Bead 5: Town Hall and Toppling Pines

When western pine beetles overwhelm a ponderosa, you don't know it at first.  The beetles are tiny--about the size of a sesame seed--so their attacks are essentially invisible.  Moreover, although beetles may kill a tree rather quickly, the tree takes its time looking dead.  The same capillary action that keeps your Christmas tree fresh until the New Year can keep dead ponderosa pine trees green for many months.  Eventually, the tree announces its passing from the top down.  Orange needles march groundward from the crown as its water column retreats and eventually winks out.

Here in the southern Sierra Nevada, we all know about the beetles.  They are why our hillsides went from green to golden in 2015, and from red to brown in 2016.  They are why our town is now swarming with tree companies--with their trucks, their workers, their hotel bookings and apartment rentals.  There is a large property on the west side of town that was cleared and leveled a few years back, leading people to believe that we were about to get a Wal-Mart, or perhaps a posh new apartment complex.  Instead, it stayed vacant, waiting for the beetles to do their work.  Now, it's the site of a massive wood-chipping operation.  Everywhere are stacks of mighty ponderosa logs, mountains of chips, trucks moving everything around.  And still the trees keep dying.

November 2015 on one of my favorite trail-running roads, Sierra National Forest

The ponderosa pine zone wraps around the belly of the western Sierra, bridging the scrubby oak-and-bull-pine forests of the lower elevations with the shady mixed conifer stands of higher reaches.  At 1,950 feet above sea level, the town of Mariposa sits below the ponderosa belt--and, for that matter, below National Forest boundaries.  And yet, public lands and forest health were recurring themes on February 21, when U.S. Congressman Tom McClintock held a Town Hall meeting at the Mariposa County Fairgrounds.

It all started with a polite line of citizens outside Building A.  Some sat in camp chairs, others stood.  Some held umbrellas against the stop-and-go rain.  Most chatted and laughed, took pictures of one another, compared signs, wondered aloud how the meeting would go.  I arrived a few minutes after four o'clock, and took my place at the end of the line.  The Town Hall wasn't scheduled to start until six, but some shenanigans by one Marshall Long, Mariposa County Supervisor, had necessitated an early arrival.  A few days before, Mr. Long had dispatched an email to local Tea Party members warning them that "the progressive left has targeted this and all other town halls by Republican Congressmen to be disrupted and shut down."  He urged them to be at the Fairgrounds by 4:00 "to fill Building A before the other side does."

The parking lot, and the line, were a mosaic of both of Mr. Long's Sides.  Subarus and Priuses squatted between jacked-up trucks.  Baseball caps vowing to Make America Great Again and protect the Second Amendment alternated with woolen beanies and the occasional pink pussy hat.  The line was not so much single-file as single-cluster; that is, a cluster of people from one Side would be followed by a cluster of people from the other Side, etc.  People drank tea and snacked.  The rain let up without my noticing it.  I kept holding my umbrella until I caught sight of a rainbow through the clear vinyl.  It stretched "all the way across the sky," as the Internet meme goes.  The rainbow was the first of two Acts of God, the second being the arrival, at that exact moment, of Yosemite Bear.  Most out-of-towners know Yosemite Bear as the Double Rainbow guy, for that is how he achieved YouTube fame.  Locally, he's Bear, or Paul Vasquez.  The Double Rainbow guy lives in rural Mariposa County, and turned out at the Town Hall to represent a Side.

Around five o'clock, the side door to Building A opened, and the single-cluster line shuffled inside.  Building A was actually just one room--a big, industrial room that in other moments likely housed dances, quilt shows, expos of various kinds.  Today, it housed row after row of metal folding chairs separated by a wide center aisle.  Though you might expect the Sides to sort themselves along the center aisle, as is customary at weddings and in the U.S. Senate, this was not the case at Tom McClintock's Mariposa Town Hall.  People sat as close to the front as possible, with political factions ignoring the east-west compass of the room.  Even with our early-bird position in line, the first seats available to my cluster were in the rear half of the room.  We took up a whole row of ten seats.  In front of us and behind us were uniformed members of the alt-right, complete with NRA logos, camo, inordinate amounts of makeup, and one Confederate battle flag.

To them, I suppose we might have looked like uniformed snowflakes.  My down jacket, Lynn's long gray hippie hair; maybe they looked at us and thought, "God, they just scream liberal!  Can't they ever tone it down?"  At any rate, as I scanned the room, it was easy to get a sense of who was who.  Mr. Long's Sides each appeared to represent about half of the democratic process that was about to unfold.

A little sign by the door reported the seating capacity as 850.  As six o'clock neared, the seats filled up, and people began to stand along the walls.  The door remained open.  This was good.  Congressman McClintock had entertained a bit of drama at his last Town Hall, held in Roseville about two weeks previous.  Known to his many antagonists as Tom McTrump, McClintock had attracted a large protest crowd to the Roseville event.  Only about 200 people were allowed into the venue, with hundreds left outside.  Although there was no violence or vandalism, the crowd was noisy and frustrated.  McTrump ended up leaving under police escort, which made him the butt of many an Internet jab in the following days.  His rebuttal:  a short speech on the House floor, clearly directed at his Roseville adversaries, in which he lamented that people insisted on "shouting at" rather than "talking to" each other, which he felt greatly eroded the democratic process.  He likened the anti-Trump (and anti-McTrump) movement to the seeds of the Confederacy, when people resisted the election of President Lincoln and ultimately rejected the Constitution.

Spoiler alert:  If you ask Tom McClintock, Abraham Lincoln is not the only late, great U.S. president that Donald Trump takes after.

As we waited for the meeting to start, I began to feel a little nauseous.  It seemed like my alt-right neighbors were exuding aggression.  Their faces, the set of their jaws, made me want to puke.  The scariest guy in the room--I'll call him Colonel Quaritch--was this Vietnam vet who was attending the Town Hall in his vintage war uniform, and was the self-appointed sentry of the pre-meeting wait.  For a solid hour, from the time we were admitted into Building A until the time McClintock took the stage, he stood just a few paces inside the door, arms folded, casing out the room.  I never saw him smile or talk to anyone.  He wasn't actually needed, as far as I could tell; at least a dozen California Highway Patrol officers were distributed around the perimeter of the room, and they were openly carrying.  Perhaps the Colonel had throwback weapons, though, like grenades or napalm, that could be employed if our Side initiated the riot that McClintock had alluded to in his speech.

Tom McClintock entered the room right on time.  I didn't see Colonel Quaritch after that; I assume he either found a seat, or headed out into the shadows to stalk his imagined enemy.

Waiting for the Town Hall meeting to start.  Colonel Quaritch is faintly visible in the background, centered in the doorway.

You could say that this thing with the ponderosa pines is just nature.  The western pine beetle is native to California.  It's supposed to be here.  All this is part of a process that has been going on for millions of years; the beetles cull the unhealthy trees from the forest, and the strong live on.

