price of cannabis artificially inflated, so that good pot remains an expensive luxury that working people can ill-afford.

Cannabis is not nuclear caviar. Cannabis is a giant fucking ripoff. Until now, the price of cannabis has been highway robbery at the point of a cop’s gun. If the CA legislature passes the current passel of pending cannabis legislation, they will simply turn iron-fisted prohibition into a state sponsored racket. It will still be highway robbery at the point of a cop’s gun, and pot will remain a giant fucking ripoff. For now.

Still, dramatic changes, already underway in the cannabis industry, will continue. The marijuana industry of today looks nothing like the marijuana industry of 20 years ago. Humboldt County will probably produce more marijuana, this year alone, than it did in the entire two decades between 1980 and 1999, and the cannabis industry of the future will look nothing like the cannabis industry of today.

The cannabis market will become more competitive, production will expand and automation will increase. Profit margins will shrink, leading to rapid consolidation. That means lots of people lose their jobs or go out of business. That’s how legal industries work. The cannabis industry is rapidly becoming a legal industry, full of businessmen who know how to run a business, and aren’t afraid to make tough decisions.

That is a dramatic change from the cannabis industry we all know and love. We like pot growers to be spendthrift fools who have no idea how much money they really make, buy everything retail, and drip money as they walk down the street. More than the cannabis itself, our local economy relies on the stupidity and shortsightedness of black-market dope growers who’s lack of business acumen lured them into this line of work to begin with. The black market takes money out of the hands of hard-working people, who might otherwise save it, and puts it into the hands of the people most likely to squander it. That’s how prohibition boosts the economy, and that’s what we see here in Humboldt County.

The fact is, no matter how legalization plays out, most of the people who benefit from the marijuana industry in Humboldt County today, will eventually get squeezed out. Will it happen in three years, or will it take five? That depends on a lot of things, but it will happen, regardless. A lot of people around here will have to find something else to do, and the sooner, the better.

The War on Drugs is a cruel racist policy. Mostly, the War on Drugs provides a legal framework for the violent control of minority communities, but here in Humboldt, we see another racist aspect to the War on Drugs. Here, the War on Drugs provided a relatively low-risk avenue to affluence for privileged white kids with no particular skills, talent or ambition. Hey, I’m a privileged, white, college drop-out myself. I certainly understand the attraction, but it’s still racist. It’s still wrong, and it’s still a huge fucking ripoff, but rest assured; that side of the War on Drugs, will evaporate too. The marijuana industry will no longer be dominated by white middle-class dilettantes looking for a low-stress, way to support their high-consumption lifestyle.

When you think about it, these are the people who make Humboldt County attractive and interesting, at least to me, the artists, performers and musicians, the idealistic art history, English and ancient language majors and the disillusioned scientists and engineers who decided they didn’t want to build weapons systems or devise new, environmentally destructive, products. For people like this, growing pot was a way to finance their art or their writing or their political activism, or their other interesting hobbies, without distracting too much from them. The cannabis industry of the future will have no place for these people.

Instead, the cannabis industry will be dominated by greedy white farmers who know how to grow pot and run a business, but have few, if any, other interests. Greedy white farmers do not attract tourists. If they did, people would flock to Iowa to watch corn grow. Greedy white farmers drain rivers, kill fish and destroy habitat, and they use their political clout to make sure that no one gets in their way. That’s what greedy white farmers do everywhere, and that’s what they intend to do here.

Yes, farming is boring and ugly and no one wants to see it, and the same is true of farmers, but we have something else here in Humboldt County that is worth more than all of the black-market marijuana we’ve grown here in the past, and all of the nuclear caviar we hope to produce in the future, put together. That is natural habitat.

Natural habitat has become remarkably rare around the world. I mean really rare, not artificially price-controlled, “rare,” but genuinely uncommon, and truly valuable. The Earth has lost half of its natural biodiversity since the first Earth Day, and the primary reason is loss of habitat. If we should treat anything around here like nuclear caviar, it is the natural habitat here in Humboldt County.

People want to see natural habitat, and they want to see it teeming with life.. Natural habitat attracts tourists. Biodiversity attracts tourists. No one will ever figure out how to produce habitat on the cheap and flood the market with biodiversity. Habitat will only become more rare and valuable. Pot, on the other hand, is easy to grow and cheap to produce, and it won’t be long before some state, like Nevada, Texas or Kansas, decides to get out of the way and open up the floodgates to an ocean of cheap cannabis.

