Biocentric

About Biocentric

Frontline struggles for environmental justice in a world spiraling deeper into ecological crisis. maxwilbert.substack.com (https://maxwilbert.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Max Wilbert

Category

news · sports

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

13 Aug 2025

Latest episode

27 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

22 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   27 Oct 2026

   Adam McKay on Climate Collapse and the Fight for What Remains

   Adam Mckay (https://substack.com/profile/120577361-adam-mckay) is a writer, director, and producer of films including Don’t Look Up, one of the most successful Netflix movies of all time; The Big Short, for which his screen play earned an Academy Award; Vice; Anchorman; Step Brothers; and Talladega Nights. He is Executive Producer of TV shows including Succession, Winning Time, and Game Theory with Bomani Jones. McKay made his name in the comedy world as a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade, before becoming Head Writer at Saturday Night Live, and co-founding website and production studio Funny or Die, which, he would like the oil executives to know, was not actually intended as a literal directive. For nearly a decade, Adam has been following the science of global warming and has worked to support cultural change through his filmmaking and his non-profitYellow Dot Studios. This work provides direct multimedia support to grassroots campaigns and leverages media platforms for storytelling to illustrate the severity of the climate crisis and the climate denialism and profiteering of big oil, corporate media, and corrupt politicians. Writing in Current Affairs (https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-massive-climate-lie-that-will-destroy-human-civilization) in August, Adam described the lie that “we have time left to address climate change” as an extremely dangerous form of climate denial. He says: “we are not talking about the kind of total climate denial one would find on the extremist, lunatic fringe inhabited by the likes of Alex Jones or the current U.S. President. And we’re not referring to cartoonish hucksters and ‘climate skeptics’ like Joe Rogan (https://newrepublic.com/article/194268/climate-change-joe-rogan-jordan-peterson) or Jordan Peterson (https://www.ncronline.org/news/climate-science-denial-rife-launch-jordan-petersons-arc-project). Polling shows only 14.8 percent of Americans deny the basic sixth grade science behind global warming. To put that in perspective, as much as 10 percent of the population still believes the Earth is flat. No, the monstrous, misshapen garden colossus lie we’re referring to is subscribed to by most of the U.S., has stopped and slowed climate action far more than outright denial, and keeps growing and growing. Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: ‘global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.’ Less embarrassing than ‘climate change is a Chinese hoax,’ but every bit as unscientific and ridiculous, it is the preferred lie of the ruling class, mainstream news media, and corporations.” After connecting here on Substack, I sat down with Adam recently to ask him about the lie that “we have time.” We discussed the catastrophic reality of climate change, the likelihood of mass casualty events and famine in coming years due to simultaneous crop failures, the complicity of fossil fuel corporations, corporate media, and politicians in the ongoing disaster, and storytelling as a weapon of cultural change. We also talked about direct action, activism, the accuracy of climate science, the limitations of scientific communication, the film Don’t Look Up, the absurdity of most mainstream “responses” to the crisis, and the sublime beauty of natural world and non-human life and the tragedy of its destruction. Links and Resources * “The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate (https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-massive-climate-lie-that-will-destroy-human-civilization)” — Adam’s latest article published in Current Affairs * Don’t Look Up on Netflix (https://www.netflix.com/title/81252357) * Yellow Dot Studios (https://yellowdotstudios.com/about/), the non-profit media organization Adam founded This is a cross-post from Truth and Reckoning (https://open.substack.com/pub/celdf), a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), where I work. CELDF is a group made up of organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth. For more than 30 years, the group has helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. * Learn more about CELDF on our website (https://celdf.org/) * Contact CELDF (https://celdf.org/contact/) if you need help defending your community and nature * Donate to support CELDF’s work (https://celdf.org/donate/) * Join the CELDF email list (https://secure.everyaction.com/TdVG-tdqbEW229YMqwOaYQ2) Cover image cropped from a photo (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adam_McKay-7784.jpg) by Harald Krichel, used under the Creative Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Creative_Commons) Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en) license. This is Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance to empire from author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers help keep this publication independent and accessible in the face of state repression, and in return for their support, they receive access to rare private posts (https://maxwilbert.substack.com/t/private-posts-for-paid-subscribers) with behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts. Biocentric is a liberated zone with zero AI-generated content. I’m not on social media, so I rely on readers to share. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit maxwilbert.substack.com/subscribe (https://maxwilbert.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   2 Sept 2026

   Frontline Action Updates / Greenwashing as the Central Strategy of Next-Gen Industrialism

   Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance to empire from author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the work you see here, receive access to rare private posts (https://maxwilbert.substack.com/t/private-posts-for-paid-subscribers) with behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts. This week I bring you a trifecta: an interview with my friend Kate Scott, who is holding down a border-wall resistance treesit that has now been in place for more than a month; a conversation with Tom Grotewohl about a new land defense camp established in Michigan’s UP to resist the planned “Copperwood” mine, and a presentation which I gave last month as part of the People’s Climate Summit. Scroll down for the discussions with Kate and Tom. Here’s more on the People’s Climate Summit event. Each year, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), a “Conference of the Parties” (COP) is held to address global warming. It is nothing but theater. Each year, wealthy nations, petro-states, and their strategic partners systematically sabotage and undermine any chance of real binding plan. And each year the climate is further destabilized. In response, each year grassroots activists hold their own conference in protest, bringing together radical organizers, small organizations, and those oriented towards true solutions. Last month I was invited to give a presentation as part of the most recent “People’s Climate Summit” taking place against the backdrop of COP31, which is being held in Antalya, Turkey this November. My presentation (which is also on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFLx861Yt0Q)) was titled “Greenwashing: The Central Strategy of Next Generation Industrialism.” I began by highlighting the fact that since 1979, when then-president Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House, lowered national speed limits, and encouraged conservation of energy, the percentage of fossil fuels in the energy mix has increased from 80.6% to 86.2%. At the same time, overall energy use has doubled. This means that even if you think renewable energy is the answer, we’re heading in the wrong direction — fast. I don’t think renewable energy is the answer. The idea that “green” technology will make industrial civilization sustainable is, as Carl Sagan would say, an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. That evidence does not exist. The idea of a sustainable industrial civilization is entirely theoretical. Sustainable industrial society exists in fiction and in theoretical computer models, and nowhere else. In the real, physical world, all the evidence shows that industrial civilization is not, and can never be, sustainable. All the evidence is pointing in one direction. Greenhouse gases rising, species extinctions accelerating, even common species declining in abundance, dead zones expanding and proliferating in the oceans, plastic and chemical production skyrocketing, urban sprawl spreading further and further. Everything is heading in the wrong direction. In my presentation, I explain exactly why renewable energy is not a solution, and how a movement to was once dedicated to saving wild nature has now transformed into one which seeks to save industrial civilization — the very thing which is destroying the planet. I finish my presentation by talking about what I think is the only realistic path forward. Questions asked by the audience at the end of the presentation include the following: * Why aren’t more people joining frontline eco-defense movements? * What does it mean to “address overshoot humanely”? * What is the timing of collapse? * If you were elected governor, what degrowth policies would you put in place? * What do you think of indigenous-led renewable energy projects? Do you think these examples only serve as a form of greenwashing, or do you believe it is possible for communities to use these resources responsibly through their own stewardship? * How could we help foster a new nature-centric spiritual practice that put humans back in our place as integral part of the living world? STANDING WITH THE GRANDMOTHERS: Direct Action is Halting Border Wall Construction “Animikiiwadiswan” Thunderbird Nest: Anti-Mining Occupation Launched in Michigan Biocentric is a liberated zone with zero AI-generated content. I’m not on social media, so I rely on readers to share. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit maxwilbert.substack.com/subscribe (https://maxwilbert.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   12 Aug 2026