Except for that in the southern Sierra Nevada, not much is living on.  On the Sierra National Forest, near where I live, up to 90 percent of mid-elevation ponderosa pine trees are dead.  This level of mortality doesn't reflect just ordinary background levels of beetle activity, but a massive outbreak.  According to University of Montana entomologist Diana Six, outbreaks happen only in a perfect storm of conditions involving warm temperatures, low tree defenses, and high productivity of beetle broods.  Often, these conditions overlap.  For example, when temperatures are warm, beetles may squeeze another breeding cycle into the calendar year.  Warm temperatures may also be linked with drought, which reduces tree defenses by limiting the amount of resin that can be produced and exuded against invading beetles.  Once an outbreak is initiated, other factors can exacerbate it.  For example, while tree overcrowding doesn't cause outbreaks, it may fuel an outbreak that is already underway.

In an outbreak, beetle populations spike.  In a massive outbreak, such as what is happening in the southern Sierra Nevada, beetle numbers reach levels beyond which tree defenses don't matter anymore.  When thousands of beetles attack a single tree, even the fattest, pitchiest pondo goes down.

Photo taken by the U.S. Forest Service during an aerial survey in August 2015.  This is just up the hill from my house, and is the aerial view of the yellow forest I was running in when I took the topmost photo in this post.

To his credit, Tom McClintock made the night about us, his constituents.  He gave the shortest of introductory speeches, borrowing heavily from the themes he'd used on the House floor after Roseville.  Then, he took questions for two straight hours.  To his discredit, he gave really shitty answers to our questions, and often didn't bother to answer at all.

The first question posed to McClintock was what he would do to protect the air and water quality of Congressional District 4.  His answer--and I have to admit, it revealed quick reflexes and a keen imagination--was that he would work to open the forests back up to logging, which would reduce the risk of wildfire, which would ensure cleaner air.  He swept the dying forest into this web, suggesting that the snags could easily kindle another catastrophic wildfire, which would "make a mockery of all of our air pollution rules."

Not long after that, a boy of about ten asked McClintock what he would do to curb global warming, so that he and the rest of his tender generation could have a future.  This could have been a grandfatherly moment for McClintock.  He could have commended the boy for his courage in speaking in front of a large, highly-charged crowd; could have sat him on his proverbial knee and told him that of course Grandpa Tom would do everything he could to make sure the planet remained inhabitable.  Instead, he told the boy we were in the midst of "a very vigorous debate on that very subject"--implying the debate was occurring among scientists, and not between scientists and wealthy climate contrarians.  Perhaps attempting to reassure the child, he said that climate change had been going on for 4 billion years, and was nothing to "wreck our economy" over.  Then, presumably because boys like dinosaurs, McClintock recalled the Jurassic Era, when the planet was far warmer than at present, and had five times the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide that we have today.  Whether his CO2 numbers are accurate is beside the point.  McClintock is a deplorable grandpa.

McClintock addressed several questions and comments about public lands.  People were concerned that he would sell off public lands, hand management of federal lands to local agencies, or both.  Here, McClintock probably felt like he had home field advantage; he is a member of the House Natural Resources Committee and chairman of the Federal Lands Subcommittee.  He listed three goals he and his colleagues had for public lands:  1) to restore public access to public lands, 2) to restore the federal government as a "good manager" of public lands, and 3) to ensure the federal government is a "good neighbor" to surrounding communities.  He threw those goals out there like lollipops, confident we'd pick them up, be delighted, and not bother ourselves with the fine print.  He moved on to the next question.

Later, at home, I picked at his three goals the way I picked at my left thumbnail all through the Town Hall.  They sounded well and good, until you stopped to think.  For starters, the idea that public access needs to be restored to public lands means that public access to such lands is currently not happening.  I live at the backdoor of the Sierra National Forest.  My neighborhood road terminates at Forest boundaries, at which point I can follow any number of dirt access roads throughout the northwestern arm of the Forest.  I find myself on National Forest lands, on average, three days of every week.  It's where I get virtually all of my exercise, where I look for birds, where I climb mountains, where I fish with my son.  In the past, as a wildlife biologist, it was even where I made my living.  Never, on the Sierra National Forest or any other National Forest I've lived near (Flathead, Willamette, Wasatch, Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie, and Daniel Boone), have I ever felt my access needed to be improved.

That said, my particular brand of access doesn't ask much of the Forest or my fellow Forest users.  I only need a trailhead at which to park, a pair of running shoes or hiking boots, and I'm good to go.  Nobody cares if I'm there.  Most of the time, nobody even knows I'm there; on a typical run on my local Forest Service roads, I will see not a single vehicle or human.  If my brand of access involved a couple hundred head of cattle, an ATV, a chainsaw, or an oil rig, many people would know I was there.  The forest community, too, would register my presence--sometimes to its detriment.  If I were a more resource-intensive user of public lands, I might feel that my access was limited.  But would that really be unfair?  A great number of us say no. 

McClintock's second goal of enabling the federal government to once again be a "good manager" of public lands is born of his belief, sounded at the Town Hall meeting and elsewhere, that our forests have gone unmanaged for 40 years, ever since radical leftist Richard M. Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act into being.  Since then, "forest health" (i.e. logging) projects have been stymied by burdensome environmental review obligations and court battles.  The result is--well, massive tree death, if we are to believe McClintock.  As the keynote speaker at a recent logging conference in Shasta County, McClintock told his audience that the forests of the Sierra Nevada are dying because of improper management.  That's it.  No drought, no beetles, and certainly no global warming.  Restore the Forest Service's ability to log as it sees fit, and the trees will be healthy again.  

That's not to say McClintock hasn't heard of bark beetles.  For several years running, he has introduced or co-sponsored bills that purport to address insect and disease infestation.  Most recently, he introduced a bill that would allow federal agencies to skip the NEPA process to deal with infestations declared to be an emergency by the state's governor.  The agencies would get federal dollars up front for these activities, but--and here's the sneaky part--they would be obligated to repay these dollars within five years through timber sales, and said timber sales would also get to skip NEPA.   

Finally, there is the matter of being a "good neighbor."  The phrase sounds innocuous enough; it puts me in mind of fresh-picked zucchini, or a friendly chat at the mailboxes.  But when it comes to federal lands, "good neighbor" is fraught with conservative ideology.  In the early 1980s, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, unveiled a number of "good neighbor" policies to quell the Carter-era Sagebrush Rebellion, a right-wing movement in the American West to take back local control of federal lands.  Watt's "good neighbor" policies included granting, or selling on the cheap, chunks of federal land that were constraining community expansion, and allowing states to help manage federal land.  Even today, such programs persist, with the Forest Service turning over certain management activities to state agencies under Good Neighbor Authority.