That will leave us, here in Humboldt County, facing the same decision we face now, but with fewer options, and greatly diminished assets: Do we sacrifice our lives, and the natural habitat we love, in a vain attempt to compete with market forces beyond our control, or do we use our imagination, and learn to do something else, that harmonizes with the natural splendor of this unique place, and works for the kind of people who make up this community, and make this community special.

Island Mountain and the Truth About the War on Drugs

They say truth is the first casualty of war, and that’s certainly true of the War on Drugs. News reports and public statements about the recent raids of cannabis flower-forcing operations on Island Mountain point out just how far from reality both sides have gotten lately.

I heard Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputy Lt. Wayne Hanson explain that they “went to Island Mountain to eradicate marijuana just like we’ve done for the last 30 years.” They still haven’t gotten the memo that cannabis is legal in California, or that millions of Californians have the right to possess it, and businesses all over the state have licenses to distribute it. It’s only been 18 years since prop 215 passed. You can’t expect them to change overnight, especially considering how dependent they’ve become on asset forfeiture for their budget.

At some point, though, someone needs to point out that these kinds of raids no longer constitute law-enforcement, but instead cross over into armed robbery, home invasion, vandalism and terrorism. Like Lt. Hanson said, they’ve been doing this for 30 years. They’ll do it for another 30 years, regardless of what the law says, unless we stop them. No arrests were made. The DA will probably not bring charges, because a jury would not convict, and the jury would not convict because no one complained, no one was injured, and no crime was committed. That is, unless you count what the cops did, as a crime.

Still 100 cops spent all week, including a generous amount of overtime I’m sure, out at Island Mountain making criminal mischief with their newly allocated Measure Z funds. They’re like, “Hey, we’re cops, it’s summertime, what else are we going to do?” This is how cops justify the continuation of the War on Drugs these days. Heavy-handed assaults on unarmed vegetation have always been pointless, but now they have become a cherished tradition that they intend to preserve for future generations.

Hanson made sure to talk up the environmental crimes they uncovered at Island Mountain, like water diversions, illegal grading and water theft, and they dragged folks from the Water Quality and Wildlife Departments along for show, but this raid had all the hallmarks of an old fashioned Drug War style marijuana raid: unnecessary, excessive, and expensive. Obviously our Sheriff’s Department has entirely too much money at its disposal.

I have no doubt that those industrial grow operations on Island Mountain have an enormous impact on the environment, but I’m also sure that Hanson exaggerated the impact, at least as he perceived it, by claiming that each of the plants they eradicated used six gallons of water each day. I saw pictures of those plants. They were all small plants with big flowers, probably potted in 5 gallon containers. You cannot put six gallons of water into a five gallon pot on any day, let alone everyday. Despite the large scale of the operations they raided, Hanson still felt the need to exaggerate, just like in the good ol’ days of Drug War hysteria.

On the other side of this counterfeit coin,

we see the pervasive dishonesty of drug-dealers on display as well. LOCO reports that three people in the upper management of California Cannabis Voice Humboldt, or CCVH owned properties involved in last week’s raids. CCVH is one of those new groups lobbying to protect the incomes of local dope yuppies from the scourge of legalization. For months now, these groups have all recited the same mantras: “Preserve family farms,” “Protect Mom and Pop growers,” and “Support sustainable agriculture.”  They’ve all reacted with indignation about the raids on Island mountain.

Lobbying to Keep Pot Expensive

Hezekiah Allen wrote at length about how these raids breached the trust that they had worked so hard to build.

He mentioned the Mendocino County system of institutionalized bribery as an example.

He criticized law-enforcement for targeting people who were “working to come into compliance,” as though those Island Mountain monstrosities were shining examples of the “best practices” he talks so much about.

Those were not little “Mom and Pop” operations. Those were not homesteaders growing a little herb to put new tires on their old truck. Nor were they “small family farms” To me, they look like industrial mono-crop operations, newly hacked out of prime forest habitat. Even if they got all of the water for these grows from rainwater catchment ponds, the sheer size of these operations, the number of them, and the density of them, constitutes a real threat to wildlife because of how they fragment forest habitat

We hear a lot about the need to conserve water in these drought times, but widespread cannabis farming in the forest impacts wildlife in many different ways. Every clearing, every road, and every truck on the road has an impact.

Large operations like the ones on Island Mountain punch big holes in the forest canopy, and turn the animals that live there, like deer, bear, mountain lions, coyotes, gophers and woodrats, into pests, to be exterminated, or at least excluded.

