Report from Two Rivers - (a version of this appeared in the Sierra Club Lone Star chapter newsletter 2017)

The road drops 1500 feet in elevation from the mile-high plateau of Marfa on route south toward Two Rivers Camp. You might pass a car or two and sometimes none at all on the 41 mile drive toward the Rio Grande. Creosote Bush, a few mesquite, a long horn, no fences and mountains, the Sierra Ricos in the Mexican distance, Chinati to the east and San Jacinto a 5000 foot peak, 7 miles from camp, stands aloof, jagged, a beacon that has been known by humans for 12,000 years.

January at camp was cold. Nearly every night saw temps drop to freezing or below. But the hearty souls that live there and those that come out for the weekend, carry on, because in many ways that is what the camp is about – to carry on.

The drums beat. Sunrise. We gather in a circle near the sweat lodge as the native led ritual begins. A ceremony to the great spirit. A sprinkling of tobacco. A smudge. Another day. A new day.

Donations have been generous. Food is plenty. We eat. We plan. How better to use the gray water? The compost needs more heat. When can we plant the watermelon seeds?

We talk of a day when the rich humble and the poor rise, a day when who we are as a people reflects across borders and the world is at peace.

The temp rises. Its 70. A Border Patrol helicopter circles overhead.

We gather firewood and stoke the flame of the sacred fire.

We carry on.

Pablo Who? (a version of this article appeared in DECELERATION)

The new guy poured Karo tinged with black over my head and it dripped into my beard. It stuck there. Crude oil. At the pipeline construction site across Highway 67 five others from camp wore gas masks and held banners. It took DPS less than three minutes to show. The sheriff showed in ten followed by the Border Patrol and a Texas Ranger. They read our FB posts.

Richard Mark Glover

We pulled off the stunt, then the new guy bellows, “See, no arrests.” He’d assured us it was a non-arrestable event. We let him orchestrate it. Now, I studied his face and tried not to use his high-amped confidence against him. We’re all brothers and sisters here united in the fight against corporate greed.

The post-protest crowd laughed, smiled easily, the drum beating in victory while a group of cops led by a thin deputy with Sheriff written across his T-shirt walked toward us. They stopped in front of Pete Hefflin.

Pete has been with Two Rivers Camp since it opened in late December. He was an elder of the Society of Native Nations, the Big Bend Defense Coalition’s partner at camp. Steely-eyed, sure, tough, with a menacing scar etched on his neck. He was in charge of camp security and had sent at least seven packing for various infractions including smoking weed at our drug-free, alcohol-free camp.

He led sunrise ceremonies and sang. His guttural hoops sparked the little bit of Quachita in me. Many of the men in camp looked up to him as a leader. I was one of them. He and I agreed: whoever died first, the other would sing at the funeral.

The questioning went on. Too long. Something was wrong. Then the deputies handcuffed Pete Hefflin.

Four women from camp, trained in these situations, swarmed Pete and the arrest party. “What’s the charge? Why’s he being arrested?” They demanded. The camp cook yelled, “Come on. Get outta here. Lets go!” One of the women turned to the cook and shot him the bird.

We piled in the van and headed to the checkpoint following the paddy-wagon. The sheriff suspected an out-of-state warrant and would finger-print Pete Hefflin there. The checkpoint had not been good to us. The dog always seemed to smell something. The week before a Border Patrolman told me, as he rifled through my Toyota, that the dogs were trained to “sniff out illegal drugs and odors from human beings.” Check the latter.

The driver shouted, “Anybody else got a warrant?” We stopped at 169, a mile before the check point and eight of us got out and into the res-truck. We headed back to camp, while the van and the rent-a-car with the new guy and the cook drove on.

I checked the gauge – less than an eighth. I let out seven in the middle of nowhere, U-turned back to Marfa, and gasoline. Luck through the checkpoint, then the new guy and the cook stood waving beside the rent-a-car on the side of the road. I picked them up and we all went to re-fuel.

Clouds streaked the sky. Black Karo hardened in my beard. I pumped gas, that which we are against. I want it in the tank—fast. Dave, the former mayor of Marfa slows, rolls down his window, gestures. I shout out, “Don’t ask!” Then: “Performance Art – Highway 67.”

We made it back to camp. Sullen. Unsure. The cook says he wants to talk and sequestered me to the side. “Those women are spies, infiltrators!”

I listened.

“It’s me or them,” he said. 