So, in speaking about public lands at the Mariposa Town Hall, McClintock didn't choose the most honest words.  If he had wanted to make his stance perfectly clear, he would have presented his goals as follows:  1) to ease or remove restrictions on public use of public lands, including intensive uses such as grazing and operation of off-road vehicles, 2) to ramp up logging of our National Forests and other public lands, and 3) to diminish the quantity and quality of land owned by all Americans by transferring management activities to local interests, and in some cases selling it off.

One of an estimated 100 million dead trees in the Sierra Nevada

Despite the animated presence of both Sides, things never got too ugly inside Building A.  Sure, people were rude--liberals and conservatives alike.  When someone would stand too long at the microphone without reaching their point, they would invariably be yelled at, by one or more political foes, to hurry up.  People proclaiming their support of the Affordable Care Act were sometimes met with boos or cries of "Socialism!"  And McClintock got shouted at almost every time he spoke:  "Answer the question!"  "Lies!"  "Alternative facts!"  And my favorite:  "You don't even live in your own district!" Of course, McClintock, as a prevaricating politician, is fair game.

McClintock faced some tough questions.  Most he was able to spin his way out of with rhetoric replicated almost verbatim from previous speeches and statements.  Some questions, though, seemed to catch him a little off guard.  A man from the nearby town of Bootjack had visited McClintock's Twitter feed, and obtained a list of the Twitter accounts McClintock was following.  With the exception of C-SPAN, all such profiles were from the extreme right, ranging from Rush Limbaugh to a feed called "CNN Lies and is Hitler."  The man pointed out that by only consuming the media that fit his own, hard-right worldview, McClintock was not representing all his constituents.  To this, McClintock conceded that the man had a valid point.  He confessed that he did not manage his own Twitter account, but would talk to his people and have "CNN Lies and is Hitler" removed immediately.

McClintock had some classic lines, some true-blue this should be a drinking game moments.  My favorite was when he exclaimed, by way of wrapping up a short ode to Trump: "We haven't seen the likes of him since Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt!"

There was one moment during the Town Hall that frightened me.  A married couple, Jennifer and Bobby, spoke about a motorcycle accident the man had been involved in, in which he was hit by "an illegal alien," and had to have his leg amputated.  Both claimed the accident happened in a sanctuary city.  "They said it wasn't," the man said, "but I know better."  He was clearly angry.  "We have sanctuary cities, and a lot of Americans are getting maimed, whether you people like it or not."  When the man finished speaking, and was returning to his seat in the row behind me, a woman from my row, and my Side, asked him privately what county his accident happened in.  Her point was that it was likely not a sanctuary city--but she didn't say that out loud.  The man did not take her question well.  He stood over her in the aisle, threw his arm up in the air, and bellowed, "Are you gonna tell me I didn't get hit?"  My row sat poised, ready to stand up and defend our friend if we had to.  She was his significant elder; in her seventies, she had asked to carpool with us because she and her husband don't drive at night anymore.  Fortunately, the situation cooled, and the man took his seat.

Finally, there was what happened outside Building A.  When the Town Hall adjourned, four attendees walked outside to find that they'd had their tires slashed.  The tires belonged to cars and not jacked-up trucks.  The cars included a Prius and a Subaru.  I think it's safe to say what Side the perpetrators came from.  Maybe it was Colonel Quaritch; maybe it was Jennifer and Bobby, who left the meeting early.  Regardless of who held the knife, one thing is clear.  The disruptive element that Marshall Long warned about indeed materialized, and it came from within.

The standard uniforms of the Sides--down and a battle flag--are shown here.

Science really gets in the way of everything Tom McClintock says about--well, science.  What he told the loggers in Shasta County, and what he's said elsewhere, is that the forests of the Sierra Nevada are dying due to improper management.  The forests are overstocked, struggling under the weight of 266 trees per acre in a landscape designed by God to max out at one hundred.  That, in and of itself, is evidently a recipe for death.

But the ponderosa pines aren't dying because they're crowded.  The ponderosas are dying because of a massive outbreak of western pine beetles.  And that outbreak has everything to do with the thing McClintock doesn't want to talk about--climate change--and very little to do with his chosen refrain, lack of logging.  To return to the work of Dr. Diana Six and others, outbreaks happen when temperatures are warm, beetle broods are productive, and tree defenses are low.  Although the common management belief is that well-spaced trees have more resources to allocate to built-in beetle weapons like resin, field studies have yielded variable results in this regard.  A number of studies have shown lower resin production in thinned forests than in control plots.

Moreover, the current body of research suggests that thinned forests have little to no advantage in outbreaks, when it really counts.  In fact, an Oregon study found that, once a beetle invasion was underway, mortality rates were sometimes higher in thinned stands than in unthinned stands. 

Another McClintock myth is that beetle-killed timber in the Sierra Nevada will lead to catastrophic wildfire if it is not removed.  In fact, this has been shown not to be true.  A University of Colorado-Boulder study compared fire data with beetle infestation data across western forests, and found that infested forests were not more likely to burn than their healthy counterparts.  Wildfire risk was linked to warm temperatures and drought, both of which also drive beetle infestations.  But wildfires were not born of the beetles.

That brings us to the elephant in the room.  Climate change.  It's not that McClintock won't talk about it; as evidenced at the Mariposa Town Hall, he's happy to discuss climate change in the context of dinosaurs.  He would prefer not to dwell on modern climate change, however, and he certainly won't admit that it's driven by humans.  He feels the matter is still up for "vigorous debate." 

In the scientific community, the debate is over.  Ninety-seven percent or more of actively-publishing climate scientists, and most of the world's leading scientific organizations, agree that climate-warming trends over the last century are due to human activities.  As to the 3 percent, I can only assume they're like McClintock--people with vested interest in not "wrecking the economy," future generations be damned.

Our favorite backyard ponderosa snag, photographed in the rain just a few days before it finally fell.

Our new view

We moved into our house at the base of the ponderosas six years ago.  Our house was built into a hill, but faces the other way, downslope across Peterson Creek and its tributaries toward Potter Ridge.  It's a house full of decks and windows.  Most of what we see is blessedly undeveloped forest--oak and bull pine, with a few scattered ponderosas, the low-elevation rear guard of their race.  When we first moved in, our viewshed took in a little huddle of ponderosa snags, four or five of them, about a hundred yards down the hill on the other side of an ephemeral creek. 

These snags weren't born of the current beetle outbreak.  When we first laid eyes on them in 2011, they were already long dead.  Perhaps they had been picked off by beetles during ordinary, non-outbreak conditions, products of the western pine beetle's own brand of forest management.  At any rate, we loved them.  They were the war zones of acorn woodpeckers, the perches of ravens and bluebirds, the nightly haunt of our local turkeys. 

The snags started to fall a few years ago, at the crux of California's drought.  Each toppling was a little blow, a piece carved out of the view we loved so much.  We are biologists, and we know the value of snags doesn't end when they fall over.  But it was hard not to feel a little sad.