   Please Help Support My Legal Defense

   Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance to empire from author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Myself and my friend Will Falk (https://substack.com/profile/2047869-will-falk) are currently facing $49,890.13 in fines (https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/im-being-fined-4989013) from the Bureau of Land Management for putting up a temporary composting pit toilet and wind break to support native elders praying at Peehee Mu’huh, a sacred site to Numu (Northern Paiute) people. We are challenging this fine in Federal Court and are asking for community support to raise $5,000 for a retainer to pay a local lawyer to assist with the case. Normally, this type of lawsuit would cost tens of thousands of dollars, but we’ve secured pro bono legal representation. We just need to pay what’s called “local counsel” — a lawyer licensed to practice in the jurisdiction at hand — to make this lawsuit possible. Please support if you are able by visiting our fundraising page (https://givebutter.com/max-and-will-legal-defense-fund) and making a donation, or sharing. Thank you to those who have already donated! The video shared here was live streamed on July 30th. In it, Will and I discuss: * The $49,890.13 fine and our ongoing fight to contest it * Will’s perspective as an attorney on how laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, and National Historic Preservation Act fail to protect the natural world and significant indigenous cultural sites, and thus how legal challenges are generally only sufficient to delay projects * The necessity of direct action and other methods revealed by these legal inadequacies * Liberal vs. radical, education vs. action, and a discussion of the themes in my essay from last week, Too Much Awareness, Not Enough Action (https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/too-much-awareness-not-enough-action). Forest defense side note: Following my previous invitation (https://maxwilbert.substack.com/p/invitation-to-a-threatened-forest), on August 2nd, a group of 30 forest defenders and community allies gathered in an old-growth forest near Eugene, OR to get to know an ecosystem threatened with clearcut logging and strategize opposition. On August 30th, we’ll be gathering in the forest once again. I’ll write a formal invitation soon, but until then, mark your calendars for August 30th and if you’d like to attend, RSVP by contacting me or emailing: Background to the fine In 2021, Will Falk and myself launched “Protect Thacker Pass (https://protectthackerpass.org)” with an encampment on the side of a mountain in Northern Nevada. While the campaign originally aimed to stop the Thacker Pass lithium mine for environmental reasons — the destruction of a biodiverse habitat — and to push back against greenwashing (the mine is for lithium, which some believe will help solve global warming), it soon expanded as local indigenous peoples became aware of the issue and shared that the site was sacred to the Numu people and was the location of several historical massacres. As resistance to the mine grew, Will represented several tribes in federal lawsuits aiming to stop the mine, and him and I both participated in direct action to stop construction. This led to a lawsuit against us and five other people (four of them indigenous). That lawsuit has since been settled, but Will and I still face this nearly $50k fine. Specifically, the fine is based on allegations of unlawful occupation and development of public land. We think we have good arguments to fight this in court, including constitutional protections and the relevant fact that we asked BLM how to apply for a permit no less than seven times. We were ignored in every case. Please support us in fighting this fine! Will is an environmental attorney with a part time non-profit job which pays far less than the average, but which allows him to engage in radical land defense work. He still has significant student debt from law school, but has chosen to prioritize defending the planet over financial stability. I am a grassroots organizer, also working part-time for a non-profit and supporting a family of three on a single wage after my partner was laid off due to educational budget cuts. Please give what you can! Transcript (This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors) Max: Will, do you want to introduce yourself? We’re probably going to, we can just shoot the breeze a little bit here as we wait for people to chime in. Because I know we’re going to be talking about the fine, the $50,000 fine that you and I are facing from the federal government. That’s the main reason we’re having this conversation today. But to start, do you want to just tell us viewers who might not know you who you are and your background? Will: Yeah, my name is Will Falk. I am an attorney and a grassroots activist and a writer. But I think for the most pertinent aspects of me for this conversation are, along with you, Max, in 2021, January 2021, we set up a protest camp of the Thacker Pass open pit lithium mine in northern Nevada. And, you know, we lived there for most of a year, but in the summer of 2021, I began representing several tribes that were affected by the mine project and helped them litigate a couple of cases against the Bureau of Land Management for failing to properly consult with tribes over the mine. And as part of that, we were fined for trespass for erecting some composting toilets in the middle of where the open pit mine would actually go. I guess I can wait to go into more detail, but that’s who I am. Max: I know this all already but for folks who don’t tell me a little bit more about your background and how you got involved in this work like what led you to when I called you up and said hey do you want to camp on the side of the mountain in January with me what led you say to say yeah that sounds like a reasonable thing to do and and then represent the tribes and go through the whole process of fighting this project and and your other work that you’re involved in now Will: um well i guess it it goes back to um really to 2013 which was a pretty bad year for me i was working as a public defender uh in kenosha wisconsin um i found the work to be incredibly hard um in terms of just caseload and how much you had to be in court and how many cases a day you had to take. But long story short, I developed a major case of depression and ended up trying to kill myself twice. And as I was recovering from the suicide attempts, I spent every morning along the shore of Lake Michigan, where I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I just spent a lot of time listening to the lake, listening to the birds, listening to the bugs, listening to the kids playing, listening to the way the water broke, the wind. And that was one of the best mindfulness exercises that I knew of at the time. And it also really helped me get out of my own head and calm some of the anxiety that I feel. But through that, I realized that not only has the natural world given me my life and supported my life the whole time I’ve been in this world. But the natural world also saved my life and continues to save my life as I can go and do this whenever I really need some help with my mental health. And so because of that, I took a vow to spend the rest of my life working to try and save as much of the natural world as I possibly can. And that has come through the form of frontline land defense. As a lawyer, I understand that a lot of environmental law is actually ineffective at stopping the destruction of the natural world. And I’ve realized that a lot of times the best hope we have for stopping projects, destructive things like mines or pipelines or clear cuts is direct action. And so I use my law license and service of direct action campaigns while trying to organize direct action. And at that time in my life, the end of 2020, when you asked me to come out to Thacker Pass, it was just a perfect time in my life where I had the space to do that. I think I originally told you I’d only be there for two weeks because I was working on something else. But once I got out there and realized how beautiful that land was and got to spend some time with the creatures on that land, I realized this is what I’m going to be doing. trying to stop this mine. Max: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. And I know you’re always vulnerable with sharing the mental health struggles and the suicide attempt and, and, um, and everything that you have been through and continue to go through. And I really appreciate that. I know others do too, because it’s a lot of people just keep that stuff buried, you know, the, the psychological weight to which, you know, I don’t have clinically diagnosed depression, but I think all of us who have a heart and have, you know, have eyes to see and can perceive what’s happening in the world around us today and just live in this culture that’s so inhuman, dehumanizing and degrading in so many different ways, you know, feel that weight to one degree or another. And I know you feel it more more uh heavily than most um so i’m glad you’re here with us um uh with me still um and doing this work together we met i think it was it was either later in 2013 or early or in 2014 Will: yeah i believe it was 2014 Max: and will’s been a good friend ever since um but just to expand on i want to dive into this a little bit before we really get to focus on the fine and Thacker Pass and what’s happening now with that, which is partly the focus of this conversation. And pardon me, because I’m battling some sort of sinus issue or something, so I’m very hoarse and I might cough. But I sent you an email a couple days ago. I don’t know if you saw it, but it was about how the Trump administration is currently in some ways laying a trap for mainstream environmental organizations by doing things like shrinking the Bears Ears National Monument. And I forget the name of the other one down there in the southern Utah or Four Corners area that got shrunk. Do you remember it? And the trap is that these organizations have now sued to contest the shrinking of these national monuments. And this argument was being made by another environmental attorney who was saying that this is a trap because the Trump administration wants environmental groups to sue over this right now because those cases will make their way to the Supreme Court. And what the Supreme Court is going to do, this very conservative Supreme Court, is it’s going to, as they say, legislate from the bench and make an end run around certain laws like the Antiquities Act, which is what is used to create national monuments and give them some protection under the law currently. The Supreme Court is going to make an end run around Congress, which should, according to the law, have the only power to modify the Antiquities Act or revoke it or expand it or what have you, by fundamentally modifying how that law is interpreted in courts and throughout the U.S. And that this is actually a deliberate strategy that mainstream environmental groups are sort of walking into to take what currently is just an executive order, which has weight but is legally a lot more tenuous than a Supreme Court decision or legislation from Congress, and to strengthen it through the very process of it getting challenged and then going to the Supreme Court. So that’s an interesting specific case of what you were talking about a second ago about how the law doesn’t really do a good job of protecting the natural world in this country. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more? Maybe talk about, I know you’ve done a lot of writing in the past about the Endangered Species Act, for example, and how people sort of misunderstand fundamentally how strong that law is or how weak it is. And, you know, give us some more insights about what, from your perspective as a lawyer, as an attorney, despite the long hair folks, he is a licensed attorney practicing. He was just telling me he was getting off. He was working on a brief right now for a case in Pennsylvania fighting against this frack waste company. Will’s represented tribal nations in federal court lawsuits. He’s been part of Rights of Nature, litigation, and you were a public defender for years, as you said earlier. So tell us why the law isn’t the right tool to protect the natural world, not to the extent that it needs to be protected. Will: Yeah, I guess I always try and use what’s most obvious and maybe what’s right in front of our faces. And if we start with the understanding that law is how people decide to comport themselves in this society, how to behave, you know, a lot of times people conflate what is moral with what is legal. But especially corporations and businesses, they try to behave in a way that will not get them in legal trouble because that can cost profits and that can spend money. I’m not saying that they don’t do illegal stuff. They definitely do. And they spend a lot of money trying to figure out how they can get around laws. But my point is just that in recent history, in the last millions of years, we’re living through the worst ecological crisis that Earth has seen in millions of years. And it is driven by humans. And so if it was fundamentally illegal for corporations to destroy the natural world, to destroy more habitat, to destroy more wild places, if it was fundamentally illegal for corporations to pollute and poison water and soil and air, then we wouldn’t be in this mess. But we are in this mess because it is actually legal to destroy the natural world and to pollute and poison and to convert life into products. And a big part of the reason for that is we live in a capitalist society. And when we say we live in a capitalist society, what we mean is that institutions like law are set up to protect capitalism. And they’re set up in a way to ensure that corporations are able to maximize their profits from destroying the natural world. So whenever we think about how did things get so bad, what we need to think of is not that just the law isn’t being applied correctly or something. What’s really happening is the structure of law is set up in a way to ensure that those things keep happening. And some of the few concessions we’ve gained from the legal system over the last 60 years or so, for the most part, those concessions are meant to pacify us and make us feel like we’re being heard by the government while corporations continue their destruction. And so I don’t want to say that anyone who steps into a court or anyone who files a lawsuit to try and stop some sort of destruction is wrong for doing so. There are many strategic reasons where a court case can help you delay projects, can possibly hold off a project for long enough for something like a change in the market to happen where, you know, a specific project, a specific mine, a specific pipeline that threatens you and your community, that if you delay it, you know, you can use lawsuits to delay it. And in that time, something can happen and the project goes away. So I don’t want to say that law can’t be a specific tool in specific context for specific campaigns. But there is so much misunderstanding about how law actually works. Most people think that the way to stop the destruction of the planet is to pass better regulations for how the planet is destroyed. But regulatory law is actually set up in a way to allow a certain amount of destruction and to actually provide legal cover for that destruction. So, you know, whenever you hear of somebody getting a permit for some sort of project, listen to that word. Again, take the obvious thing. A permit means to permit harm. It’s permission from the government to go do this destructive activity. And then with that permit, if somebody sues you to try and stop that harm, you can claim that you have a valid permit. You are allowed to do this. You are permitted. you have been given permission and therefore your, your lawsuit won’t work against us. Um, so, um, you know, I do like to use specific laws to kind of illustrate what I mean, especially this, this notion of, of, um, regulatory law giving cover for, um, um, for destruction. Um, the Endangered Species Act is a good example. You brought it up. Um, a lot of people think that at the Endangered Species Act, what it says is you can’t kill endangered species. That’s not what it says. It says you can’t kill endangered species unless you have a permit. And you can get a permit for things like mines, pipelines, clear cuts. And endangered species are killed every day with those permits. So, you know, it’s when we step back and think, Why would the government pass this law like the Endangered Species Act? And why would so many people come to believe that it prohibits the killing of endangered species when in reality you can get a permit for that killing through the Endangered Species Act? They’re called incidental take permits. But why would that belief grow so much? And it’s because the government wants us to believe that, And corporations want us to believe that these laws are out there stopping harm and protecting us. Because then whenever we think about how to stop environmental destruction, we will go to these laws, we will go to these courts and think that that is all we need to do to stop the destruction, win a lawsuit or invoke these laws. But of course, that hasn’t worked. That hasn’t been working for decades. And it’s because laws are, they don’t actually do what people think they do a lot of the time. Max: Yeah, it’s very interesting to hear you talk about this. And hopefully folks will listen because you’re an attorney. And likely if you’re listening to this, you know, you aren’t one. You know, this is the reality across so many different aspects of law. We ran into it at Thacker Pass in regards to the National Historic Preservation Act, which a lot of people believe the National Historic Preservation Act, which was set up to provide some level of consideration, potentially protection to Native American indigenous cultural sites, cultural resources, as they call them, artifacts. It dovetails with NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. And the National Historic Preservation Act also provides some protection for non-Indigenous historic sites, whether they’re settlers or historic battlefields from the Civil War or what have you. And a lot of people, I actually was just on a call the other day with a group who’s fighting mining in the upper Midwest, and there were quite a number of indigenous people on the call. And one of the women was rather upset when I said that at Thacker Pass, Peehee Mu’huh was a sacred site to Numu, northern Paiute people, and the government ignored the objections of all the tribes who said, don’t destroy this site. It’s incredibly sacred and important to us. and destroyed it. And she said, well, you have to use the right language. You have to invoke a certain clause within the National Historic Preservation Act, and that will prevent them from destroying it. And I’m not a lawyer, so I couldn’t respond very intelligently to her. But what I said was that we did everything possible under the National Historic Preservation Act to protect that sacred site at Peehee Mu’huh from being destroyed. I’m wondering if you can chime in on that and talk about how native sacred places are being destroyed right now all over the country, including at Peehee Mu’huh, at Thacker Pass, where the bulldozers are rolling. As we stream this video here, we were unable to stop that despite all our efforts, legal challenges, pressure campaigns, protest, protest camp, direct actions, what does and what does not, what is not allowed or what can be protected and what isn’t protected by the National Historic Preservation Act in terms of native sacred sites and culturally important sites? Will: Yeah, so again, despite the name National Historic Preservation Act, the National Historic Preservation Act is not set up protect historic places. It’s set up to describe a process by which the government has to review the historic places that they’re going to destroy for this or that project. So it’s a procedural law that sets up things like consultation. But nowhere