I didn’t want to lose him. He’s the cook and I like him, but this time he’s wrong.

“Any word from Marfa?” I asked nobody in particular.

Then the news.

Pete Hefflin is not Pete Hefflin. He is Pablo Gutierrez. A rap sheet a mile long—but as Pete Hefflin, clean in Texas for the last 12 years.

I believe in redemption. I believe in Pete Hefflin. Pablo Who?

Review; Bedouin band - "Tinariwen" (a version of this appeared in the Big Bend Sentinel 2011)

Taureg energy metered over the Capri stage last Thursday night in Marfa as the motor coach traveling Bedoiun band “Tinariwen” pumped the sound of a different desert into the West Texas air. Surreal, at times you expected the six man band to drop their electric guitars, pull off their kufeyas and reveal L.A. smiles, but the music, strange and bent was too far out to be a charade.

They call it “Desert Blues” but you didn’t hear a turn-around, no 12 bars to rely on for your dance rhythm – this was different, like 11 beats to a measure if anybody was counting. At times there was a riff you might nail, Almond Bros? Stevie Ray Vaughn? – But like a North African sirocco it was gone with the wind into the strange.

A consciousness mulled in their beat – distinct from much American hip-swaying, sex-drive pump. Tinariwen’s was blue nights, blue stars, but not the blues we know – happy, sad and hypnotic at times. Hands at their side, they received their praise with apparent aplomb but their eyes told us “it is good.” Steel balls on ceramic occasionally feathered the beat in a wavy motif and the bass player charmed some songs with a one-two that captured a sitar like buzz, perhaps a root that checked their music in the dry white Sahara.

In Mali, the founder of the band, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib witnessed his Taureg rebel father’s execution in 1963 after a failed coup d’tat. The family fled to the vast expanse of the open desert sojourning in the shadow of sand dunes, along ancient camel-hoofed trade routes south of the Atlas Mountains. Refugee camps sprung up in southern Libya as Taureg clans and others from neighboring countries took advantage of Muammar al-Gaddafi’s apparent generosity. The band members met in these camps in 1979 and soon became known as “Kel Tinariwen” a Tamashek phrase meaning “Desert Boys”. Playing Tuareg and Arab pop at the refugee camps, they began to explore “chaabi” protest music of Morocco, Algerian pop-rai and later Presley, Santana, Led Zepplin, Boney M, Marley and Hendrix. They gained international recognition in 2000, won Germany’s prestigious Praetorius Music Award in 2008 and have toured and released a number of CD’s including their latest “Tassili”.

Outside the gabion-walled Capri courtyard a slick motor coach await these Bedouin musicians. The Tuareg tour on. Other great music towns beacon outside the desert: New Orleans, Atlanta, London

The State of Oil & Gas (A version of this article appeared in the Big Bend Sentinel, 2017)

Smog. A lot of it lately. Almost every time I drive in the Texas Big Bend country I see less blue, less mountain.

By chance I got a call from Texas Sharon of Earthworks. “Wanna go for a drive?” She asked. We head toward Balmorhea in her Dodge with Wilma Subra, a renowned chemist, filmmaker Joe Cashiola and Sharon’s FLIR video camera that makes visible the invisible air pollution coming from oil&gas facilities. We’re looking for leaks. Smog makers. Methane.

The shale play region around Balmorhea State Park, known as the Alpine High, is the most active fossil fuel hunt in the world right now. John Christman, CEO of Apache Corp., pledged to his shareholders last year he’d spend two billion dollars in 2017 exploring there for oil & gas. $2B is a lot of combustion.

Sharon stops the Dodge on the side of Highway 17, 30 miles south of Pecos and focuses the FLIR lens toward an oil well tank battery that seemed benign but in the camera’s black&white monitor we see clouds of gas rise from the tanks. “See that one,” she points. “Not only is it venting through the pipe but the top of the tank is leaking too.”

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TECQ) allows up to 25 tons of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC’s) to be released from existing sources yearly. This allows harmful gases from hydrocarbon production including ethylacetate, hexane, and 2-butanone to vent into the atmosphere, adding to the Green House Effect, that human induced phenomena that keeps heat trapped in our atmosphere creating global warming. Sharon is sure that most sources in Texas exceed this yearly limit. And that quantity does not even include methane aka natural gas. Unlike Colorado and some other hydrocarbon producing states, methane, in Texas is unregulated. “But the real problem,” she said. “Is they’re not even monitoring. I’ve sent them clips of leaking gas but seldom do they take action.”