Finally, just one snag remained, the tallest of them all.  It stood alone for two years, as the drought ended and Biblical rains began.  Every time we took a trip, we were sure we'd come back to find it gone.  Whenever the wind picked up, we assumed this would be it.  A leaner to begin with, the snag deepened its blow as time passed.  It could feel the ground; it just didn't know how to get there.

On February 21, the day of the Mariposa Town Hall, the leaning snag lay down.  I wasn't around to see or hear it.  Later, I registered the blank place in the sky, and looked down to see its red, broken form propped in some scrubby oaks by the creek.

It's the circle of life.  Old snags fall over, and thanks to the beetle, new snags form constantly.  The turkeys have moved into two recently-deceased ponderosas near the site of the old clan.  But I worry the circle is spinning out of control.  What will this little plot of land look like in a hundred years?  What will any place on earth look like?  Will there be ponderosa pine trees?  Turkeys?  Human beings?  It's morally reprehensible that, this many years after scientific consensus, we still have deniers running the show.

All we can do is stay the course, stay active, and stay loud.  All we can do is hope that someday, the environment will lose its political charge, and become something all Sides care for, by way of caring for ourselves.

Bead 4: DAPL, a Good Divestment

First off, let's review the recent timeline.  Not the overall recent timeline of illegal and/or irrational executive orders, alarming appointment confirmations, venomous tweets, and government-sponsored gaslighting.  That timeline is much too cluttered, much too emotionally exhausting, for a single blog post.  I would be working on Bead 4 for the better part of 2017. 

I'm talking about a very narrow timeline here:  the Dakota Access Pipeline project, or DAPL.  I'm not even talking about all of DAPL.  Its proposed length is 1,172 miles, after all, a great diagonal slash from North Dakota to Illinois.  I'm just talking about that one little slice of DAPL that makes the news every day, the slice that has come to embody Big Business vs. Environment, and U.S. Government vs. Native Peoples, not to mention U.S. Government = Big Business.  It's the last holdout on the DAPL route, a 7-mile segment that crosses the Missouri River's Lake Oahe, just half a mile upstream of the northern boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, and a few miles upstream of the Reservation's water intake facilities.  It's the slice that has been the subject of international protest, litigation, presidential memos, myriad decisions and about-faces by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, police brutality, and constant prayer.

There is the question of where to start the DAPL timeline.  Does it begin in August 2016, when most Americans, including me, first learned of the Water Protectors at Lake Oahe?  Or do we back up to June 2014, when the project was first announced by Energy Transfer Partners?  Perhaps we need to go deeper into history, to when Seven Brothers sparked Seven Council Fires, the Oceti Sakowin people.

We could follow the Oceti Sakowin, or Sioux, from their origin at Wind Cave in the Black Hills, to their current homes throughout the Great Plains of the U.S. and Canada.  We could study how the Oceti Sakowin, whose council fires once burned close enough together that messages between the bands were carried by long-distance runners, eventually got cut off from one another, compressed onto reservations spaced out across the West.  We could inspect the treaties and legislation.  There was the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which established a vast area of the West as Indian territory to which the U.S. government did not have claim.  The area included sizeable chunks of present day South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and smaller chunks of Montana and North Dakota.  The North Dakota chunk extended north to the Heart River, well past the location of the present-day conflicts at Lake Oahe.

There was also the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which established the Great Sioux Reservation across the western half of South Dakota.  The 1868 treaty incentivized living on the reservation with promises of food and financial support, but left wiggle room in the form of unceded lands in present-day North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Colorado, where the Sioux retained hunting and fishing rights, and where no whites were allowed to settle.  Once again, the unceded lands in North Dakota extended north to the Heart River.

We all know what happened to those treaties.  As white settlers became interested in the unceded lands, and as gold turned up in the Black Hills, they eroded away to nothing.  The government became increasingly fixated with keeping the Sioux on the reservation.  In December 1875, it channeled this fixation into official policy:  Indian people camped on the unceded lands must report immediately to the reservation, or be regarded as hostile.  Next came the Acts of Congress, the government's fallback method of rubber-stamping its misdeeds.  The 1876 Act wrote the Black Hills out of the reservation; the sacred birthplace of the Oceti Sakowin was no longer theirs.  The 1889 Act removed 9 million acres from the already diminished Great Sioux Reservation, fragmenting it into six much smaller reservations, one of which was Standing Rock.  

What of the clashes between the Sioux and the U.S. military?  There have been many.  Historically, there was the Dakota War of 1862, Red Cloud's War in 1866, the Battle of Little Bighorn, or Custer's Last Stand, in 1876, and the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, to name just a few.  What of the modern clashes?  In 1948, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction of the Oahe Dam on the Missouri River, despite strong opposition from the Standing Rock Sioux.  With the formation of Oahe Lake, 25 percent of the reservation populace was displaced to higher ground.  In 2015, the Army Corps struck again, starting the formalities of approving DAPL.  And the Oceti Sakowin fought back.

The Army Corps' role in DAPL is several-fold.  First, the Army Corps regulates impacts to most of our nation's natural waters--including 200 waterways crossed by DAPL--under the Clean Water Act.  It issues Clean Water Act permits for impacts to such waters.  Projects that will have a substantial impact on waters must obtain coverage under a permit devised just for that project, a.k.a. an individual permit.  Projects that will have only "minimal adverse effects," as the Army Corps website puts it, may qualify for coverage under a fast-track general permit, a.k.a. a nationwide permit.  Examples the website gives of projects eligible for nationwide permits are "minor road activities, utility line backfill, and bedding."  I'm not sure what bedding is, but it indeed sounds minor.  Not mentioned as good candidates for nationwide permits are 1,172-mile-long crude oil pipelines.  And yet--wouldn't you know it?--that is exactly how the Army Corps permitted DAPL under the Clean Water Act.  In Corps-speak, DAPL is actually a set of 200 very minor, "single and complete" projects, coincidentally all laid out in a perfect line.

The Army Corps also issues permits under the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899 for potential impacts to its own civil works projects.  These are commonly referred to as Section 408 permits.  With DAPL, Section 408 permitting came into play with the pipeline's proposed crossing of federal flowage easements at the Missouri River upstream of Lake Sakakawea, and of federally-owned property at Lake Oahe.  In considering whether to issue Section 408 permits for DAPL, the Army Corps was obligated, under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), to study the potential environmental consequences of that action.  And it did--sort of.

