Ranting is Impossible... for all things are connected.

To Fight for the Land
Wyoming Tribune - Cheyenne,WY,USA

Sage runs ahead, stopping to point at a grouse in the underbrush before it flies into a tree. Reed's a relatively quiet man, striking up a conversation here ...

Hi All,

It seems many Wyomingites have yet to fully discover the ease and power of commenting online following an article such as this. I will comment later this evening and I invite folks outside the state to comment as well. The Wyoming Range includes hundreds of thousands of National Forest and Bureau of Land Managment (BLM) lands (your land). If all the voices in Wyoming collectively shouted 'keep oil and gas development off our public land!" that may not be enough to stop the Dick Cheney cabal from developing anyway.

Thanks for lending your voice. You can comment online at end of the rather poignant article entitled "To Fight for the Land." (linked above & below)

To see an aerial view of what the gas & oil companies seek to do to the Wyoming Range go to:

http://skytruth.mediatools.org/content/images/photo.acs?object_id=10897&photo_id=14415

Just in case you might think the simulated aerial view of the Wyoming Range is an exaggeration, go to:

http://skytruth.mediatools.org/objects/view.acs?object_id=4419

Here you will see a time lapse of natural gas and oil development in the now infamous Jonah Field near Pinedale AZ. Just ask Mike McRoy... an Illinois resident who has visited this area several times. When Mike discovered I was moving to Wyoming he warned me I would smell gas and oil if I visited what has historically been a pristine sage brush steppe and mountain region around Pinedale, WY. Mike was right. Locals are livid but does anyone in the Cheney coterie care? Of course not.

No more or less than the Appalacians need outside help so do Wyomingites. Wyomingites have long resented outside interference to their culture (even if offered as genuine help) but they need help. This is not a Wyoming problem. Like mountaintop removal, this unbridled stampede of energy extraction is a national disaster. It won't take long before both the gulped-down energy reserves and the land, water, and air destroyed to get at those reserves are gone... and forever. Our kids will love us for gulping down their future energy reserves and for destroying any hope of enjoying clean air and water, pristine lands and the wildlife we so enjoy today. I keep asking myself... "who are we?"

This white-bread raised kid used to stand on the sidelines while my teenaged friends marched to end an unjust war. I used to secretly admire their courage. I felt and was, in fact, constrained from participating in this necessary grand social "acting out."

Now I am an adult. Now I act out. Now, when the stakes, to my personal life, are greatest, I act out. Folks where have all the hippies gone.... long time passin'? Here we are... in the midst of another Vietnam... only worse in many ways. We have an unjust war and corporate takeover of our government taking place right before out eyes. Where are those teenagers who used to question and challenge authority? Did the stakes get to high for them? Robert Hoyt wrote a song, "I Hate Money." If you think do or don't hate money you might want to listen to the words of his song.

While singing the evils of money Hoyt includes the deepest truth of all, "I hate money, it's that carrot on a stick... I hate money, as I turn another trick... I hate to think that they would take away mine... And that's ALL it takes to keep me in line!" duh duh duh duh dut! Isn't that so true. But again I ask, "who are we?" We are watching our communities, our regions, our nation, our world slip into corporate fascism and because they haven't yet quite enough power to take full control of all our money or our lives and we can still enjoy TV and air-conditioned couches we sit in silence... hoping we either outlive the bastards or that we die before the great fall comes. But... what happened to caring about the world beyond our own personal comfort? What happened to fighting for principles that extend beyond our own noses? What have our children become? Pawns in our tax returns? Feathers in our parental caps? Friends, we are leaving them a mess they did not create. Who do we blame? I used to blame the prior generation. But guess what! As I look around... I discover a sobering thought... I am now part of what I used to call "that prior" generation. Here I am about to turn over a world to my children that is far less attractive than the world that "awful prior generation" handed to me. We are turning over global military instability, global economic instability, unthinkable US debt to a nation many consider the greatest threat to our economy and way of life (China), and in my view, I am turning over the worst of the worst to my children.... a collapsing global ecology. None of the above matters one bit if my children have not... fresh air to breathe, clean water to drink, healthy food to eat or a natural world that they can retreat to when the all else in world is simply too painful to endure.