Fertilizer runoff, erosion, light pollution, noise, traffic, pesticide contamination, all of these things accompany industrial agriculture wherever it happens, and I daresay, all of it was, and is still, happening on Island Mountain.

Those Island Mountain operations offer a glimpse into the future of the cannabis industry, and that future looks a lot different from its past, for which Humboldt County is so well known. Back in 1995, for instance, if you could manage to harvest five pounds of weed, which wasn’t easy, you could probably make your land payment, pay your taxes and feed yourself all year from the money you made. Back then, if you grew a hundred pounds, you were a big shot. If you did it outdoors, you were Houdini. This year, 2015, if you don’t harvest at least a hundred pounds, people around here will consider you a hobbyist.

The scale of grow operations in the area has exploded by orders of magnitude in recent years, and in this year in particular, as exemplified by the totals tallied in the raids on Island Mountain. The cops seized over 4,300 pounds of processed, packaged bud. That’s over TWO FUCKING TONS of high-grade marijuana, ready to smoke.

They eradicated more than 86, 000 plants, most of them in full bloom. That’s got to be another couple tons of bud. All tolled, this one raid might have taken 10,000 pounds, or five tons, of weed off the market. How do you like that for a price support system?

I’m not saying that large scale cannabis farming is inappropriate. Quite the contrary. I hope I see operations ten or twenty times the size of the ones raided on Island Mountain, but on established farmland, all over America. I like cannabis. I think everyone should have plenty of it, and we should grow it everywhere.

However, I am saying that these large scale cannabis operations are a totally inappropriate use of forest habitat, and their economic viability is likely to be short-lived, at best. It took the insanity of prohibition to drive industrial agriculture into the forest to begin with. It would be colossally stupid to encourage it to remain there, after we change the law.

Yes, these Island Mountain raids should remind us that there are no “good guys” in the War on Drugs. You can’t trust cops, and you can’t trust drug-dealers either. The War on drugs is being waged by heartless, lying, mercenaries on both sides, and their short-term agendas threaten our long-term survival. The sooner we take this industry out of the hands of the cops and the drug dealers, and put it into the hands of honest farmers with real farms, the sooner we can heal our country, our communities, and our watersheds from the ravages of the War on Drugs.

A Species in Adolescence

In separate interactions with two different liberal lawyers, recently, I heard the same phrase uttered as an excuse for human caused environmental devastation. It sounded all too familiar. It’s a deceptively simple phrase, but it conceals one of the fundamental myths of this new science-based religion called “Secular Humanism.” Both of these gentlemen expressed this phrase as a personal belief. “I just think that we are a species in the midst of adolescence.” or “I believe that we are a species in adolescence,” was more or less how they put it. That’s a strange thing to believe.

Secular humanists have adopted this strange belief in the adolescence of the human species because of their strange belief in science. Believing in science is pretty weird too, if you ask me. Not that anyone did, but still, it’s one thing to learn about the world using the scientific method, and it’s something else altogether to “believe in” science.

Secular humanists think that our objective, scientific understanding of the universe is the greatest thing since sliced bread. They see the emergence of science as a guiding light that will see us through this difficult phase of our evolution, our adolescence, if you will. We must be doing something right, they reason, if we can put a nuclear powered car on Mars, calculate the moment of the Big Bang to the millisecond and find the goddamn Higgs boson, and they assume there is a point to it all. They see the scientific viewpoint as superior. Our best hope for survival, as a species, they will tell you, is more science and technology. That’s what I mean when I say that Secular Humanists “believe in science.”

Unfortunately, the facts on the ground tell us that most of today’s really pressing crises originated with some new scientific development, and the technology it inspired. For instance we face Global Warming because of certain developments in chemistry, a few mechanical inventions, and a hell of a lot of marketing. The knowledge that science gives us, has led to horrific disasters and environmental devastation around the globe. From the spectre of nuclear warfare to global climate change, to overpopulation, every new scientific discovery leads to new technology, which creates a new crisis.

We tell ourselves that all of this destruction is part of our “education” as a species. We tell ourselves that we are a good species, and we are on the right track, but we just need a little more time to reach our maturity. If we think about human beings as an “adolescent species” does that also mean that we should also think of the genocide of the American Indians as a college “panty raid,” slavery as a sort of fraternity hazing, and the whole environmental crisis as just a nasty hangover from doing too many Jagger-bombs at that kegger last night? Perhaps we should just say: “boys will be boys.” about these dark chapters in in our history, because these were just the youthful indiscretions of an adolescent species, and someday, we’ll grow out of it, get a job, and settle down.