Under NEPA, before a federal agency (in case, the Army Corps) can take an action (in this case, issuing Section 408 permits), it must evaluate the impacts of that action on the environment.  The rigor of that evaluation depends on the magnitude of the project's impacts.  An agency may first prepare an Environmental Assessment (EA), a relatively light-duty study, to determine how serious the impacts will be.  An EA touches, but does not dwell, on project impacts to various environmental factors--air and water quality, biological resources, archaeological resources, socioeconomic issues--and ultimately issues a verdict on the significance of these impacts.  If an EA determines that the project will have a significant effect on the environment, a more comprehensive study, the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), is required.  EISs generally delve deeper into the environmental implications of a project than EAs do, and also have a hefty public input requirement lacking in the EA process.

At this point I should mention that, on the Environmental Protection Agency's NEPA website, there is a lot of talk about federal agencies preparing EAs and EISs.  Certainly that is the case sometimes.  But it is also perfectly legal for the project applicant--i.e. the developer--to prepare these documents.  Anything seem funny about that?  No, I didn't think so.

By now, I'm sure you know where this is going.  The Army Corps published a Draft EA for DAPL's crossing of its property and flowage easements in December 2015.  The Draft EA was prepared not by the Army Corps, but by Dakota Access LLC.  The Draft EA, as you might expect, found nothing much wrong with the project.  As required by NEPA, it compared the potential impacts associated with DAPL's passage under the Missouri River and Lake Oahe with those likely to arise from alternative project designs, and found the preferred version of the project to be far superior.  It also compared the planned passage with the "no action" alternative, a hypothetical situation in which the Section 408 permits would not be issued, and the pipeline would not be permitted to cross Army Corps property and easements.  You might think that the "no action" alternative would be the most environmentally-friendly option, as it would entail... well, nothing.  But according to Dakota Access LLC, you would be wrong.  The paragraph below, gleaned from the Cultural and Historic Resources section of the EA, is repeated in nearly identical form, for nearly every environmental resource considered in the document.

Under the "no action" alternative, Dakota Access would not construct the proposed Project and no impacts on cultural and historic resources would occur.  However, if the objectives of the Project are to be met under the "no action" alternative, other projects and activities would be required and these projects could result in their own impacts on cultural and historic resources, which would likely be similar to or greater than the proposed Project.  Nevertheless, the impacts associated with a future project developed in response to the "no action" alternative are unknown, while no impacts on cultural and historic resources would occur as a result of the Proposed Action, as described in the sections below.

There is so much wrong with that paragraph that I don't know where to start.  First off, why must the objectives of the project be met under the "no action" alternative?  Why doesn't "no action" get to be as it sounds?  No action.  No permits, no pipeline, no 570,000 gallons of oil per day pumped beneath one of America's greatest rivers, beneath the main water source, and site of treaty hunting and fishing rights, for two reservations.  Why must the project objectives be indelible?  It would be one thing if we were in an emergency situation, like if light sweet crude were coursing unchecked from the Bakken fields, and the only way to keep the citizenry of North Dakota from drowning was to funnel it under the Missouri right quick.  But this is not an emergency. This is just rich guys trying to make money.

Also, what kind of universe is it where we must conclude that the impacts to cultural and historic resources associated with unknown future projects would be "similar to or greater than" those of the proposed project?  Why not less than?  Ah, but here Dakota Access LLC is one step ahead of me.  There is no "less than" when it comes to the project's impacts on cultural and historic resources because, as is plainly written at the end of the paragraph, the impacts are presently zero.  No impacts. This is borne out in the document's claim that the "the Standing Rock [Tribal Historic Preservation Office] had indicated... that the Lake Oahe site avoided impacts to tribally significant sites."  Similarly, other sections of the Draft EA report "no disproportional impacts on minority or low-income populations" and "primarily beneficial impacts on social and economic conditions."

Dakota Access LLC goes out on a limb and acknowledges "temporary and minor impacts" to air quality and noise, geology and soils, water resources, vegetation, wildlife resources, aquatic resources, land use and recreation.  Fortunately, these impacts can be mitigated by constructing the project exactly as planned.  For example, one mitigation measure highlighted by the Army Corps in its preface to the Final EA is that the pipeline will be constructed using horizontal direction drilling, which was the only way the pipeline was ever going to be constructed.  Other mitigations include the implementation of plans that are standard in the construction industry: a Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan, a Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure Plan, and Horizontal Directional Drilling Construction and Contingency Plans, among others.

The Army Corps made the Draft EA available for public comment for about a month, until January 11, 2016.  Strangely, although the Draft EA was evidently prepared in a climate of kinship and mutual understanding with the Standing Rock Sioux, the Tribe wasn't keen on how the document turned out.  As the Army Corps itself puts it in its July 25, 2016 Finding of No Significant Impact (or FONSI; think Happy Days), "the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (SRST) and other tribal governments object to the pipeline and its alignment because its proposed route passes under Lake Oahe a few miles upstream of the SRST water intakes."  The tribes are "also concerned that the installation of the pipeline and a potential leak or rupture could damage or destroy cultural and sacred resources in the area," and maintain that the Army Corps "did not adequately consult on the DAPL pipeline alignment." The Corps goes on to pooh-pooh these concerns by citing the developer's impeccable EA, which clearly shows that the tribes were adequately consulted, and that the pipeline will pose no risk.  The Corps finishes strong, asserting that DAPL's crossing of the Missouri River and Lake Oahe is "not injurious to the public interest" and would not "significantly affect the quality of the human environment."  The project is so benign, in fact, that further study under an EIS is unwarranted.  As a final flourish, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers notes that it is now, as ever, in full compliance with the Law of the Land.

On the same day that it issued its FONSI for DAPL's crossing under the Missouri River and Lake Oahe, the Army Corps issued the Section 408 permits for those crossings, and nationwide permits for the other 200 waterways along the pipeline route.  The only thing missing, at this point, was an easement pursuant to the Mineral Leasing Act, which the Lake Oahe crossing required.  It appeared that DAPL was full steam ahead.

But so was the resistance.  At this point, the Oceti Sakowin camp at Lake Oahe was in its fourth month.  Runners from the nine Oceti Sakowin bands had already completed a 500-mile relay run from the camp to the Army Corps District Headquarters in Omaha, and had met with Corps officials to voice their concerns.  On July 25, the day of all the bad news, another relay run was in progress, from the camp to Washington, D.C.  Although the runners elected to stay the course, the new focus of the Oceti Sakowin became the camp itself.  Water protectors from all around the nation--both "relatives," or fellow Natives, and "friends," or non-Native sympathizers--began arriving at the camp en masse, and the camp population swelled from dozens to thousands.  Meanwhile, on July 27, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in federal court, alleging violation of multiple federal statutes, including the Clean Water Act, National Historic Preservation Act, and NEPA.

- SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM BEYOND THE FOURTH WALL -

At this point, I have to take a breather.  I've been working on this blog post for five days, and I'm worn out.  I haven't even gotten to what my Bead 4 action was.  I didn't see this coming; didn't think I'd start to put together a simple timeline and would get swamped by the details, the insidious loopholes and shenanigans, the unfairness of it all.  I should confess, though, that environmental review is what I do for work, and so I guess I was bound to become perversely fascinated with the legal technicalities of DAPL.  I hope this post hasn't become exceedingly boring.  If you're still with me, I promise to stop belaboring the Code of Federal Regulations.  And I promise to get around to my Bead 4 action in short order.

