'Enslaving Mother Earth'

In listening to all the feigned outrage from “resource interests,” such as those represented by Cary Hegreberg, about the Power Shift conference, one can’t help but wonder what planet they think they are living on.

 Their attacks on the University of Montana for sponsoring an “energy and the environment” conference — namely the “Power Shift” conference — go far beyond anything we have heard before. It’s like the university, the Department of Environmental Studies, the Appropriate Technology and Sustainable Development Movements (not to mention the presidents of both MSU and UM) are somehow criminals for wanting to conserve and maximize the utility and value of Montana’s natural resources!

Not the “cash value,” one might add, but the real value in perpetuity — the values of life on earth for ourselves and a hundred generations into the future. Don’t these people claim to be Christians? That’s 2000 years — a hundred generations. Is that over, now? Are these guys telling us to drill and mine and log and deplete so there’s nothing left for even one generation in the future? That’s what I hear them saying.

Apparently, they don’t believe in life on earth. Are they Nazis? Their rants almost sound Hitlerian to me, after reading William Shirer’s journalistic account of the 1930s in Europe — “The Nightmare Years.” And like Hitler, most of their statements are bare-faced lies — the exact opposite of what the situation really is, claiming that those serving the public interest and future generations are criminals, while concealing the real motives and intentions of those corporate interests who have despoiled Montana, its land, wildlife, and ecosystem since the earliest fur-trading days.

If you’ve listened to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or some of the other fanatical “talk radio” people, you know how it goes. Everything is about the money, and the more lies and attacks you can make on the poor, the peace-seekers, those who love the earth and want to improve the chances for everyone to live a better life, the more money you will make. It’s all about blaming the victims and defaming anyone who defends them and the spiritual values of maintaining a healthy ecosystem and a sustainable, non-exploitative economic order. There’s a legislative lobbying group called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) which does this, too — with vast resources supplied by the Koch Brothers, the prison industry, “health insurance” rackets (making sure that no “government money” goes to those actually needing health care, but only to large corporations and the wealthiest medical practitioners), etc.

You’ll also find the oil, coal, and nuclear industries heavily represented (Koch is mainly an oil company), as well as the agribusiness giants and even a lot of kitchen names like Sarah Lee, Coke, Pepsi, and many others. NorthWestern Energy is the corporate leader in Montana for its ALEC affiliations — a public utility which as a “regulated” monopoly we must deal with whether we like it or not. It is clearly illegal for it to be lobbying for an agenda like ALEC’s.

Notice, too, how these “spokespeople” for the business community and the construction industry accuse the universities of “biting the hand that feeds them” — namely, the tax-paying oil and other resource industies, while they use Montana Public Radio to attack the very university which hosts MPR. That can easily be stopped. All sorts of commentators, including me, have been barred from KUFM and KGPR for our public interest advocacy. Surely the same standards must be applied to those who attack the public interest on the public airwaves.

Yes, there are lots of academic and other forums and publications, more or less respectable, in which these views have a place, but not in the form of lies and personal attacks against the organizations and their leaders with whom one disagrees. Hegreberg is an outright bully. He’s been doing this for the Wood Products Industry and many other groups for 20 years or more — all on the backs of public radio supporters and the taxpayers who support universities and public radio. Let him rant along with Rush and friends on commercial AM talk radio. Their “views” constitute a total denial of the laws of economics, of consumer choice, and good government in general which requires honest elections and fair campaign practices, and while it’s true that PBS and NPR are often perverted for warmongering, corporate advertising, and other criminal purposes, we don’t need to allow that to happen in Montana.

I’ve also been watching a program on PBS about the history of slavery, which led me to make this comparison. According to these historians, the slave economy was the largest single economic force before the Civil War — bigger than coal, railroads, gold mining, and all other industry. Slavery began with plantation systems for cotton, tobacco, and a few other crops, but cotton was king, and our largest single export as well as the largest industrial product which tied together the North and South with “Yankee ingenuity” and entrepreneurship running the mills, and the South’s slave economy supplying the raw cotton. Most mills still ran with water power. Steam engines were small and primitive, and coal to fuel them and railroads to haul bulk commodities were just being established.

Thus, all farming was done with animal power, with human slaves being just another kind of livestock, and often treated worse than the horses and mules. Slaves were actually “bred” and raised for sale — a consequence of the supposedly “humane” end to the importation of slaves from Africa, which the Southern states accomplished long before it was a federal law, or the British outlawed the slave trade throughout the Empire in the 1830’s. That was “foreign competition.” The South would not hear of freeing the slaves — they were “property”, and who was going to “reimburse” them when this property was “confiscated” by emancipation or some sort of taxation (which was used to free the slaves bloodlessly over 10 years throughout the British Empire)?

Starting to sound familiar? It’s no different to speak of Mother Earth, its rivers, forests, minerals, oil, and gold as someone’s “property.” Does anyone really “own” the earth? By what right? By what perverse theory of economics can anyone even dream of such a thing? A human being lives for 70 or 80 years, usually. How can such claims to “ownership” extend even to another generation?

We know, as Proudhon said, that “property is theft.” Someone had to “claim” or otherwise confiscate the land and other resources either from pre-existing “owners” (in our case, Native Americans who never believed that people own the earth) or from Nature, itself. Wherever agriculture and cities are established, property rights in land is established, but unless you believe in brute force and that “might makes right,” there are corresponding rights for everyone, and for Nature and the environment, as well.

That’s why we have governments and legal systems — to protect everyone from the abuses of a few, and to make sure that our common land and resources aren’t depleted or sold off immediately, leading to ecological collapse, climate change, deathly pollution, and depletion of soil fertility, aquifers, and otherwise depriving us of all the resources needed to sustain life.

We are all part of a natural system, and anyone who destroys or diminishes it is a criminal — much like a rapist or murderer — or, of course, a slave-owner or dealer. Native Americans welcomed the Spaniards and other colonizers, and soon found themselves enslaved to dig gold or grow crops for their new “masters.” Is there any validity to such slavery? Apparently, Rush Limbaugh, Mr. Hegreberg, and many other “natural resource development” apologists would like us to think so.

Stephens is a resident of Great Falls and is affiliated with the Green Party.