And so it goes, rural California gets away again and again with a complicity of environmental disaster.
I know the country this article is about. I did WASC accreditations in that county and was an acting Director of a large Charter School there.
I grew up visiting Burney and Fall River. I know the people who live there. I even hunted, deer, (I never shot my rifle).
They were the foot soldiers who destroyed the environment. Modoc and Lassen County were once the bedrocks of the logging industry, clear cutting thousands of square miles in the incessant quest to build the west.
San Francisco, Las Angeles etc., all have the wood from these counties and in California as their infrastructure bedrock. In short, Lassen and Shasta County, et al, were where the lumber was that built the cities of the world….
This fall the commander in chief of meanness tried to remove protections for wolves, who are nearly extinct. He also is trying to cause American democracy to go extinct also.
Don’t believe the lies. Wolves are nearly extinct all over the world. Don’t believe the lies, mankind’s survival is at stake.
Every day many species go extinct, including thousands of square nautical miles of coral.
The balance of nature has been ruptured. Pandemics are a result not a cause of climate change.
But the Republican Party the party of “business” pushes every harder for more oil, more timber, more more more. And the middle white caste votes with them.
California as a state burns every year, pouring even more CO2 into the atmosphere.
We are looking at a disaster that will make the pandemic (also caused by global warming) child’s play. More pandemics were forecast long ago because the habitat destruction and building in remote areas have forced bats and other animals that carry pandemic virus closer to people who catch the killer virus. When Trump says China it really means from humanity too close to wild animals. But as a plutocrat he fans the winds of war.
As usual the wild animals must either move or die. And they die. And we die as they die.
I know this region I know the people. They are all angry.
They are angry because most of them used to work in the logging industry.
Old growth forests were nearly all cut down in the mad dash to the suburbs after WWII, that build millions of homes, with two car garages that encouraged people to move to the suburbs, and that meant two cars plus an RV and the useof gasoline exploded.
America won the war to a large degree by having an endless supply for the allies of oil to fuel its war machine.
Thousands of real estate agents and contractors got rich with this housing boom. Oil companies got rich, car builders got rich, television was built on car sales ads, it pervades every inch of the modern economy.
In short the entire world is now addicted to petroleum. Our modern lifestyle is completely dependent on oil.
And we are running out of it. Fracking and other chemistry driven tricks are draining every drop of the precision fuel out of bedrock, with some predictions of a run out in 10 years.
That’s right, ten years!
This boom created a rich middle white caste, leaving people of color and the original owners of the timberlands, in poverty. Racism and red lining, that made our current President very rich, built a nation of injustice and inequality that is currently tearing us apart. Segregation and the caste slavery it prompted are all buttresses of the oil economy. They are intertwined.
Native Americans, who also nearly went extinct (in fact their culture IS EXTINCT) warned us in a Seventh Generation Prophecy (now) that large scale destruction of the environment would mean a disaster for the world of pandemic proportions.
In short, they predicted exactly what is happening now.
And it isn’t over. Part of this madness created a petroleum dependent world, that is based foolishly on the never ending oil.
We are running out of oil. Yet we still build suburbs.
The housing industry will literally kill mankind to stay in their evil profit making disaster quest for endless profit.
And animals go extinct in massive numbers.
The chain of life, when broken, will ultimately mean mankind is next.
And this article proves it. As the wolves go, so goes mankind….
Rural areas like Lassen County long ago swung to a fascist economic apologist society. In short, they vote for fascist plutocrats who put the economy above EVERYTHING ELSE. Ranchers are barely hanging on to a lifestyle that the oil economy is intent on destroying.
Ranchers are as much a victim of this greed as the wolves they hate.
Their enemy is not the wolves, their enemy is rich plutocracy.
That means if the climate change kills my people, so what, progress and money means everything.
Trump was elected because the modest efforts to slow climate change began to touch the money making machine that is suburbia. The white middle class screamed in anger as their lives were effected first, the rich plutocrats actually are making more money as the middle class dwindles. The drop in middle class status means more goes to the top 1%, and there is way less for the rest of us.
One proof is the price of gasoline is a news item all the time, when I used to work in a gas station gas was 10 cents a gallon, now it is 5 dollars! That is supply and demand in action, which means we are running out of oil!
The homelessness of America proves this. Homelessness means people can no longer afford the timber rich suburb life style; lumber is more rare driving housing cost and rents so high that middle class people cannot afford them; hence homelessness.
But true to fascism, the angry middle class chooses to kill wolves to protect what they think is the key to their survival, when killing wolves and protecting industrialists is exactly the opposite.
It will ultimately kill mankind.
There is an arrogance that is really fear that feeds the right wing in rural California. There is an anger because the economic boom that followed WWII ended about fifty years ago.
Now the world is trapped in a never ending spiral of anger, throwing democracy under the bus, filling government with fascists who blame democracy for the economic woes that climate change and plutocratic selfishness have caused.
It is no accident that Russia gave in a long time ago to plutocracy, that Germany, England etc., and not far behind. FASCIST PLUTOCRACY IS THE FASTEST GROWING POLITICAL MODE IN THE WORLD.
The last time economic dislocation like this threatened the world, a World War ensued that killed 55,000,000 people.
The next time it will be way worse.
The only way out is first racial justice, first we have to rid our society and the world of the wrong headed idea that a caste system somehow can keep the economy of much for the few and nothing for the many going.
That is plutocratic or aristocratic fascism, where the state is really the economic boss who run the country for one thing: profit. This is exactly the same analysis that socialists reached in 1900!
But in 1900 there still was a over supply of lumber and oil; now there is not. The “business of America is business” was the watchword then and is the death knoll of democracy now. Trump represents that autocracy, that is an inevitable result of economic dislocation and shortages.
Trump is a product of that madness, so was Mussolini, so was Stalin, so was Hitler.
Political Science and climate science are linked at the hip.
The Native Americans, who most Americans only know about from racist movies, have been screaming at us to stop, to change before it is too late.
And the litmus test of that change is how we treat nature; the early returns on that, with a deeply divided country over climate change, is not a good one. The perpetuators of rich, who are the same spoilers of the environment are clearly in control.
Think not, look at the United States Senate!
And, as we are learning to our horror, it also is critical to ending democracy around the world. Dictatorships evolve when supply and demand swings into exploitation and destruction.
The wolves always have been a friend of man, domesticated dogs were once wolves. They are man’s best friend.
And they are in trouble because we are in trouble…The Cherokee had the fable of the two wolves, all of us have evil wolf and kind wolf in us….we all have the choice of what wolf to follow.
Most of us, to make a profit, have chosen the evil wolf.
May God have mercy…