in the National Historic Preservation Act does it say that because this place is sacred to a certain community or because this is a historically important property, that that means that they can’t cite some corporate project on it. So all it does is set up this process for reviewing the properties that are going to destroy. I like to say that what it really does is it obligates the government with telling you how they’re going to screw you before they screw you. So it doesn’t lead to any mandatory protection for something that is going to be destroyed by a certain kind of project. It’s really complicated in the West by the fact that there’s this law that governs all public lands in the West. And I think something like 61% of the United States is federally administered public lands. Some states in the West, like Nevada, I believe are like a full 80% federally administered public lands. And what that means is that the federal government owns those lands. It’s not actually within the state’s jurisdiction. It’s not state law that applies to that. But anyway, so the 1872 mining law was passed in 1872. It was passed primarily as a way to sell cheap mining claims in the American West as a way to pay off the Civil War debt. You know, the 1872, the country is six years removed from the Civil War, seven years removed from the Civil War and deeply in debt. But what it says is that mining is actually the highest and best use of American public lands. And it provides a whole way for corporations to get automatic mining claims. And what I mean is if someone locates valuable minerals as defined by the 1872 mining law on public land, the 1872 mining law gives the government no discretion to deny those permits. Meaning once they locate those minerals, they have to be allowed to extract those minerals. It does not matter if it’s the most sacred place in the world to Native or other communities. It doesn’t matter if it’s used by millions of people as a recreational area. Mining is the highest and best use. Another way to think about that is American public lands, we often think they’re public, right? They’re ours. They’re not. They’re the federal government, and the federal government is holding those lands basically in trust for mining companies to find minerals on those lands. and we’re allowed to use the lands as long as nobody wants to mine the minerals there, as long as there are no marketable minerals there. But again, what I’m saying, the government has no discretion to deny those permits. So when, say, environmentalists or the tribes challenge the permits for these things, All they’re doing is saying that the government needs to go back and re-examine part of the permitting process. If a tribe wasn’t consulted, the lawsuit would be about the government going back and giving a tribe the consultation it should have gotten before the government issued the permit. But that doesn’t mean that the project is just done. It just means that it’s delayed for a little while while these corrections are made to the permitting process. So, you know, in other jurisdictions and in other kinds of projects, it’s rare that there’s a law that says you absolutely cannot do some sort of economic activity. There are rarely flat bands on certain kinds of activities. So, yeah, so through the legal process of Thacker Pass, the best that we could hope for was that we were delaying the project so that we could continue to organize on the ground, continue to try and gather enough people to confront this project literally on the ground, on the roads that the construction equipment needed to access Thacker Pass. But in terms of whether a lawsuit could just get the government to completely cancel the project, that’s not what’s at play with laws like the National Historic Preservation Act or the National Environmental Policy Act or those kinds of federal regulatory laws. Max: And just to be clear, because I think sometimes when you tell this to people, I’ve been around, you’ve done a lot of work with tribes across the Great Basin, across the West, really. And you’ve given a lot of these types of presentations and people get mad at you sometimes. And I think it’s important to say, you’re not saying this is the way it should be. You’re just describing to people this is what the law currently is. It shouldn’t be that way. But a lot of people have this mistaken conception, I don’t know, probably going back to watching Schoolhouse Rock and being told as children that U.S. law is based on democracy and it’s all about the will of the people being enacted through Congress. And I think what you’re doing here is trying to expose that a lot of this law has been blatantly written by elite interests from the beginning. It doesn’t represent necessarily the interests of the entire population, certainly doesn’t represent the interests of indigenous communities in these cases. So whether we like it or not, we don’t in this case. We don’t like it. But that’s the reality of current law. And I think the point that you were making earlier about if we had strong environmental protection laws, if we had strong cultural resource or sacred site protection laws, then the sacred sites that were destroyed by the Dakota Access Pipeline would have been protected. The sacred site at Peehee Mu’huh, Thacker Pass, would have been protected. The sacred site at Oak Flat in Arizona would be protected. The sacred site, the springs at Hakamwe in northern Arizona would be protected from lithium mining. All these things would not be happening if we had effective and strong environmental and cultural protection laws. But they are happening. And I just want to make that caveat because I think people get mad when they hear about this. And you should be mad. You should get mad hearing about this. But don’t be mad at the messenger. Be mad at the injustice. Be mad at the reality of the situation. be mad at what’s being done to these, you know, these sacred places, these biodiverse places, you know, not just in the U.S., but around the world, right? Because a lot of these laws are similar in other places as well. Will: Yeah, I mean, it’s just sort of basic, like the cure requires proper diagnosis. So if we’re not diagnosing the reality that American law is pretty impotent, for a lot of these kinds of issues, then, you know, we’re just going to keep going back into that hamster wheel and we’re not going to protect places that need to be protected. You know, I think there is a certain amount of comforting ourselves or sort of, you know, we really hope that a lawsuit will take care of it because, you know, once it’s in the lawyer’s hands, a campaign is in the lawyer’s hands, or, you know, and there’s all these arguments going on. It’s really the lawyers doing all this work on it. And so a lot of people, you know, they feel like they can sort of suspend what they’re doing until the lawsuit goes or, you know, fighting these projects is really hard. There’s no getting around it. It’s scary. And as we’ve experienced, the government will hit you back. And so there’s a certain impulse that we have to like, oh, somebody else will take care of it. Somebody will come in and save us. The lawyers will come in and save us. And we have to really resist that mindset because lawyers aren’t going to save us. And in fact, nobody else is going to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves. And that is just a reality that we’re going to have to get used to if we’re going to stop the destruction of what’s left of the planet. Max: Yeah, we’ve got a question in the chat from Keala who’s watching. Hi, Keala, a friend of ours. But I’m going to grab some water, so I’m going to step away for a second and maybe you can address Keala’s question. But I’ll be here, I’ll be listening, just grab some water. one counter example that i wanted to throw out there just uh that a friend here uh in the eugene oregon area used to help stop a highway is uh section 4f of the 1966 transportation act which prohibits federally funded transportation projects through parks and he used that to help stop a major highway expansion in the late 90s, early 2000s that threatened all these wetland areas outside Eugene. So it’s interesting because, you know, for as much as we critique environmental law, I know you yourself are litigating cases right now. You’re defending activist groups. You’re helping defend us against this fine that we’re going to discuss today. And you’re helping these folks fighting data centers in Ohio who are battling, you know, trying to use the existing environmental law, knowing that it’s not going to stop the projects, but yet having limited tools at their disposal to slow things down in the hopes that if the AI bubble bursts within the next year sometime, then if those projects are already built, then the harm’s done. But if the bubble burst before those projects are built, then they may never be built. And so, you know, this is the type of fight that a lot of environmentalists, land defenders have been in for a long time, is this sort of running retreat that the whole environmental movement has been for my lifetime and beyond. The environmental movement, you know, and I know a lot of people who are fighting for indigenous sovereignty and cultural protection feel the same way in many senses. I mean, we’ve talked to Keala about similar things. She does a lot of brilliant writing about sort of the degradation of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement over time and how that movement has been a running retreat. Maybe we should just bring Keala in if she wants to. Keala, let us know in the chat. We could just bring you in on the live stream here if you’re prepared to hop on camera. But yeah, why don’t you jump in and talk about her question and I’m going to grab some water. I’ll be right back. Will Yeah. So NAGPRA, again, I know it’s called the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. For the most part, the law focuses on the repatriation part. So the, um, the 1872 mining law does, um, uh, does supersede, does Trump the, uh, does Trump NAGPRA. So, so what happens, um, for, for like mining on public