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philosophy is direct action: protest – lock down, call out the injustice of the American Corporate model, a model so outdated we might as well light the whole Earth on fire.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.

Apache Corp hooks-up with UTA - (Valentine Radio News 2017)

October 24, 2016

Apache Corp hooks-up with UTA

VALENTINE - Apache Corporation issued a $136,000 grant to have chemists from University of Texas at Arlington conduct a baseline analysis of surface and groundwater quality at Balmorhea State Park. Apache, according to CEO John Christmann, is already drilling in the area and could drill 3000 oil and gas wells in the next 20 years on land surrounding the world's largest spring-fed pool. The lead chemist for UTA is Dr Kevin Schug, who co-authored a similar water quality study of the North Texas Barnett Shale play. That study found methanol and/or ethanol present in 29% of the samples taken at private wells in the area. Both these chemicals are commonly used as solvents in fracking solutions. The Barnett study made no mention of injected frack fluids as a possible source of contamination.

Is Mexico a failed state?

VALENTINE - Mexico is America's No.2 trading partner with 531 billion dollars exchanged in 2015 and over 1 million legal border crossings everyday. “Yet, Mexico is in many ways a failed state,” said UT Austin Psychology professor Ricardo Ainsley, who spoke this month in Marfa, “There are areas of ungovernability, massive corruption, extortion, kidnapping, and over 1000 mayors were assassinated in the last decade,” Ainsley said. He further suggested that America is “part of the violence” and that we are “feeding the beast,” not only for our consumption of illegal drugs but also our weapon exports to Mexico.

A Ticket to Ride

VALENTINE - Elon Musk founder of Space X plans to sell round trip tickets to Mars by 2020. The flight may take as long as a year in space compared to Jeff Bezo's Blue Origin plan to take tourists from Van Horn to outer space and back in as little as 20 minutes. Moreover recruiting astronauts and tourists could be difficult. Gloria Leon, a University of Minnesota psychologist told the Christian Monitor, in August, “They miss the smells of nature, or the smell of food cooking. On a Mars voyage, Earth will be out of view. It will be the equivalent of twilight, looking out of the porthole. So there will be boredom – monotony, really – in terms of the environment.”

Lost Tribal Land Sweat

VALENTINE - A sweat occurred in a small community near the Brewster/Presidio County Line last Saturday. The ceremony, performed in a desert willow redoubt was led by tribal leader Juan Mancias of the Carizzo Comida Crudo tribe. Mancias and other members are in west Texas seeking to reclaim lost tribal land from the federal government, that Mancias claims was a violation of the Tehauacana Treaty.

Too late for Trap Springs 

VALENTINE - At the Quarterly board meeting of the Texas Historical Commission this month in Sealy, Trap Springs, an archaeological site that was nominated for official recognition did not make it through the certification process. Trap Springs located in the path of the Trans Pecos Pipeline, near Hovey Road in north Brewster County, showed signs of human occupancy for the past 5000 years according to archaeologist, David Keller. Keller filmed the bulldozing of the site by pipeline operator ETP last month.

Stripes Boycott

VALENTINE - For the third week in a row pipeline protesters stood in front of the Stripes convenience store last Friday in Alpine urging people to boycott the Energy Transfer Partners owned store. Kelcy Warren, CEO of ETP, the Trans-Pecos Pipeline, Sunoco and Stripes is the 83rd richest man in America according to Forbes Magazine with a net worth of 5.4 billion dollars. Stripes is a chain of over 600 stores and includes store brands Aloha, Aziz, Sunoco and MACS. The cluster earned 73 million dollars in net profit during the second quater of this year with 40% revenue generated from gasoline sales and 60 pct from sunglasses, tacos and other assorted sundry.

Kahuna Magic (published originally IN THE TOTE, 2011)

Writer, fisherman and father Hillel Wright gestured as he leaned out of the sun, into the shade under the canopy at the Kava Café in Havi. He glanced at his grandson Ollie then summarized the tale he’d just told – “It’s the whole philosophy of commercial fishing.”

Now living in Japan, the green-eyed, mustached former PHD candidate should know - he spent thirty years at sea fishing the Pacific and now writes for Fishing News International a leading fishing publication of Asia. 

It all started in Hawaii in 1969 on a 60 foot diesel sampan named “Alika.”

“Late one night, my friend calls and tells me that if I can make Hilo Docks by 4:30 AM there’s a job for me,” Wright said, sipping an Americano. “I bought a Renault Dauphine down the street for 200 bucks, drove it as fast as I could and by the time I rolled into the Suisan parking lot, the motor was toast. It would never run again, but I got the job.”