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality production permits allow many other air pollutants such as nitrous oxide to be released which combined with VOC’s and sunlight create the ozone smog we see on the horizon.”

We look toward the Davis Mountains but they are not there.

This year the State of Texas cut the TECQ air pollution budget by $20million per year guaranteeing an even more passive approach to air pollution. Oil&Gas doesn’t seem to like regulation, moreover enforcement. And with Governor Abbott leading this charge, motivated perhaps by half million dollar campaign contributions from the likes of pipeline giant Kelcy Warren – what can we expect, ethical behavior? Or should we rejoice in behavior deemed legal by rich lawyers in office conjuring for their oil&gas buddies?

We drive north and scope another tank battery. All leaking, all venting. Then we check a flare, from a distance - the roar of pressure pushes the base of the flame 20 feet from the top of the flare stack.

“That one relieves pressure directly from the underground formation,” Subra said. The flare next to it black smokes but mildly pyrographic compared to the devil next to it.

We turn down another road and watch through the FLIR camera monitor another set of tanks off-gassing. With the methane comes carcinogens including toluene, benzene, and sulfuric acid. If you’re unfortunate enough to live in the vicinity of oil&gas production, common health effects include respiratory impacts, sinus problems, throat irritation, allergies, fatigue, eye and nasal irritation, breathing difficulties, vision impairment, severe headaches, swollen joints, and sleep disturbances.

We stop now at a frack on a Rosetta Corporation wellhead. Fracks are generally a 3 day operation. Ten million gallons of water are lost to the hydro-logic cycle forever. Five hundred tons of special sand along with blends of various “proprietary” chemicals including diesel, pesticides, detergents, solvents, and carcinogens like benzyl chloride, formaldehyde, and napthalene are mixed into the fracking solutions.

Trucks smoked as they lined up in a snaky half mile queue ready to discharge their goo into the crevices of our earth.

“They’re going to frack tonight Joe,” I whisper in Joe’s ear as if conscience will be struck from all moral codes for the next few hours.

Eight thousand miles away, a New York Times article reports this week, that a laboratory off the Tasmanian coast is monitoring our air, air that should be some of the cleanest on the planet as it sweeps across thousands of miles of ocean.

It appears, however, according to the article by Justin Gillis, that over the last two years atmospheric Carbon Dioxide concentrations, the No.1 source of the Green House Effect, have accelerated. Consequently global warming/climate change, will accelerate, and Mother Nature may become Mother Strange.

The NYT article suggests that the natural sponges, likes trees and oceans have been absorbing much fossil-fuel generated CO2 over the years of the industrial age but are now saturated. And methane, 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide over a twenty year period, flows like no tomorrow in the once pristine area of the Big Bend.

We climb back in the Dodge now. I have a headache. There is less talk. We head back to Marfa, as the mountains, cleft and everlasting, slowly re-emerge through the smog.  

Report from Two Rivers Camp (A version of this appeared in the Big Bend Gazette, 2017)

Reef, my 8 year old son, and I pull out late from Two Rivers Camp, the stars twinkling beyond the mountains as we drive north up the caliche road. We plan to meet the leaders of the Toyavale Camp, a long over-due pow-wow and a chance to get away. Two Rivers is on its 90^th day. Since Day 1, at least one in our family has been at the only current direct action camp in Texas.

Reef sleeps now in the back seat as I pull over at a roadside park with big trees, near Fort Davis, a spot we'd once seen elk standing in the snow one winter long ago. I lay out our sleeping bags in the truck bed and we roll up close in the 1am cool. Stars between the branches. Every branch.

Spring Break souls poured into Two Rivers from all over that week; young environmentalist from Houston, Austin, Santa Fe, Denver and a blitz of protesters from Standing Rock that included a tribe from Canada. Hardcore. Their philosophy staged a rational conviction that continued construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, the exercise of feckless corporate power and business agents acting as elected representatives of the people was not only unjust but a signature that capitalism is out of control.

There is philosophy and there is philosophy that fuels thought and action. At Toyavale Camp it was monitoring the fracking frenzy of John Christmann's Apache Corp.

To finance their own drilling, Apache, is selling some of their lease options in the 454,000 acres they bought early on, potent acres that surround the world's finest swimming pool – Balmorhea State Park. Christmann told shareholders in Sept 2016 he'd spend 2 billion dollars in 2017 in the Alpine High mining fossil fuels. Coupled with the other players, the activity was intense and Toyavale Camp has much to keep busy.