lands, if there are Native American graves there, what NAGPRA does is it provides a process for figuring out who to give the remains to. So they’re going to remove the remains, um, it’s, and disturb that site, you know, which is very offensive, just first of all. But it provides a process for sorting out which descendants, which lineal descendants should get these remains. It’s not a hard stop on the 1872 mining law, unfortunately. And in fact, one thing that I didn’t mention about regulatory law, especially in the federal, in the federal setting, the way that you sue the federal government for violating laws like the NAGPRA or the National Historic Preservation Act, it’s not a violation of the regulations that you’re suing. What you’re suing for is that that violation rises to the level of being arbitrary and capricious. So government, um, courts have ruled that you don’t even have to like follow the regulations perfectly. Um, you just have to do a good enough job that a judge can find that your violation of those regulations wasn’t arbitrary or capricious. Um, so a lot of times, can you define that? Yeah. So like, um, just like completely unreasonable, right? Like, um, You have no reason for why you denied that request from, like in the Thacker Pass situation, we had information that there were graves. I mean, there was a massacre there, right? There was at least 32 Paiutes were murdered by U.S. cavalrymen in Thacker Pass. so you know if if we were asking the government to protect those sites what they’ll say is well let’s start the process of finding we’re going to dig those those remains up when if we find them we’ll dig them up and we’ll put this 100 foot barrier around where they are and then we need to start talking about who to give them to. But it’s completely within the legal rights of the government for those government agents to say, yeah, you know, we’re having a hard time deciding which of these 10 lineal descendants these remains should go to. So we’re going to hold on to them until you guys sort it out. And we’ll keep them in our archaeologists’ offices, and we’ll keep them safe for you while you guys are sorting it out. And this is just kind of an example of the kinds of things. And a judge is going to look at that and say, well, that’s not really unreasonable. So you can’t compel the agency to turn those remains over. Max: So did Judge Miranda do, who was hearing the Thacker Pass cases in the district court in Reno, were there rulings that the BLM had violated the law in the permitting of Thacker Pass, but that it didn’t rise to the level of arbitrary and capricious? Or did she rule that there were no violations of the law to place at all in the permitting of the project? Will: Yeah, she ruled that... That’s a long answer. Yeah, parts of the ruling were, yes, the agencies could have done a better job, But that’s not what’s at stake. It’s whether or not—the big thing in the Thacker Pass case was they failed to consult with dozens of tribes that attached cultural importance to the massacre site, to other things that were in Thacker Pass. But what she ruled was that because the government agencies sent letters to the tribes to a general tribal office building, and this all happened in the middle of COVID, for example, or we have to keep in mind, and most tribal employees were not at their offices. She ruled that that was good enough, that just sending a letter when they didn’t hear a response and within 30 days they moved forward with planning the project. And so she ruled that because the tribes had not responded to that initial letter, that it was not arbitrary and capricious for them to proceed without consulting, without doing more to try and involve the tribes. So yeah, again, there’s regulations, and those regulations are kind of like guidelines. And if you’re going to win some sort of claim on how the regulations work, like the National Historic Preservation Act regulations, it has to be really bad. They have to just completely disregard what the regulations say. And that’s, I mean, that’s part of what the Trump administration is doing is trying to strip down these regulations even more, which is just going to like make it even easier for government agencies to be like, well, we did good enough. We tried. Let’s move on and destroy this place. Max: Okay, interesting. So did you finish answering Keala’s question about whether there’s anything in NAGPRA that can challenge or that overtly contradicts the mining law? Will: Yes, there’s not. All that NAGPRA does is set up a way to determine who should receive the remains that they will remove because of the project. Max: Yeah. Yeah. And I know, so you were part of a tour, I wasn’t able to make it, but with representatives and tribal members from a bunch of different tribes around the area who went to the Nevada State Conservatory, is that what they call it, in Carson City, Nevada. Can you tell us about that visit and what takes place in a facility like that? Will: Yeah, I mean, they have the, sorry, it was really emotional. I’m not Native, but it was crazy to walk. It’s a warehouse where they keep all these remains from places that they’ve destroyed, that government agencies have destroyed. And when you, you know, I know Native people already understand this, but for non-Native folks, you got to remember that Native people lived on this whole continent for tens of thousands of years, which means that there’s really not anywhere that’s not covered in artifacts that Native peoples created, sacred artifacts that Native peoples created, parts of their history. And so whenever you destroy, especially in the West where colonization happened later, and I live over on the East Coast, and one of the reasons why there’s not as many artifacts and stuff found is because they’ve already destroyed so many times and paved over so many times. Europeans have been on the East Coast for way longer than, say, in Nevada. But whenever they are going to destroy a site and they take the artifacts and stuff off the land, they take them to these warehouses and they hold them and archaeologists do all these studies on them. And it’s really sickening to walk into a building and they’re totally like sterile buildings with like they keep the temperature low and preserve the stuff. But you’re looking at these long aisles of metal shelves that have all these cardboard boxes, and they’re just filled with Native culture. And it’s, I don’t know, you know, it’s just a very powerful scene to really put into perspective the way that the American government still engages in genocide against Native peoples. but yeah it’s it’s atrocious and places like that are there’s a whole industry there’s a whole archaeological industry that has built up out of taking advantage of the artifacts that are removed from public lands before projects are constructed on those lands and using those artifacts to create their theories about how Native peoples moved through the area, how they lived. And a lot of times those theories contradict with what Native folks themselves know about their own history. And so a lot of times those theories are used to justify more genocide. I’m really getting in the weeds here. I don’t know if that’s what you want me to do, Max. Max: Yeah. Yeah, no, I think it’s interesting. It’s important for people to know because I think it’s shocking to people to learn this. A lot of people don’t know that this is the reality. You know, a lot of people might go on the New York Times or whatever website and see some news story written about, you know, genetic testing on Native American remains from such and such location has revealed whatever xyz and they don’t realize what’s actually entailed in that sort of scientific industrial complex knowledge production knowledge production process theory production process um which is like looting people’s ancestors graves you know imagine if it was your parent or your grandparent or your great-grandparents grave which was looted without your consent or in some cases even knowledge. And people were doing scientific research on it and on them and building careers on that exploitation, getting their PhDs, writing their dissertations, getting tenure at universities based on that research. And that that research was not only science divorced from everything else, but that it’s taking place in the context of the further colonization and desecration of the land itself. mining projects, highway projects, fracking, oil pipelines, housing developments, AI data centers, transmission lines, all these things which are further deepening the infrastructural colonization of the land, destroying species, you know, who of course, like my ancestors, come from Europe, and they had those traditional relationships long ago with the willows and the oak trees and, You know, the deer and the wolves and all the different creatures who lived around them, who they were in daily relationship with, who they had this relationship with as kin, as brothers and sisters, as elder brothers and sisters in many cases, because you don’t survive long on this planet if you’ve got a huge ego and you think you’re superior to everything else around you, like this culture does, which is why it’s destroying everything and running us underground. Um, so yeah, it, it, I’m not native either, but being present at Thacker Pass through this whole process and walking through it with, you know, with our friends, Bethany and Michonne and Dean and all these people who, who are native, who are from these, these areas and that’s their relatives, like that’s their ancestors bones there. um you know i just feel so much anger and and sadness um you know in in in that that that they’re feeling um to a much stronger level than i am i think um so you know this leads us i think to the discussion that we’re really that we came here to talk about which we haven’t even gotten into So this is how conversations between Will and I tend to go, we’re good friends, you know, we spider web out from things. Which was about the fine that was leveled against you and me particularly, because we’re the ones who started the first