Single, fresh out of Southern Illinois University with a master’s in Literature, the soon to be father of four slid 5 tons of block ice across the dock that morning filling the cold hatch. It was the beginning of the fall season and for the next two months he’d be working off the Puna coast, five days a week, 20 hours a day with four other men, hot-bunking and pulling in ahi by day and mahi-mahi, and walu by night.

Under the direction of a Hawaiian Captain, “Old Man John” the fishing in those days was pretty good.

“He knew how to find fish,” Wright said.”He’d look out over the sea as dawn crept up and watch the birds. ‘Aku birds,’ he’d say and then ‘Ahi birds – go, go, steer 280.’ And before you know we’d be full of fish.”

“By the third week, I had the program down,” Wright said. “One day I’d just finished laying in the insulation in the ice hold and sat down on the hatch cover and lit a cigarette. I was watching the sea when I heard Old Man John yell something at me. I couldn’t make it out, it was Hawaiian and then finally he’s in may face and yells in English, ‘No sit on Ass!’ and that, in one sentence is the whole philosophy of commercial fishing.”

Moana Loa, the mountain towering above the Puna coast also had philosophy that year. It was the year that Mauna Ulu, a vent of Kilauea erupted.

“We were twenty miles off shore working bottom fish. Then it blows,” Wright said. “You never saw fireworks like that. Old Man John, or Ahab as I knew him up to that point, suddenly gets nice. He tells us to pull in the hooks, make a pot of tea and sit down on deck. His whole personality changed, he became grandpa. Told us about Madam Pelu, his Alamakuu, as the boat rocked and the vent blew oranges and reds into the sky.”

Wright lives with his wife Shiori in Kawasaki and wears a gold wedding ban inscribed with eagles, “they mate for life.” On the same hand a thick turquoise ring covers nearly the bottom joint of his index finger. He grips it and twirls it on his finger. 

“Helps with my spiritual risk taking,” he said. “All religions are one,” he said as an Aloha Petroleum tanker passed by on Mamalahoa Highway, shaking the ground. “I try to follow the local customs, live life and make my pilgrimages.”

He comes to the Big Island regularly, a place where his first daughter Anita was born, and always makes Hapuna Beach - he lived there when it was a county park during the summer of 1969.

“There was a bunch of us hippies. Tourists, locals, high school girls all came to the park. Everybody wanted to see what we were up to. We slept under the stars at night, stowed our stuff under the picnic tables – nobody stole back then. We combed the beaches in the morning for money. Occasionally the Aku boats would anchor at the cove to catch bait. We’d snorkel out to them, they’d throw their gill nets and we’d chase the Weki into their nets.”

Wright follows a lizard with his eyes, as the reptile slinks across a hou-hou wall.

“I stayed in one of the A frames last week,” he said. “Walked down the beach late the first night and heard the Matahunas singing. You don’t believe me?”

Wright edited five books and wrote another five including an interview he did with Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg.

“He had quite a mind, and quite an agenda. And for the most part it all worked together,” Wright said.

At sea on the “Alika,” Wright recalls the smell of salt air, the warm blood of tuna and a Louisville Slugger that Old Man John used on the ahi that came flying over the rail.

“He was pretty good with it,” Wright said.

Before flying to the Big Island, that summer of ’69, Wright spent a month in Berkeley, hanging out, learning Zen-Buddha chants and hitchhiking.

The first question they asked me the morning I arrived at the Alika was whether I was a hippie. ‘No,’ I told them, ‘I’m a gypsy.’ So they called me Egypt. A few days later as we waited for the fish to bite, I start chanting. And almost immediately, the ahi start biting. I remember Old Man John shaking his head, saying, ‘Da Kina Egypt, singing for fish,’” Wright said, as he looked out across the patio of the café. “There I was, a Jew named Egypt singing Buddhist chants on a Hawaiian boat. Kahuna magic, I guess.”

Bluefin and You

Caring will get you in trouble. It guarantees heart break, tears, and a conscious seining in the sea of emotion. Often painful, it is no wonder many have given up on it after experiencing one too many tragedies. Like many man-made tragedies, greed often propels the misfortune. And such is the case of the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna.

In March of last year the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITEC) met in Qatar and voted not to place the decimated Atlantic Bluefin Tuna on the endangered species list. Commercial extinction of the species has already occurred with stocks in Brazil, USA, Canada and the North Sea, and the Mediterranean stock, 85 per cent depleted and the last commercial vestige of the species, seems tied to the same sinker.