The worst trait we are bequeathing our children is our example of apathy. Corporate economics have crippled our imagination, thus rendering us hopeless, that a community can exist without absentee ownership. We have abandoned the idea that we can supply each other with the healthiest food, most durable goods, and most genuine services without shipping McDonald's hamburgers from South America, Africa, or Asia into every village across the US. Not to disparage the foreigner (God bless 'em all), but we believe we cannot have a clean, healthy, and happy home unless a foreigner cleans it. We believe we cannot get from point A to point B without EXXON-Mobil.

Folks, the fact that you might now be considering me out of touch with reality is testament to the fact that we have lost our image of communty, of true communal self-reliance. We have become toddlers, helpless to resist the commands of our new parents, corporations and their illegitimate offspring they (and we) call "democracy." We the people are no more the central component of U.S. Democracy than the U.S. economy is the central component of Wall Street.

I have, true to form, digressed. But there is a method to my madness and naturalist, John Muir, best explained both my method and my seeming madness. Muir pointed out, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is tied to everything else in the universe." John Muir (1838-1914) U. S. naturalist, explorer.

Oil and gas development is at the heart of corporate fascism and we, therefore, cannot not pick it out without picking out all that is connected to it. We cannot save or natural world without picking out that which is destroying it whether that be political corruption, corporate or personal greed, inhumane treatment of the poor and helpless (including countless plants and animals struggling to survive), or perhaps worst of all our own apathy. We must pluck deadly apathy from the fragile web of life that exists only in a thin film across the surface of one planet earth. The depths of earth is not our home and it cannot sustain us. Only the surface do we have upon which we can live and reproduce. Only rock and remnants of catastrophic death, something we call fossil fuel, exists below the thin living surface of our planet. We have been hoodwinked into believing if we exhume the dead of the past and consume their remains (fossil fuels) we are somehow advancing the human race. NO. We are simply advancing our own journey to lie with the dead in the form of coal or oil. One thin film covering planet earth is the domain of life. Yet when we think of earth sustaining us, we think of a giant blue ball and, unconsciously or not, we think of the entirety of this big blue as life sustaining. Nothing could be more untrue. Think! Protect this very limited and finite thin film scientists, at least, understand is the only source of life on planet earth. Protection includes the dismantling of powers that deceive us into believing we can eat, drink, and breathe gas and oil. I hope Muir's point is clear in my rant. "All things in the universe are connected" and I might add, "finite."

As always... recipients of this, my rant, need least to endure my words. But please glean what you can and pass on to shock addicts who may enjoy the "shock" of it all. Our shock addicted world needs to be shocked back into reality... quite opposite the kind of shock our so-called "reality TV" offers.

You know, Bush sold a shell-shocked US citizenry a bill of goods that included the notion that "Shock & Awe" would, overnight, transform Iraq into some form of paradise. Of course it didn't and, of course, a shell-shocked US citizenry has had four years to rationalize away its guilt for supporting such a naive and heartless invasion of Iraq. It is time we transform US foreign policy from "shock & awe" to "talk & aha!" It is time our domestic and foreign policies value the shock and awe that comes with understanding each other and the wonders of our natural world. No bomb will ever be designed by engineers, manufactured by factory workers, and dropped by a bombardier that can shock and awe an Iraqi student, sitting studiously in a classroom, more effectively than a single bit of shock and awe information presented by his or her teacher. Anyone that has witnessed that spark in any student's eye when a new and fascinating truth about the world in which he or she lives creates that priceless moment when suddenly the student's world makes much more sense, knows what I am talking about! This is the kind of shock and awe our world needs... a form of shock and awe we can be proud of rather than ashamed.

Please don't forget my plea offered so many paragraphs ago. Comment to save Wyoming from Dick Cheney's rape and pillage of his own home sate, Wyoming.

Duane

To Fight for the Land
Wyoming Tribune - Cheyenne,WY,USA
Sage runs ahead, stopping to point at a grouse in the underbrush before it flies into a tree. Reed's a relatively quiet man, striking up a conversation here ...

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