The reason most of us first heard about DAPL in August 2016 is because that's when things started to get really big, and really ugly.  By the time David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, wrote his op-ed piece in the New York Times on August 24, ninety tribes were represented at the Oceti Sakowin camp.  On September 3, Democracy Now! reporter Amy Goodman arrived at Lake Oahe to cover an escalating situation: Dakota Access LLC was attempting to bulldoze a site that the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe had identified to the Court as containing sacred stone features and the graves of "chiefs, warriors, and Bear Medicine healers."  Hundreds of men, women, and children stormed through the construction fence in an attempt to stop the destruction, and Amy Goodman narrated with emotion as private security contractors went after the Water Protectors with attack dogs and pepper spray, and as a Water Protector was thrown, belly-down, on the ground.  The next day, September 4, Dakota Access LLC destroyed the sacred site.  On September 8, Morton County issued a warrant for Amy Goodman's arrest, on charges of criminal trespass.

After the bulldozing of the sacred site, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe stepped up its legal game.  They filed for a temporary restraining order to stop construction (granted), appealed the Court's decision to deny a preliminary injunction (outstanding), requested an injunction pending appeal (denied).  The result of these efforts was that construction at Lake Oahe was stop-and-go for much of the fall.  The temporary restraining order halted work for three days, and an administrative injunction granted by the appeals court stopped it for more than three weeks, until the injunction pending appeal was denied on October 9.

Also around this time, the feds put on their Good Guy suits.  On September 9 and October 10, after two DAPL-friendly Court decisions, the Department of the Interior, Department of the Justice, and Department of the Army issued joint statements requesting that Dakota LLC voluntarily stop construction near Lake Oahe while the agencies considered whether that portion of the project required further environmental review.  Dakota Access LLC was unmoved by these statements, however, and continued working.  And so the Water Protectors stayed on at Lake Oahe, and their numbers grew.

Celebrities increasingly aligned themselves with Standing Rock.  Leonardo DiCaprio, Pharrell Williams, and Jason Momoa had been speaking out against the pipeline for several months by that point, and now famous people started to show up on the ground:  Shailene Woodley, Mark Ruffalo, Jesse Jackson.  At about the time Amy Goodman became wanted, Morton County also issued an arrest warrant for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, after a video surfaced of her spray-painting a DAPL bulldozer.  And on October 10, the same day as the second Good Guy federal memo, Shailene Woodley was arrested with 26 others while peacefully praying at a work site.

As the fall progressed, the Oceti Sakowin camp reached a zenith of over 10,000 souls. It became a city of sorts, and provided all the services you would expect in a city--food, sanitation, health, even child care.  But because it was a city of relatives and friends, and was heavily subsidized by donations, everything was provided at no cost.  It became a well-oiled machine.  Jake Ratner of The Nation described waking each morning to the sound of a pre-dawn loudspeaker:  "It's time to get up.  This is not a vacation.  We've got work to do, relatives."  After prayer ceremonies, people involved in actions would be given their assignments for the day.  Many others would stay behind to support the operation of the camp--preparing food, chopping wood, building shelters in advance of winter.

The police presence became overbearing.  Marta D.'s November 22 post on the Daily Kos describes seeing 20 to 50 police cars at any given time, all parked on the north side of the Backwater Bridge.  The Backwater Bridge passes over an arm of Lake Oahe at Cantapeta Creek.  Although out-of-bounds of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the main Oceti Sakowin camp, it has served as a front-line camp for Water Protectors, and has also been the site of well-known clashes with law enforcement.  On November 20, Water Protectors attempted to clear a barricade on the bridge in order to re-open Highway 1806, which had been closed for nearly a month at that point and was posing safety issues for the Camp and Reservation.  The Morton County Sheriff's Department, National Guard units, and other law enforcement jurisdictions responded by firing a host of non-lethal weapons on the Water Protectors for hours.  Water cannons, tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades were used; the water cannons persisted as temperatures dropped to 23 degrees.  The Oceti Sakowin camp reported injuries to over 300 people that night, including one case of cardiac arrest, one arm facing possible amputation, and many instances of hypothermia.  All of the Water Protectors were unarmed.

Not long after Backwater Sunday, as it is known to the Oceti Sakowin, the Good Guy feds resurfaced. On December 4, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would not, at present, be granting the Mineral Leasing Act easement for DAPL's crossing of Lake Oahe.  The matter deserved further environmental review, the Corps said.  The agency would start preparation of an EIS, in which it would give substantial attention to tribal treaty rights, the potential for an oil spill in Lake Oahe, and alternative routes.

Of course, I am telling this story with the benefit of hindsight.  We know now that it was too little, too late from the Good Guy feds.  They probably knew it, themselves, when they made their December 4 announcement.  By then, Election Day had come and gone.  They were making an eleventh-hour concession blessed by President Obama.  They knew that, come January 20, they would have to change into their Bad Guy suits.  The last thing they did, just before their transformation, was to publish a notice in the Federal Register soliciting public comments on the EIS.  That was on January 18.

One week later, all of us liberal white Americans felt like we'd been overtaken by a hostile race.  It was unbelievable.  Everything was falling apart around us.  Promises broken, policies upended, a hateful new language on the tongue of our elected officials, every time we turned on the news.  But to the Oceti Sakowin and the rest of the original inhabitants of our nation, it probably felt like business as usual.  On January 24, the newly-minted President Trump issued a Presidential Memorandum to the Secretary of the Army.  In a nutshell, he instructed the Secretary to review and approve DAPL in an expedited manner, consider rescinding or modifying the Good Guy memo of December 4, consider NEPA satisfied, and issue the Mineral Leasing Act easement for passage under Lake Oahe.

Who knows what the period between January 24 and February 7 was like for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  Maybe they struggled.  Maybe there were some holdout ethical types who didn't want to bend to the caprices of the new administration.  Kudos to them, if they existed.  But in the end, on February 7, the Army Corps issued a Notice of Termination of the EIS process.  They were done reviewing DAPL, evidently for good.  The public comment period was over, and the comments received on the EIS to date didn't matter.  It was over.  The next day, February 8, the Army Corps issued the Mineral Leasing Act easement for the Lake Oahe crossing, the last piece.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is still active in the courts, and as of the writing of this post, there are still Water Protectors on the ground, albeit a skeleton crew.  Shortly after the Bad Guy feds issued the easement, military veterans began making the trek to Standing Rock, pledging to serve as a human shield for the remaining Water Protectors.  It was the second such mission for the vets; in December, over a thousand vets came to the Oceti Sakowin camp for the same purpose.  At a ceremony celebrating the Army Corps' December 4 decision, a group of veterans lined up by rank, knelt down before Sioux elders, and begged forgiveness for the myriad crimes of their military forbears.  They allowed as how these were their crimes, too.  They committed to serving the Oceti Sakowin however they were needed.