Of course, if we actually applied what we know about science to this new myth, we’d realize that adolescence happens to individuals, not species. Individuals reach a stage where they no longer need the direct care and supervision of their parents, but have very little experience to draw from in their encounters in the real world. Adolescence never happens to a whole species at once. Every species is fully mature at the moment it evolves into existence. There are no “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” in nature.

Species evolve in response to the pressures and limitations placed on them by their environment. If the species survives, it is only because it’s particular adaptations are suited to the challenges of the environment they face at that moment. Species don’t evolve with adaptations suited to some future world, or with adaptations that take a few millennium to refine. The idea of a species in adolescence has no basis in science at all.

Every generation of every species comes with a fully mature set of time-tested adaptations that prepare it for survival within the limits set by its environment. That’s why you will never hear a biologist say, of an invasive species, for instance: “Well, Zebra mussels are an adolescent species. They want to get out and see the world, but we think that eventually they will return to their home range and settle down as the species matures.”

…or of an endangered species: “We think that the declining numbers of Northern spotted owls in Northern California forests is the result of the owls engaging in risky behavior. We think the owls are ‘acting out’ in reaction to losing so much of their habitat to logging. Spotted owls are an adolescent species, and we think this is just a temporary phase. We just need to give the owls some space, and let nature take its course.” Nor will you find any such nonsense in biology textbooks.

Why then, do you suppose, has this idea of an adolescent species, homo adolescence, if you will, has become such a widespread belief among Secular Humanists, who, because of their high regard for science, should know better?

It might be because Secular Humanists, like most people, prefer literary metaphor to real science. It might be because most Secular Humanists just haven’t examined that aspect of their belief system very closely, or it could be because Secular Humanists simply cannot face the fact that we are not looking at the youthful indiscretion of a species nearing maturity, but instead, we are witnessing the collapse of a suicidal culture, that is taking science, democracy, all of our beloved technology, and everything that makes us feel superior to the rest of nature, with it. The real answer, of course, is “all of the above.”

In truth, we’re a great species! We’re a mature, time tested species, that has achieved global distribution. There’s nothing wrong with us as a species. As a species, we’ve developed thousands of cultures, suited to life in the place they originated. We just happened to be born into one particularly destructive culture, that has already destroyed an alarming amount of the world’s biologic, as well as human, cultural diversity. There’s nothing wrong with us as people, but the way we live, the way we think, and the way we see ourselves in relationship to the rest of nature couldn’t be more wrong. If we hope to survive, as a species, our culture has got to change.

Wildlife Matters #5 Debuts Today, Thursday, Feb 26 @5pm PST

Today, Thursday, February 26 at 5pm, KMUD Redwood Community Radio will air the latest installment of Wildlife Matters.  On this month’s show Amy Gustin and I will talk about Sea Otters, and the crucial role they play in maintaining healthy coastal ecosystems.

We’ll hear from sea otter biologist Dr. Jane Watson

…and noted ecologist Dr. James Estes.

They talk about sea otters’ peculiar adaptations which allow them to flourish in the chilly waters of the North Pacific.  they’ll teach us about “trophic cascades,” a fancy word to describe the consequences of eating habits on ecosystems, which explains how sea otters can turn a barren sea floor inhabited by nothing but sea urchins, into a lush kelp forest teeming with biodiversity.

Wildlife Matters airs on the fourth Thursday of the month on KMUD, and is available to all Pacifica Affiliates through audioport.org.  In the future, wildlife Matters will alternate the fourth Thursday at 5pm time-slot with my other new radio show called The Adventurous Ear.

Next month, The Adventurous Ear, a radio show highlighting music of exceptional originality, will bring you the music of Arcata based improvisational ensemble Medicine Baul.  I hope you’ll tune in today at 5pm for Wildlife Matters, and March 26 at 5pm for some wild music on The Adventurous Ear.  Just remember the fourth Thursday at 5pm as the time for something wild on KMUD Redwood Community Radio, or listen online at http://www.kmud.org

Pisaster Disaster

This starfish wasting syndrome is not funny folks. In case you haven’t heard the story, an epidemic of disease among Pacific starfish, specifically pisaster ochraceous, or Ocher Starfish, the big orange “stars” of beaches and tidepools, is causing them to waste away, fall apart and die in alarming numbers.