protest camp at Thacker Pass at Peehee Mu’huh in January 2021. And from when we went out there, the BLM, I think it was within about six days that they came out the first time. And they just were asking questions and trying to figure out who we were and what our intentions were. They were following what we were writing online and our videos and interviews with media and so on. And they started threatening us pretty early on with legal repercussions, fines, and so on, potentially escalating to jail time for the protest camp. And we had a whole back and forth of exchanging legal threats with them, essentially, in those early days of the camp. And then eventually in, I believe it was August of 2021, they came out to camp with paperwork saying that we are instigating a process to fine myself, Max Wilbert, and you, Will Falk, $49,890.13 with the potential for rapidly escalating fines beyond that for trespass, unauthorized trespass use and occupancy and development of public lands. And specifically what they cited was two pit toilets where we took a shovel and dug a small hole in the ground. Keep in mind, this was literally directly adjacent to a weather station that had been built by Lithium Nevada, an already impacted site where heavy equipment had been rolling around in cars and so on. It wasn’t like we were damaging the land. And then we built a little toilet seat around it with a privacy screen and a windbreak that, Will, you were involved in helping put up. And specifically, those structures were built because Native folks, including some of the elders who we mentioned earlier, Dean, who’s in a wheelchair, and others were coming up to Thacker Pass to pray to be present in this place where their ancestors had been killed, massacred, and to be part of opposing this massive open pit mine. And these people needed, like Will and I had just been going out to the bathroom in the bushes, in the shrubs. We’d been just out in the wind. But, you know, there were elderly people coming out who needed a little bit more support in order to be out there on this mountainside a mile above sea level, you know, where there’s incredibly strong winds. I saw a tent literally just get ripped in half one day up there where there’s hail, where there’s snow and rain and thunder and lightning. And they needed some support to be up there. So we helped create some of this infrastructure to allow them to be there. And the federal government police, the Bureau of Land Management police, told us, oh, you need a permit for that kind of thing. And we asked them, how many times, Will? I think six times at least. We said, okay, we need a permit for it. How do we get a permit? How do we get a permit? In writing, in person. We have this on camera. We got their body cameras. We asked them multiple times, how do we get a permit to do this? And they ignored those requests. They didn’t even respond. And then they came with this fine against us. So can you expand on that, Will, and just talk a little bit about the fine and what it represents and how that legal process works? Will: Yeah, I mean, there’s just so many layers of absurdity that it’s sometimes hard to know which layer to start on. Um, I guess just like, just the very basic, um, you know, this is land that’s set for, uh, um, and is currently being destroyed for an 1100 acre, 400 feet deep open pit lithium mine, um, with all of the, um, dynamite that goes into that, all of the, um, pollution, all of the, I mean, they, um, their own environmental impact statement documents talk about things like antimony and arsenic in the water that this mine is going to produce. So we put these little pit toilets where they’re going to do that. And we got fined the $49,800, and I forget what the exact total is, for that. And so I always try to make the joke that it must be that our s**t wasn’t toxic enough to get a permit for. We’re just humans taking regular old human s***s, but that’s not okay. But a corporation that’s shitting all kinds of forever chemicals and really toxic stuff, leaving the groundwater undrinkable for hundreds of years, they can have their permit. So on that level, it’s just absurd. But then even on their own terms, it’s absurd when you consider that Max: showing a video here of what they’re actually doing to this land this is the land that they’re getting mad at us for destroying but go ahead I’ll just play this as you continue Will: yeah so the actual Bureau of Land Management regulations that they said we violated they say that the government because the government owns the land again when we hear public land we think it’s owned by all of us but it’s owned by the federal government and that’s why they can get us for trespassing but they say that they can recover from us three times the fair market value of the land that we deprive them of their property interest that we trespassed on we occupied, plus administrative costs for, that they have to, that, you know, the time they spent, the hours that they spent in meetings discussing our trespass. And so that came out to the total amount of money that the government said we were depriving them of was $12.40. So, like, those pit toilets were so small that they only, if you were going to sell that land for three times the market value of that land, it would have come to $12.40. So, the government can fine us for that, plus administrative costs. So the rest of the fine is all of the money they spent investigating us for depriving them in their own words of $12 and 40 cents. Um, if that’s not, uh, tax dollars, well, well spent, I don’t know what is. Um, but, uh, it’s, yeah, it’s absurd on its face. Max: It’s, it really just illustrates for me how, you know, projects like Thacker Pass are always joint, corporate government projects. People perceive it as the corporation, but the U.S. from its very beginning has been a corporate project. Originally it was the Dutch East India Company, and you had all these different... The colonies were actually corporations in the beginning, right? They were established by corporate crown corporations, chartered corporations of the British and the and since the beginning of this country corporate development in partnership with the federal government has been the name of the game and it just continues that way at Thacker Pass the federal government permitted the mine they repressed and surveilled the opposition to the mine they gave the mine $2.26 billion in loan they protected the mine against legal challenges and now they’ve actually taken a partnership stake in the mine so they’re literally going to profit the federal government is literally going to profit from the mine too it doesn’t get much more explicit than that in illustrating just how the government and corporations are not really separate at all it’s the same structure Will: yeah I mean and to me always the most obvious example is you know it those were those were blm cops that you know um came to to make sure we knew we were being watched you know they came out in their huge suvs with their automatic rifles in the hanging in the back window they’re in full body armor guns tasers batons coming up and and telling us that um they want us to remember that this needs to remain peaceful and Max and I are looking at them like we’re not the ones with guns we’re not the ones with all this equipment we want it to remain peaceful too how about you take your weapons somewhere else but my point is just that perhaps the closest way that corporations and the government are intertwined is the government provides the muscle the government provides the armed people to come and threaten us when the corporation isn’t happy with what’s going on. And if, you know, we know this, like if you were to nonviolently block a road to a government project, a government-permitted corporate project, then the corporation is going to call the government and say, hey, why don’t you send the cops or the National Guard out there to move those people? And they do that all the time. So, you know, the government, again, we really need to see that. The government provides the foot soldiers to make sure that people like us can’t protect the land. And corporations avail themselves of that muscle all the time. Max: Yep. Yeah, thank you for that. So I interrupted you earlier. So this fine was levied on us in August. I think they finalized it in October, right? And said that we are, yes, we are fining you this money. And how have things gone from there, October of 2021? Will: Yeah, we, so the fine is not actually considered, at least at this stage, not considered a criminal legal thing. So American law has much stronger protections for criminal defendants than it does for just kind of civil defendants. So at the beginning, it’s actually considered an administrative issue, which means that before we can actually get an actual real judge, someone that’s actually sitting on a federal bench, to review the case, we had to exhaust our remedies. We had to go through every available outlet within the Bureau of Land Management’s own internal courts. And this is called the Interior Board of Land Appeals. So for the most part, what they deal with is like, grazing disputes. But the fine was issued against us. We had to file our opposition to that within the Interior Board of Land Appeals. But there’s no procedural deadlines built into the Interior Board of Land Appeals processes, which means that they theoretically... Max: To a speedy trial, right? Will: Exactly. They could sit on it for as long as they wanted. And in fact, they did. We just learned about this fine, you know, that they were finally approving the whole fine or finally ruling that, you know, they weren’t going to revoke the fine just a few weeks ago. So we were sitting under that for basically five years, waiting for them to make some sort of decision. so we did that but now we have to appeal it to an actual federal judge the administrative law judges, they’re called judges in the Interior Board of Land Appeals but they’re just like other lawyers they’re sort of like other normal lawyers who deal with these things and they can’t hear constitutional