Chief Leonard Dog Crow of the Sicangu Lakota people offered forgiveness.  He said, "We do not own the land.  The land owns us."

Photo courtesy of Democracy Now!

I was born a white girl in Washington, D.C.  My father was serving in the U.S. Army at the time, the same institution that slaughtered hundreds of Native people at Wounded Knee in 1890.  The same institution that issued the Mineral Leasing Act easement to DAPL a week ago.  My father is a child psychiatrist and a gentle soul; he has never been in combat.  But still.  I was raised Mormon, a religion that believes Native people are all descended from a single family that came to the Americas from Israel, by boat, about 2,500 years ago.  More specifically, Native people are derived from the wicked half of that family, the Lamanites.  My uncle served a Mormon mission on the Navajo reservation in the 1970s.  He converted some people.  Many years later, at a bar in West Yellowstone, Montana, I drank beer with a Navajo man and apologized on behalf of my uncle.  The man was not one of his converts.  He forgave me, and named me "white feather" in Navajo.  I am saying all this to tell you that I am roughly the most unqualified person in the world to speak for Native people, or tell their story.  At the same time, Native customs and spiritual beliefs resonate with me deeply.  I am as white as it gets, and I hate that sometimes.

I hardly need to mention my Bead 4 action.  You know it from the title.  But I promised I would come back to it, and so here I am.  (The "short order" part was an unintentional fib.)  Bead 4 is in progress, and will be for some time.  I am divesting from Bank of America and U.S. Bank.  Neither is among the 17 worst-of-the-worst banks that are actually funding DAPL, but I understand that both have issued lines of credit to Energy Transfer Partners.  And that's enough.  Bank of America is my checking account, and savings for both my son and me.  U.S. Bank is my credit card and home mortgage.  I will confess, I am not actually about to refinance my mortgage, but I am preparing to put my home on the market.  Bead 4 won't be officially complete until it sells, likely this summer.  In the meantime, I will string a bead, and say a prayer for the Oceti Sakowin.

Bead 3: Elephant Seals, the Immigration Ban, and Dear Tom

When Trump first issued his executive order on Muslims--er, I mean immigration--I was out to lunch.  Not literally; I was literally sitting in my office, trying to make headway on a report before the weekend arrived.  It seems unbelievable that I wouldn't have stumbled upon the breaking news; like many other Americans, I'd spent the first week of Trump's presidency compulsively refreshing my New York Times app, seesawing between horror and morbid curiosity, unable to unplug.  But it was the end of my workday, and as is my want, I'd gone into overdrive to finish half a dozen last things.  So, Trump's executive order escaped my attention.

At home, there was a family to catch up with, a workout to manage, dinner to cook, a couple of beers to drink with Taylor.  We sat down, the three of us, and watched the final movie in the Hunger Games series.  I can't get enough of future dystopia these days--in movies, books, mental preoccupation, whatever.  My thirteen-year-old, Zac, is on board.  Shortly after Election Day, I handed him first 1984, and then Fahrenheit 451, and he read them voraciously.  (He took a stab at Brave New World, as well, but wasn't keen on the writing style.)

The next day, we set out on a overnight trip to the coast.  It was elephant seal season at Piedras Blancas, and after seven years in California, we still hadn't witnessed the spectacle.  In the spirit of vacation, I promptly let my phone die, and left it that way for most of the weekend.  We bought a campsite on a bluff about a mile from the ocean, flanked by many other state park-goers with the same idea.  Deeply resentful of other humans in our imaginary wilderness, we wandered a quarter-mile out of the campground into a brushy grove of Monterey pines, where we contemplated setting up a stealth camp.  Taylor was the biggest advocate of this approach.  Zac and I are more inclined to be comfortable, however, and outvoted him.  Back at camp, we picked ticks off each other, and most particularly off Zelda the dog, for hours--evidently our punishment for plotted rule-breaking.  No matter.  We stoked a smoky fire, perfect for throwing ticks into.  We ate brats and s'mores, identified constellations, and despite the crowds, slept soundly in our tents.

The next day was elephant seal day.  It delivered.  All these years, I'd assumed elephant seal viewing was kind of a wildlife nerd thing to do, something requiring binoculars and a field guide, requiring you to hoist your kid on your shoulders and point out a few blobs in the distance that could be seals, but could also be rocks.  I was glad we'd finally made the trip, but I wasn't expecting anything mind-blowing.  We pulled into in a massive gravel parking lot that looked to be at capacity, a hundred cars or more.  With no other visible options, we parked where it said "No Stopping Any Time."  There were no ticks here, after all.  Taylor and I donned our binoculars, and I remember thinking, as I looked out at an oceanside boardwalk that appeared to be thronged with ordinary tourists and not wildlife nerds, "Everyone's going to ask to use them.  It's going to be so annoying."

As it turns out, binoculars are dead weight at Piedras Blancas.  The writhing mass of seals starts just ten feet or so below the boardwalk, and stretches south until the beach curves out of sight.  In late January, it's an all-ages show, with females nursing babies born just last night, month-old young independent of their mothers, adolescent males pretending to be in charge, and enormous bosses of the beach, up to 16 feet long and 5,000 pounds, that only have to lumber a few feet out of the surf before all the lesser boys scatter.  We were transfixed.  The seals were so close we could smell them. The tourists didn't matter--the selfie sticks, the jostling, the cityslicker cologne.  It was just us and nature, the wilderness experience we'd hoped for at camp.  We would walk a few steps along the boardwalk, stop, gape for ten minutes or so, walk a few more steps, stop, gape.  All the while a symphony of yips, hoots, groans, and snout-to-snout growls came welling up from the beach, jubilant chaos to our ears.

Elephant seals at Piedras Blancas, January 29, 2017.

Lone bull at Piedras Blancas, January 29, 2017.

 

We returned home late Sunday night.  By then, my phone was somewhat charged.  My New York Times app lurked in the background, unattended for 48 hours.  In bed, just before turning off the light, I did what you're not supposed to do, and what I can never resist these days:  I checked the news.

If you were at all tuned in last weekend, you know the headlines I saw.  Lives Rewritten with the Stroke of a Pen.  How Trump's Rush to Enact an Immigration Ban Unleashed Global Chaos. Demonstrators in Streets, and at Airports, Protest Immigration Order.  Protest Grows 'Out of Nowhere' at Kennedy Airport after Iraqis are Detained.  Judge Blocks Trump Order on Refugees Amid Chaos and Outcry Worldwide.