Eighty per cent of the commercially caught bluefin tuna is exported to Japan, where the rich dark purple flesh commands a premium as the much sought after maguro sushi. Some of these fish have auctioned at over $200,000 at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market.

According to Matt Rigney, author of In Pursuit of Giants, Japan informed the world prior to the Qatar meeting that they would ignore any CITEC restriction on the species.

In March of this year the Obama administration rejected placing the fish on the endangered species list. According to Sen. Snowe (R., Maine) “Such a listing would have unilaterally penalized US fisherman.”

But the jobs issue might be deceptive.

“The number of jobs lost in sports and commercial fishing alone on the eastern seaboard of the United States because of the collapse of our bluefin tuna population in the 1980’s is just one indication of the costs of bad fisheries management,” said Rigney. “…it represents both the loss of income to tens of thousands of fisherman and hundreds of local communities, as well as the radical concentration of wealth in the hands of a few – to the tune of 16.4 billion between 1998 and 2008.”

A primordial law of ecology is that everything is connected. Whether the flapping wings of a butterfly in Africa can cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico is up for grabs but a school of tuna eating mackerel is very much part of food chain balance. This week in Science magazine 24 scientists from 6 countries warned of the consequences we face as the planets top predators are eliminated. The report suggests that the dramatic decline of wolves and lions, sharks and tuna may be one of the most destructive human influences on the natural world.

“Apex consumers… have powerful effects on the ways ecosystems work, and the loss of these large animals has widespread implications,” said Professor James Estes of the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Tropic cascade or the impact on plants and animals lower in the food chain was evidenced when urchin-eating sea otter declined in population along the Pacific Coast in the 1990’s. In turn the kelp forests, one of the most dynamic and productive ecosystem on the planet, shriveled as the kelp-eating urchin population exploded.

When wolves were eliminated from Yellowstone Park, elk in large herds overgrazed the sensitive woodland environment. Wolves are now being reintroduced there.

The wolf is no longer a factor in Texas. The last reported Canus Lupis was shot at Castolon in the Big Bend National Park on a cold January day in 1957. However, the elusive Mountain Lion, another apex predator, has survived despite an open season on the animal in our Lone Star State.

The bluefin is a majestic fish that can swim at bursts up to 60 mph, through water that is seven hundred times denser than air. It grows up to eleven feet long, weighing 1000 pounds and can leap out of the water twenty feet and dive to 3000 feet to catch its prey. It crosses the Atlantic in ten days and spawns every spring in the Gulf of Mexico.

A pre-BP Oil Spill estimate of the Atlantic Bluefin population administered by the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna suggested 5 million exist from fingerlings the size of a thumbnail to breeding age fish. That’s 1600 humans to every Atlantic Bluefin. In west Texas there’s 1600 flies to every human. So why should we care about a fish in the sea?

Maybe we shouldn’t, there’s pain in caring.

Where Are the Philosophers?

Harry V. Jaffa wrote:

“Politics is inherently controversial because humans are passionately attached to their opinions by interests that have nothing to do with the truth. But because philosophers… have no interest other than the truth, they alone can bring the canon of reason that will transform the conflict of opinion that otherwise dominates the world. “

But where are the philosophers?

Most of the philosophers of this country are drinking at the trough of economic stability. Lapping away at $100,000 a year salaries can suck the philosopher right out of you and fitting in to corporate culture can have its perks; electro-magnetic golf, sex hormone chewing gum and a bottle of soma.

What?

In his Foreword to the second printing (1946) of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley explained the underlying calm in his 632 A.F. fictional dystopia, “The masses don’t have to be coerced because they love their servitude.”

The problem of making people love their servitude is a function of economic security and economic security serves as part of the indoctrinating machinery of the novel as expressed in the World State’s motto; “Community, Identity, Stability”.

But now with exposure of the feckless “limitless GNP growth” theory, Wall Street honor and other extraction economy myths, we might see a few more philosophers falling from stability and coming back to where great societies need them: asking the hard questions about our politics and politicians. As Huxley wrote, “…greater triumph of propaganda has been accomplished not by doing something but by refraining from doing. Great is truth but silence about truth is greater.”

Sandra from Uganda

Sandra Basudde smiles easily at the picnic table at Waiohinu, on the south end of the Big Island. Her teeth sparkle as light from the sun peeks through an opening in the clouds. An ajoite crystal hangs from one necklace, a tetrahedron from another, and there’s an Ugandan pendant on the lapel of her blue jean jacket. It’s a long road from Africa to the Big Island but for Sandra the journey is never over.