Humans have adored these strangely beautiful creatures for eons, and their popularity hasn’t waned one bit, but within the tidal ecosystem, the ocher starfish is a feared predator, at least to the degree that a bivalve mollusk can experience fear.

Frightening or not, the ocher starfish plays the same role in the intertidal zone as lions do on the Serengeti, or that wolves do in Yellowstone National Park. The ocher starfish is the apex predator of Pacific tide-pools. In fact, scientists have learned a lot of what they know about apex predators, like lions and wolves, from studying ocher starfish.

Ecology, especially ecosystem ecology, is a very new field of scientific inquiry. It seems hard to believe today, but before World War II, nobody really gave a rats ass about how ecosystems worked. The story of civilization has been one of “plunder first, ask questions later,” and so it goes that the science of studying ecosystems didn’t get under way until well after most of the world’s ecosystems had been severely impacted by industrial exploitation. As a result, we may never know how a healthy ecosystem operates. In a sense, studying ecosystem ecology today, must be a lot like trying to learn about antebellum life and culture by observing a confederate field hospital towards the end of the Civil War.

Still the nascent field of ecosystem ecology can teach us a few things about what happens to an ecosystem when you remove a keystone species. In fact, one of the landmark studies in the field of ecosystem ecology looked at the effects of removing just this particular species, pisaster ochraceous from a tide-pool ecosystem.

The scientist in this study, Robert T. Paine, marked off two equal sized patches of tide-pool habitat. A couple of times a month, Robert would go to one of those marked off areas, and within it he would meticulously remove every single ocher starfish from that area, and hurl them, as far as he could, into the surf. In the other marked-off area, he did nothing but observe.

Every two weeks or so, for a year, Robert went down to his little marked-off areas and began chucking starfish. Doesn’t this make “ecosystem ecologist” sound like a pretty sweet job? Spend your days splashing around on the beach skipping starfish across the water. How do I sign up? I guess his hands got pretty torn-up from the abrasive skin of starfish, but it still sounds like a pretty good job to me.

Over the course of the year, Paine observed the results of his strange new obsession. In the area where Paine had removed all of the ocher starfish, the ecosystem collapsed. Initially Paine observed dozens of different species living together in that area. Within a year, half of those species had disappeared completely, and those that remained, did so only tenuously. Before long, all but one species completely vanished from the experimental area.

The only species left inhabiting the area, had completely taken over. Every square inch of the marked off area was covered with large mussels, mytilus californianus, the ocher starfish’s favorite prey. In absence of starfish, nothing could stop the mussels from squeezing everyone else out of the picture, leaving a desolate monoculture where there was once a thriving, diverse ecosystem.

Paine published the results of his experiment in 1966 in the scientific journal American Naturalist, and it has become a foundational work in this emerging new field. Paine’s experiment revealed that certain species, specifically predators, have a greater effect on their ecosystem than their numbers suggest.

Paine’s work with starfish eventually led to federal protection of keystone predators like the spotted owl, and to the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. Paine had demonstrated that predators are critical to maintaining healthy ecosystems, and that without them, complex and diverse ecosystems quickly collapse into desolate wastelands overrun with pests.

Like I said, ecosystem ecology is a new field, and its progress has been greatly compromised by the impacts of industrial exploitation. As a science, ecosystem ecology remains in its infancy, especially regarding marine ecosystems, but when it comes to the question “What happens to intertidal ecosystems when ocher starfish disappear?” thanks to Robert T Paine, science can give us a pretty good answer. Unfortunately the answer itself is neither pretty nor good.

Introducing: The Living Earth Connection

Introducing: The Living Earth Connection

 

Maybe you don’t get my perspective. Maybe you think I’m just a knee jerk reactionary, or maybe you just think I’m a jerk, but if you want to know why I see the world the way I do, you should listen to my partner, Amy Gustin’s radio show, this coming Sunday April 29 at 9:30 AM on KMUD (or you can download an mp3 file of it here, to listen to at your leisure). I cannot recommend this show highly enough.

Her program, The Living Earth Connection draws from the writings of Daniel Quinn. The show takes a long view of human history, instead of dividing the story of our species into “history” and “prehistory”. From this perspective, the program examines the success of our species as well as the success of our culture, drawing conclusions that shatter the dominant paradigm.

Amy did a great job of putting this material together. She’s put together a program that can change the way you see the world forever, but just because its profound, that doesn’t mean its going to get religious. Our problems run deeper than religion, and so does this show. You should listen.  (This link takes you to the Living Earth Connection blog)