The word "chaos" was what got me.  It erupted off the screen, hovered in the air between my face and my phone as I tapped and scrolled, trying to figure out what was going on.  I didn't wade in too far; it was after midnight, and there was work and school the next day.  But I read enough to know that seven Muslim-majority countries were affected, and that none of them were linked to any recent acts of terror in the United States.  I also read that the ban had a number of potential legal issues, and that a possible constitutional crisis was emerging in its aftermath, in that customs and border officials were disregarding stays on the ban imposed by federal judges.

When Taylor came to bed, I mumbled something about our nation being on fire.  He said he didn't want to know.  Smart man.

The next day I looked into it more.  I learned that a handful of Republican lawmakers (e.g. John McCain) had come out against the ban, a larger handful (e.g. Paul Ryan) had endorsed the ban, and the vast majority (e.g. my very own Congressman Tom McClintock) had issued no opinion.  It was time to act.  It wasn't that I thought this toady Congress was about to pass a law overturning the order, but I did feel that, at this precipitous moment, all representatives needed to hear from their constituents.  I tried calling first his D.C. office, then his Roseville office, and got the busy signal.  I kept trying the Roseville number, and finally got through, in a manner of speaking.  It rang about a dozen times before shuttling me to the answering machine, where I left an impassioned and slightly incoherent message that ended with, "I have really strong feelings about this.  I'll be following up with an email." 

In the evening, I sat down and made it happen.  I had only about a one-hour window to work with, and had to be quick.  I couldn't be bothered with formalities.  I addressed Tom like a living room nemesis, like a friend's friend who was buzzed up and quoting Sean Hannity, or some such nonsense.  When I was finished, I asked Zac to review it for me.  He suggested that it might be "pretty informal," but it did the trick.  I pressed send.

Dear Congressman McClintock,

From what I understand, you have not yet taken a position on President Trump's recent immigration order.  I am writing to urge you to stand with courageous Republican leaders like Senator John McCain, and voice strong opposition to this dangerous, irrational, and potentially illegal order. 

My concerns with the order are many-fold.  First, there is the legal side of things.  The order discriminates against people of particular nationalities, which makes it a violation of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.  The order also appears to discriminate against Muslims, in that it targets seven Muslim-majority nations, but may, according to President Trump, be circumvented for Christians from these nations.  As you know, religious discrimination is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Second, the order is irrational and, for President Trump, likely self-serving.  If Trump were really trying to prevent acts of terror from being committed in our homeland, he would logically look at where previous foreign-born terrorists had hailed from--right?  The 911 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon--all mysteriously missing from Trump's banned list.  Is it a coincidence that the Trump Organization currently does business, or has in the past done business, in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt?  On the other hand, since 1975, foreign-born citizens of the seven nations targeted in Trump's order have killed ZERO people in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

Finally, there is the matter of the touchy-feely.  This is perhaps the biggest, and most amorphous, issue.  This act is decidedly un-American.  We are the melting pot, we are the land of opportunity--and we are all (or almost all) immigrants.  This act is inhumane.  In a time where refugees from Syria and other war-torn nations are fleeing for their lives, it is cruel and, at the very least, un-Christian, to throw up a wall.  This act is massively unfair.  People who have gone through lengthy visa applications and immigration hurdles are now being turned away--including people who have already been studying or working in the U.S., contributing to our economy and society.

Hopefully, this is all stuff you know yourself, and you've been able to just quickly scan this email.  But once again, as your constituent, I urge you to take a stand against Trump's executive order.  Please keep America America.

Thank you, 

[Bekah]

There were a lot of things I forgot to mention in my email.  For example, in retrospect, I think one of the scariest things about the ban and how it has been carried out has been the disregard for checks and balances.  When portions of the order are blocked in federal court, and Department of Homeland Security personnel on the ground continue to do Trump's bidding, we have a serious problem.  For a precedent like this to be set so early in Trump's presidency is extremely ominous.

Nevertheless, Congressman McClintock must have been moved by my correspondence, for the very next day he updated his website to reflect his position on the immigration order.  It was a complete shutdown.  Here is what he said:

Dear [Bekah]: 

I strongly support President Trump’s executive order on refugees.  There is no unconditional right to enter the United States, and the President has a sworn responsibility to assure that those entering our country are not hostile to our Constitution, our people, or the rule of law.  The order is limited to countries that are hot-beds of Islamic extremism and provides for case-by-case waivers to assure that bona fide dissenters from these regimes can enter.  This is a temporary stop-gap to give the administration time to put a new vetting system in place that can adequately assess the veracity of a refugee’s claims and his intentions.

Okay, I confess he did not actually post "Dear [Bekah]" on his website.  That's just how it felt.  And like a living room nemesis, he went on to say a bunch of shit that he probably felt was patriotic and well-informed, but actually sounded drunk.  Like the part about about the President needing to ensure that "those entering our country are not hostile to our Constitution, our people, or the rule of law."  If that were actually the case, the President would have no choice but to cancel his own visa.

Even better than McClintock's statement is actual language from the executive order:

In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles.  The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law.  In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including "honor" killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

There are at least five clauses in that paragraph that obviously beg a "Trump!" cough after them.  Zac and I had a short read-aloud session in which we did this, and found it depressingly hilarious.  Try it at home and see for yourselves.

I suspect I will have a lot of "Dear Tom" actions this year.  Some I will write about; others I'll just do as part of my new-normal life.  Next up will probably be environmental policy, as one Obama rule after another comes up on the chopping block under the Congressional Review Act.

The northern elephant seal is my current totem animal for conservation, a shining example of what we can do when we stop exploiting and consider the approaching horizon.  From the 18th century to the early 20th century, elephant seals were heavily hunted for their blubber, which was used as oil for lamps and lubrication.  They were driven to the very brink of extinction.  In their darkest hour, they occupied a single colony on a remote island off the coast of Baja.  Their numbers dropped to as low as 50 seals.  With the advent of kerosene and protections put in place by Mexico in the early 20th century, the species began to recover.  Today, its numbers are estimated at 225,000 and still climbing. While my living room nemesis might point out that fossil fuels saved the day, I think of it instead as a reminder to stay creative and resilient, to embrace alternatives. To live not for power and wealth in the present, but for life in the future.

Meanwhile, back on the immigration front, it's been touch-and-go for a week now.  A few points for the people, courtesy of the judicial branch.  Big pushback from the administration. A few more points for the people, this time with the State Department on board, and the Department of Homeland Security once again observing constitutional law.  The freedom fighters of California's District 4 turned out en masse for Tom McClintock's town hall meeting in Roseville yesterday, where they loudly opposed his blind support for the immigration order, among other positions.  He had to leave via police escort.  We're seeing an awful lot of democracy in action right now, even as the clouds continue to build.  Let's keep riding this momentum--and let's play a smart game, eyes wide open to both the big, gut-busting issues and the lesser headlines, pacing ourselves for the long haul.