legal issues so like if we argue that our free speech was infringed upon by this whole thing. We haven’t been able to actually make those arguments, and we can only make those arguments once we take it to a federal judge. So it’s like we went through this whole five-year process of not knowing what was going to happen, all the anxiety that comes with that, and now we have to go litigate in the federal court, which of course takes a lot of time and and resources. And, um, you know, it could be several years before that process is, um, um, resolved. Um, so it’s, it’s like a really good way for the government to hold things over your head. Um, and I think I, I, they know that that’s, that’s the psychological effect of these things. Um, and they know that, that more than anything, they can try and just, uh, play chicken with, people just try and wear people down with a psychological fear of like what’s it going to mean for me to owe all this money and basically make them go away. So yeah, it sucks. Max: Yeah, the Arundhati Roy quote has been on my mind for a while now that real resistance has real consequences. And in some ways to me, that’s a good gauge of the effectiveness of our actions. if your resistance work has serious consequences associated with it negative consequences for you then it’s probably at least potentially effective if it doesn’t have consequences if it doesn’t have consequences attached to it probably pretty ineffective that’s not true across the board but i think that’s a good uh measure that we should look to in some ways for these things the actions which are really effective to halt the destruction of our planet, to challenge the hegemony of capital and elites, have been made highly illegal. And the actions which don’t challenge them, they’re fine with those. The actions which don’t represent a real threat, they’re fine with that. I mean, this is why Sheldon Wolin, who’s a famous political philosopher, he talked about inverted totalitarianism, how Western-style democracies are inverted totalitarian states in which you don’t have a single dictator like an Adolf Hitler figure who has absolute power because in some ways that’s a much more fragile system of authoritarianism. What we have instead is a supposedly democratic society in which we have political representation, in which we have voting rights, in which we have freedom of speech rights. But like Jane Ann Morris says in her great book, which I’ve got a copy of right here called Not in My Backyard, it’s going to be blurred out, back from when that wasn’t a slur. It was actually a term that movements adopted happily for themselves to say, hell no, not in my backyard, which didn’t at the time necessarily mean I want it in somebody else’s backyard or I’m okay with it in somebody else’s backyard. That term has now been co-opted by industry and has turned into a negative slur against people who try and defend the land where they live. She says in here, it’s a democracy theme park. You submit your public comments, you petition regulators and politicians and those in power, and it’s like a black box. Your voice disappears into the void and nothing comes of it. But it preserves this illusion of democratic participatory democracy that in the end allows for a much more effective and insidious system of totalitarian control to become established. that’s what we have in this country and uh you know that that’s that’s why you see um methods which don’t really challenge power being completely fine with those in power they don’t really mind uh me and will live streaming here as a small number of people watch us but if we want to go on YouTube and we start building a big audience and so on, then the shadow banning starts to kick in, right? Then the algorithm starts to kick in. Then you might have character assassination attempts. Then you might have actual assassination attempts, right? There are different ways in which hegemony is maintained, but in this inverted totalitarian society, we are allowed to have some freedom of speech because there’s a recognition that it’s a pressure release valve for people who would otherwise take up arms and launch a revolution and fight for the future, fight for justice, fight for what’s right, fight for not being poisoned, not having a climate apocalypse future in which billions of us die in horrible ways. But instead, everybody’s busy making public comments and going to hearings and arguing about whether or not voting is a good idea and what candidates to vote for as we descend further and further into the apocalypse and the most powerful people on the planet just ascend like a rocket. Will: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, this to me is one of the most important things anybody can be talking about something has happened in our culture. It’s taken generations to do this, but something has happened where we’ve convinced ourselves that what we think and what we say about certain issues, what we believe, what we feel about certain issues or certain realities is the most important thing and that we can be a good person. At least I did the public commentings. At least I spoke out against the problem. But at a time when reality is physical, when ecological collapse is something that is happening in the real physical world, when a bullet hits your heart and kills you, that’s a physical process. It does not matter what was in that heart when it gets hit. we have to understand that either we stop the destruction or we don’t. And I know that that sounds obvious, but when we talk about stopping the destruction, we come up with all these ways to imagine indirect ways that we can stop the destruction. If I just write this amazing book, it’s going to stop the destruction, or at least my conscious is clean because I said something about it. The problem is, if we’re going to stop the destruction of the planet, we have to actually stop the destruction of the planet. It doesn’t mean that ideas aren’t a part of this. It doesn’t mean that writing books and that kind of thing and speaking up is not a part of it. It’s just that if everyone only imagines that as the way to fight, then we’re never going to win. And at some point, in order for those ideas to be effective, people have to step up and wield real power in the real physical world. And so that’s something I’ve been starting to say. Like, if we all want to stop the destruction of the natural world, everybody’s like, yeah. It’s like, then we have to go stop the destruction of the natural world. We don’t get to procrastinate with ideas. We don’t get to procrastinate with everything but stopping the destruction of the natural world. It’s something that we have to actually go do. And we’ve all been alive long enough to look around and say, there’s not very many people doing that. And when we do that, that means that we have to realize, well, at some point, if we don’t see anybody else doing it, then we have to be the ones that do it. And I feel like that’s something that we just really have to come to grips with. And the thing is, we won’t, as you keep saying, we can’t do this and remain safe. There’s just simply, but the thing is we’re not safe right now. We all might get killed by an industrial toxin. We all might die from cancer that is from something in our water. Max: 40% of human deaths are due to pollution. Will: We’re already not safe. So, you know, you can, let’s stand up and we all are going to die. Let’s die for something that really means something. Max: mm-hmm well said well said well i think you’re absolutely right and you know really this gets back to liberal versus radical uh which you know is an idea, a juxtaposition that we’ve been grappling with for a long time now which is uh really that liberalism which defines you know much of the environmental movement the vast majority i would say of the environmental movement the vast majority of the political left you know most people that i come into contact with general. Although the right wing, they’re much more materialists. But most people who I come to contact with are idealists. They believe in the primacy of the mind, of attitudes and ideas, and that that’s where reality emerges from. Radicals are materialists. We believe that it’s not that ideas aren’t important, but they’re secondary. They emerge from material circumstances. Ideology tends to emerge from as a secondary element and reinforced too, but the primary element is the material conditions, the material reality. And this leads to entirely different political strategies. Liberals focus on education and changing people’s minds. They focus on thoughts, ideas, and hearts. And yes, those are important. Radicals do not reject that by any means. But radicals see that, see education, see changing minds, changing hearts, as being part of the process of building organized political resistance, physical, material resistance, that is the ultimate goal, the ultimate way that we wield power and change the world. And, you know, this is, I think, a pretty important, it’s a critical distinction, really. It’s a critical distinction because people have been educating to try and solve these issues, the ecological crisis, for at least 70 years at this point and really far longer than that. But if you look at the most effective actions that we have seen around the world to actually make a dent in global warming, for example, and the flow of fossil fuels, we’re talking about things like the movement for the emancipation of the Niger Delta, sabotaging oil facilities in Nigeria, and knocking out 40% of the oil export capacity of the largest oil producer in Africa at various times. We’re talking about things like, although it wasn’t intended with an environmental effect, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran. These are physical actions that regardless of the heart behind it, Iran’s actions had more impact on global warming than anything that environmentalists have ever done combined. And that tells you the relative strength of these approaches. And again, it’s not to say that education isn’t important. Here we are having a conversation, having a live