Men are often chosen as CEO's because of their confidence. Confidence is often distilled through a disconnect with others – allowing ruthlessness to bubble just below the swagger. And if you happen to be an oil&gas executive, a disconnect with environmental reality helps too.

At Two Rivers Camp the philosophy is direct action: protest – lock down, call out the injustice of the American Corporate model, a model so outdated we might as well light the whole Earth on fire. Kelsy Warren's ETP, is destroying Texas with a lot of help from his cronies at the capitol, and profits by killing the state's last frontier with a 143 mile methane tube known as the Trans Pecos Pipeline. Seared across the Big Bend wilderness, the legally mastered “public utility” affords private gain by connecting the gassy denatured gray of the Permian Basin environmental catastrophe with an export terminal in Topolobampo.

Twenty-one public protests events were staged in the first 90 days of Two Rivers camp's existence including twelve felony arrests. The demographics of those incarcerated, mostly 25 to 35 years old, many professional, mostly Native, White, Latino, and LGBT, chose to be arrested for simple exercising their first amendment rights. As the felony arrests continue around the nation, many generated by camps such as ours, authorities are actually creating a class of young people who now will never qualify for the “American Dream.” And this creates an even bigger subculture of committed protesters.

Stars – the story of the Big Bend. Photons of past light penetrating the skies. Orion's mighty Betelgeuse yellows in the night sky as Reef begins to snore.

The story of Texas could not be more explicitly told than the story of the City of Denton's recall on fracking. Railed by a fracking operation less than a football field from a high school, the city changed their laws and passed the ordinance to outlaw fracking within their city limits. The day after that Tuesday, the Texas Oil&Gas Association sued the city for “loss of profit.” The day after that, a state Bush sued the city for “loss of oil&gas tax revenue.”A month later our state legislature ruled by business agents, determined Texas cities cannot change their ordinances to limit oil&gas production, even if they're a stone's throw from a High School.

Texas is the epitome of the one per cent sucking the blood of the 99 per cent. It is No.1 in industrial accidents, No.1 in pollution, and most likeliest state to have people without a high-school diploma. 47 billionaires call Texas home and pay the same rate of tax as a poor single mom. Our governor's hobby is not fishing but suing the federal government to protect the one per cent from federal oversight.

Meantime, as the fracking frenzy continues in the Alpine High, the partners of the McDonald Observatory, namely the University of Texas, sludge through the process of dealing with oil&gas flares, trucks and tanks and smells and smoke at the bottom of their mountain-mounted telescopes. How does oil&gas deal with itself? In this case, the business of astronomy and education have to justify the extra layer of grunge the 1 to 2 photons of hourly light from deep space have to pass through to register at the lens.

Reef and I roll into the Toyavale Camp the next afternoon and are greeted with handshakes. We swap tales of running camps and could've gone on talking into that hazy Reeves County night – but my son and I are thinking the same thing – lets get on the other side of the mountain, find that tree and collect a few more Z's of powerful star-photon sleep.

Their is nothing sleepy about the most powerful entity in the world - the oil&gas industry. The 20 billion tons of fossil fuels offered annually have created an international network of players whose use of force including war is second to none. And the twenty billion annual tons of burned carbon add to the Greenhouse Effect and nudge human-essential environmental negative feedback loops into reverse. Twenty billion tons a year - in our finite space has consequences. Scientists tell us once we hit 450PPM of Co2 in the atmosphere, we may be out of business. We're at 405 today and currently adding 1PPM per year.

And those mired in myths including the Texas Myth still deny anthropomorphic induced climate change.

If we change Texas can we change the world?

Two hundred eighty billion dollars were exported from this state last year, and over half were oil field related. Moreover, our fresh engineers and other specialists from UT, Texas A&M and Tech etc., move out across the planet; Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Iraq, Saudi Arabia exporting the Texas ideology – slash and burn you might call it.

If we change Texas, we can change the world.

Its a powerful force this Texas and if we're going to change it and change the world we should all think about joining or supporting some of these camps. Camps are popping up nationally, internationally – direct action camps who's sole purpose is to expose the injustice, peopled by youth who are dedicating their lives to a re-visioned world and camps like Toyavale committed to monitoring the extraction process so that others can find the facts undiluted by corporate smear and state government editing.

At the roadside park near Ft Davis, Reef and I again watch the stars through the big tree. A twinkle of hope, but just a twinkle.