Beartooth Range, Montana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
“The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.“
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The mountainous ecosystems of the Northern Rockies are under assault by the Trump administration, his oligarchic masters, and their soulless, plundering corporations and trust funds.
Mining, oil and gas drilling, clear-cut logging, roadbuilding, industrial recreation, livestock grazing, and commercial and residential real estate development threaten the continued existence of tens of millions of acres of publicly-owned lands that have avoided commodification and domestication since the Lewis and Clark expedition (May 14, 1804 –September 23, 1806).
Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, the mountainous red states, are pushing for state supremacy, rapid privatization and liquidation of all public lands and the animals and plants that live there.
States want to exploit the charismatic megafauna so trophy hunters will pay for a license to kill threatened grizzly bears, the same way they have exploited for decades the slaughter of endangered Yellowstone buffalo, wolves, elk, swans, native trout and anything to boost state revenues.
Booming global markets kill the last big mammals, photograph the gunner with a manly, domineering pose over the dead carcass, as populations go extinct. Apparently, killing the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs, evades irrationality because after everything on planet earth has been shot, or bombed, eaten, stuffed, or taken to the landfill, we’re all going to Disneyland Mars.
State religion in this God-forsaken backwater region is practiced at the altar of the God of Mammon (neoliberal, pseudo-Christianity). When combined with an extreme variety of cultural retrogression that longs to return to 19th-century, state and local politics takes on a soporific Nietzschean, nihilistic cognitive framework.
Until humanity comes up with a secular form of exorcism, the mass psychosis caused by the mind parasite wetiko will keep attracting m and more “mighty whitey” migrant killers who watched one too many episodes of Yellowstone.
How do we combat this gathering madness?
Grassroots activists in the region have a legislative plan. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) will reintroduce The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) in the U.S. Senate.
NREPA protects over 23 million acres of defacto wilderness in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington. In Yellowstone, Glacier and Grand Teton NationalFrank Church–River of No Return, and Parks some 3 million acres of the nation’s most treasured mountain scenery and critical wildlife and fish habitat will finally be designated wilderness. NREPA legislates special regulatory protection for secure core wildlife habitat in linkage corridors connecting sacred places like Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, The Bob Marshall Wilderness Areas.
NREPA will designate all the inventoried roadless areas in the Northern Rockies as wilderness; protect some of America’s most beautiful and ecologically significant lands while saving taxpayers lots of money and creating jobs that restore impaired trout streams and critical habitat areas fragmented by too many roads. NREPA is national interest legislation with the strongest and most enduring protection the federal government can bestow upon public lands.
The Northern Rockies ecosystem is an important part of our natural heritage encompassing the largest block of wilderness lands outside of Alaska. NREPA is one of the most effective ways of combating climate change and reducing species loss in western North America. We are facing the world’s sixth major extinction. Congress must remember reverence of the sacred and act now to pass ecosystem protection before the last intact ecosystem in the Lower 48 is destroyed.
For more information about the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) contact the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
Source: Counter Punch