stream, educating people, talking about these issues. But it’s directly in service of action. It’s not just about changing people’s minds. It’s about mobilizing people to action. And that’s the type of education that I’m drawn to, particularly. Will: Absolutely. Yeah, I don’t have much better things to say than that. I mean, maybe because I’m a lawyer, I’m going to try to. but one thing I always think about are the greater sage grouse at Thacker Pass or everywhere in the Great Basin. And I often think, do those greater sage grouse are, there’s only 2% left of greater sage grouse that existed prior to European conquest of the Great Basin. so in about 200 years their population has collapsed 98 percent and I often ask myself is like do those greater sage grouse really need me to write another poem about them or do they need the destruction to stop do they need their habitat to still be here do they need their their lex preserved. And I don’t think you can really make the argument that the attitude, the idea is more important to them than the habitat, than directly protecting what they need to survive. And if we’re going to be truly biocentric about this, truly biophilic about it, and we’re going to recognize that it’s not okay for the needs of some humans to dominate the rest of life on earth, the perceived needs of some humans, then I think we also have to consider that it’s not okay to procrastinate the actions that we know need to be done to try and get humans to accept that it’s important that we protect the natural world. It’s not okay to keep delaying this to get more people on board, um, to agree with us, um, because there are real lives at stake, and there are, our whole species going extinct, and for them, it, it’s literally game over, they’re, they’re, they’re species here that don’t even, they can’t be here to even think about whether humans need to change their hearts and minds, they’re just gone, um, and the longer it takes for us to, to stop this madness, the more, um, destruction is going to happen, and the less life is ultimately going to be here. Max: Yeah, thank you, Will. Well said. Last chance if anyone wants to ask the lawyer questions while he’s here, legal questions or otherwise, we’re going to wrap up. But yeah, I think about that often in regards to the sage-grouse and in regards to other creatures. I’ve got a painting here behind me on the wall that my friend did of an elk. that I don’t know if you can see, but one thing that elk will do as they’re gearing up for their breeding season, which is in the early fall, they will, the males start getting really aggressive and they’ve got lots of testosterone. They’ve got these giant racks of antlers and I watched them on mountainside, some of the best experiences of my life, just sitting and watching elk. and the males will just, they’ll battle against a bush. You know, they’ll take their antlers and they’re just tearing a bush or a tree to shreds. And part of what they’re doing is getting the velvet off of their antlers because it’s living tissue and they’re covered in this velvet as they grow incredibly rapidly. And so you’ll often see male elk in the fall with sticks and grass and all kinds of stuff all caught up and wrapped up in their rack of antlers. And this picture shows a transmission line, a power transmission line wrapped up in an elk’s antlers as if it were a giant elk who just bent down and ripped up the transmission line as it walked past. I mean, that to me is a reminder. That’s a reminder that the natural world is always fighting against its own destruction, is always fighting for life, fighting against this death infrastructure of modernity. And I don’t mean that as a metaphor. I mean it literally. Like every winter that happens, every hurricane, every ice storm is working to pry apart cracks in concrete is physically working to tear apart the infrastructure of industrial civilization. You know, every termite and ant that’s burrowing its way through, you know, through our buildings made, you know, largely made from torn down forests. You know, every flood that undermines the foundations of skyscrapers and highways is an action, a sabotage action against the industrial infrastructure. And we need to align ourselves with that natural world and take its example. We got one question about the international court, Will, if you want to address that. We’re going to wrap up here, folks. I told Will this might be 20 or 30 minutes, and here we are. An hour and 20. Will: That’s my own fault. but um so i i don’t want to say that um you know like take like the concept of ecocide and trying to give that a platform that there’s not a place for that i think it helps people understand like you know eco like even just the concept i don’t think people think of ecocide as even a concept we think of homicide and you know we kill each other um we think of genocide we we kill whole groups of, of humans, but this notion of ecocide where we’re just killing vast swaths of the, of the earth. Um, I think that’s a good idea to kind of help people wake up, but the problem with international courts, um, are they, they rarely have enforcement mechanisms, um, especially in big countries like, uh, like the United States or big imperial countries like the United States. Law is only as good as your power to enforce it. That’s a really important point. So when we think about if somebody is convicted of murder, they don’t just magically appear in prison, right? There are bailiffs that have armed men and women that have to go physically take that person to jail. So the law of homicide, the law that prohibits murder is backed up by force. And American courts can enforce that. International courts, you know, we’re already seeing this. There’s a warrant out for Bibi Netanyahu. But what’s the reason why Bibi Netanyahu hasn’t been arrested? That’s because who’s going to invade Israel and go get him? you know, somebody should, but the international court doesn’t have an army to go and do that. So it’s the same, it’s the same sorts of things with ecocide. So, you know, the American economy, the global economy is based off of ecocide. And so if you got an international court to rule against the ecocide, that would be great in terms of people’s awareness. But the international court is not going to have the power to go stop the ecocide. And so I think we have to start thinking in that way. And we’re seeing this all the time. I mean, the Trump administration, who’s not the first presidential administration to do this, just disregards court rulings. And that’s because courts have no power in and of themselves. They only have the power that they have to the extent that they have armed people to go enforce their will. Max: And this has actually happened before in U.S. history, right? If I’m not mistaken, there was a Supreme Court ruling during the days of Andrew Jackson trying to stop the Trail of Tears, the march of all the indigenous people from the eastern U.S. to what’s now Oklahoma. And the Supreme Court ruled that it needed to be halted, and Andrew Jackson basically said, f**k you, make me, and went ahead with it. And there were no consequences because no one could enforce consequences on him. So I think Will’s making a really important point that law is sort of a collective societal agreement. And if we don’t have some sort of means to enforce that law or to make its power real in the world, then it’s just words. It might as well be a Facebook post by some random person that gets two likes, you know, and one of them is your mom. So, yeah, I think it’s an important point. I’m really supportive of folks doing ecocide law, doing rights of nature and so on. but only so far as those provide greater democratic legitimacy to physical acts of resistance, sabotage, revolutionary action, mass nonviolent direct action, mass strikes, etc., that can actually enforce those measures in the real physical world. And I think that’s what our movement really needs to focus on as a whole. Will: Agreed. Max: Okay, well, I think we’re going to wrap up. I’ve been on live streams. I gave a talk earlier this morning for the People’s Climate Summit in Turkey, which is happening in advance of the COP31 UN conference, which is this year. Once again, talking about global warming and the crisis it represents and doing nothing about it as they have done every year. Not again, because many of the people in those UN conferences have very good hearts and very good beliefs and want the right thing. but they don’t have power to enforce what they want in the world and so it ends up being words and more words and more words and more meetings year after year with nothing actually changing but anyway I just say that to say I’ve been on video for three hours this morning and it’s not even 11.30 my time so I am tired and need a break but I appreciate everyone watching we’re going to be challenging this $50,000 fine in federal court. So I’ll keep folks appraised about that if you’re interested. If there are any lawyers out there, attorneys, law students, professors who want to be involved in the defense, please reach out to me or Will. We could use some assistance. Will was talking about he’s just working on another case before this. So we’re busy and he’s doing it for, he’s doing our legal defense for free because we don’t have money to pay for high-powered attorneys to do this. So Thanks everyone for watching. Keala, Eli, Shams, Barry, Adeline, ST, Fran, Karen, Tish, Zach, Scott, everyone else. I appreciate you being here. And we’ll talk to you all soon. Thanks, Will. See you soon. Biocentric is a liberated zone with zero AI-generated content. Please note that I’m not on social media, so I rely on readers to help share and distribute this content. Paid subscribers support the work you read about here, and in return receive access to very occasional private posts with behind-the-scenes information and unreleased drafts. Thank you to everyone who is able to support in this way. What’s Coming Next * Confronting the nuclear myth. * More on sabotage. This is a public episode. 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