“I came here in response to a spiritual call,” she said, her dreadlocks hanging from beneath a swaddled purple and black head scarf. “I go whenever I am called in the moment. I go where my energy can be of best value. If you stay too long in the wrong place you lose the resonance of your purpose.”

Sandra works at an organic farm called Ailani Orchard in the green strip between Ocean View and Na’a’le’hu. She works most days at the Fruit Stand located on the Belt Road at mile marker 68 where the products of the farm are sold; citrus, six types of avocado, macadamia nuts, coffee, and lamb.

“I tell the lambs, ‘If you over populate, we’ll put you on the plate,’” Sandra said, laughing in the way a vegetarian laughs at a meat joke.

“It’s a beautiful place to meet people from all over the world and makes for an interesting study. One gets to learn diverse perspectives and compassion for various states of mind and often I’m renewed by the potential of humans to transcend limits,” she said.

A nine year old boy visited the stand and according to Sandra, did an amazing thing.

“He called up the wind,” Sandra said. “On a day when there was absolutely not even a breeze, the wind came out of nowhere --and after it shook the branches of the trees, he summoned it away. He told me it was his natural state of communion with the wind.” She paused and looked toward the sea. “Then again we see what we are ready to perceive.”

Sandra dreams of creating retreat centers throughout the world to revive and encourage the human spirit to transcend limits in thought and being-ness.

“My SPIRIT Re-Treat Centers are already manifest, yet they have not precipitated yet from the standpoint of our shared reality,” she said. “Minimal facilitation is the direction I want to go but mentors on the premises would be available. I want spirituality centered on nature. This nature includes humans re-establishing their co-creation with the earth as a living entity of which we are but a small part.”

She takes a breath of the cool Ka’u air and continues, “I want to collaborate with artists to build gigantic Buddha and Jesus slides, Isis wing swings, crystal caves, huge soundproof domes and yurts for energy enhancement and a library that offers many modalities.”

She talks about private property as a limit to the evolution of humanity.

“It’s a cornerstone of capitalism and perhaps human nature, if there is such a thing,” she says. “But I think to overcome the gap between rich and poor and to transcend our problems in corporal reality we must move beyond private property. Yet at the same time I feel the need to set basic boundaries at the retreats, to have a certain look and feel and that in itself is a form of private property.”

She looks out across the manicured grass of the park and adds, “Maybe I’ll have a sign out front that reads, ‘Trespassers Welcome.’”

Children now gather around the picnic table and Sandra pulls from her purse a poem she wrote with rhyming couplets. The children listen. She looks up after finishing and says, “Spirit, Science, God – it’s all the same thing.”

At the farm, workers rotate and occasionally Sandra helps with the packaging of the macadamia and coffee. She also works in the fields where she “listens to the land” and takes breaks “under the trees taking in the elements.”

It’s all there, nature is our true teacher, our tonic. To be spiritually divorced from the land,” she shakes her head then points toward the trees, the ti, the orchids nestled against the green hills. “That is our spirit.”

Sandra spent the first four years of her life in Entebbe, Uganda, as dictator Milton Obote was stepping down to Idi Amin’s genocidal regime. Her family immigrated to Germany where she attended school in Bonn. Later she moved to Kansas City, then Scottsdale, Philadelphia and Ashland, Oregon.

She says that her spirituality “comes from the place of no words.” “Sac-cid-ananda” is another expression she uses to describe the aboriginal genesis of her spiritual beginnings and links it with the Big Island.

“I love the Big Island,” she said. “Its primordial and you can’t hide from it.”

Sandra believes the land can be known through the food that is eaten from it.

“We are what we eat energetically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically and sub-atomically. We are one and holographic in nature. When we bite into a mango we are intersecting with an energetic formation. It is possible to become acquainted with that energy and form a symbiotic relationship.”

“I’m also working to analyze soil, through the taste of food,” she said. “But I’m not that good yet.”

She also believes that one of her purposes in life is to be a cog in spiritual midwifery.

“The highest honor I can receive is to know that I’ve been part of the supporting cast,” Sandra said. “To bring people to a higher awareness of themselves – to have a relationship with themselves, because we are our own experiments and divinity resides in each of us.”

Rain drizzles and we decide to go to a restaurant.

“Good, good, sometimes I forget to eat,” She says as her thin body slips easily through the car door. Her purse catches. Sheet paper with notes reading “21 frequencies – Tuesday: rose, pink, scarlet, Wednesday: blue, violet, magenta” falls from it. Sandra takes it, “Frequencies,” she announces, laughs, and stuffs it back in her purse. Then she looks out the window as we drive down the road, the tires humming against the wet pavement, wipers clicking in the gray air and she says, “Molecules have been everywhere.”