Isla del Cano, Corcovado Park, Costa Rica

Sometimes, I wonder how I’ve managed to get myself into so much interesting misery in my life. I wouldn’t change a thing, just FYI — but there are days when I gotta wonder. My real activism career started when I met Leroy Lee, the architect of the Phantom Forest scandal of the early ’90s, who decided I was worthy of training. That led me to one of my primary mentors, famous Combat Biologist Al Espinosa, a fisheries biologist on the Clearwater National Forest, who was famously run out of the organization for chronically refusing to lie about the impact of timber sales on water quality in one of the places in the world most known for clear water. Hence the name.

That carried me forward into the orbit of other friends, like Steve Kallick, famous Alaska activist, lawyer, and one of the primary authors of the Tongass Timber Reform Act.

It goes on from there. But what happens when you start building a (non-paying) career around social/environmental change, is that you learn things that are simply impossible to learn anywhere else. There is no book on how to sue to stop a federal timber sale. And no one’s written the comprehensive book on how people inside agencies rig things for their own interests. You gotta figure these things out on yourself — or preferably with the help of a great mentor. One of the most recent silly things has been the “No Kings” protests, populated by oldsters, possessed with Trump Derangement Syndrome, and screaming about issues they know precious little about. Don’t believe? With any activist movement, one of the smartest things you can do is show up with a clipboard, a list of SIMPLE terms, and start asking people in a flat monotone voice about their actual familiarity with those terms. You’ll quickly learn most people running have NO idea how anything works.

Why? Most current issues are above the complexity limits for most people’s understanding. Not only do they not know, they CAN’T know. Their brains won’t process it. Take the current immigration debate. People on the pro side of unfettered immigration will wax on about keeping families together, etc., while at the same time refusing to acknowledge that many women brought their kids to the border during the Biden years, and abandoned them at that border. Naturally, that created a fertile hunting field for cartel predators, who were more than happy to scoop them up and sell them into prostitution. It’s not like this kind of thing has no historical precedent. Read about the Children’s Crusade of the early 13th century. Inspired by religious fervor, thousands of children gathered to march to the cause of liberation of the Holy Land. They, too, were sold into slavery in Tunis. Now which does your brain prefer? Hardworking Mexican families, or a complex supply chain of childhood sex slavery, controlled by cartels, and running through multiple Central American families? Complexity, especially when bracketed by real-world unimaginable cruelty, is always a tough sell.

I’ve already told the story about my friends, Anastassia Makarieva and Andrei Nefiodov, largely responsible for getting me off the bench for the latest moral racket– the Net Zero campaign for CO2 emissions. It makes me dizzy to think about all of it, but the subsequent organization of all this led me to connecting with the Executive Director of the organization, Green Oceans. Green Oceans is fighting the commission of a series of huge wind farms off the Massachusetts and Rhode Island coasts. They’re losing right now, for a variety of reasons that I’m not going to go into. But it was interesting that whoever made their strategy could have used some help more than a couple of years ago.

The problem is not alone that the wind turbines that are in the process of being installed are a blight and an eyesore on the ocean. This has indeed happened in some rich people’s backyard, and so it’s easy to go to the elite’s desire to not have this kind of thing in their backyard. The real problem is that the permitting process necessary (done by the federal government) allows what is known as an “incidental take” of marine species in the context of construction and operation of this wind farm. That means the project gets to damage or kill a certain number of wild animals in the context of making and operating that wind farm. Gotta break some eggs in the Natural World if you’re going to save it. Amirite?

The problem is those numbers associated with this project are mind-boggling and astronomical. 90,000 dolphins are acceptable for Incidental Take, as well as 500 northern right whales. Right whales are already an endangered species, and there are only an estimated 400 of those critters left in the wild. The mind literally reels. Imagine a similar declaration with bald eagles — you get to eliminate all of them, as long as you did it by accident. How would that play?

Plus, the group had a near-impossible time finding legal counsel. No one wants to be on the other side of Big Green and Anthropogenic Global Warming, even if this wind farm will contribute basically nothing against global tallies of CO2. Gotta start somewhere!

There are other projects accelerating in the name of CO2 sequestration and reduction, like bulldozing thousands of acres of Joshua trees for solar farms. We’re on the cusp of going through a major “burning the village to save it” phase in all of the AGW stuff. And the attacks will come from moral rackets from the Left.

As a response to this, pre-emptively, a group of atmospheric scientists and I are launching a campaign centered around what we are calling The Monterey Declaration, named after the location of one of the scientists’ universities. The point of the Monterey Declaration is to get people to agree to not destroy the natural world to save it. You’d think it would be a no-brainer, but it’s more challenging than you might think. But I like the name. It sounds cool. Here it is below.

The Monterey Declaration – 

As environmental scientists, physicists, chemists, climate scientists, engineering scientists and applied mathematicians, we are writing this declaration in regards to the issues of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), and human actions proposed to mitigate AGW.  

We are deeply troubled by the potential damage on wild and intact ecosystems that may be created by large scale geoengineering mitigation policies being pursued in the name of stopping AGW. Because of our current state of incomplete knowledge of the effects of global warming on weather systems, we strongly believe that we should not destroy the remaining natural ecosystems on the planet in the name of  slowing global warming.  We believe in preservation with appropriate humilityregarding the actual state of the science, and are advocating for preservation of the remaining wild and relatively untouched ecosystems which are still functioning on our planet.

Life has existed on Earth for at least the past 3.5 billion years.  It is also highly likely that plant life formed the atmosphere we breathe today. That natural vegetation has modulated extremes in atmospheric composition as the Earth passed through cataclysmic events, such as the Permian Extinction 252 million years ago, the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event 66 million years ago, as well as five interspersed Ice Ages, scattered through the geologic record, with the most recent and familiar being the Quaternary Ice Age that we still are in.  Throughout these events, the complex system formed by the sun, orbital dynamics, the surface of the Earth, the ocean, the atmosphere and the biota of the Earth has proven especially resilient, rebounding from events, such as the Permian Extinction, that devastated over 90% of life on the planet. 

Though much more research is needed to truly understand the interactions of large-scale geological disturbances, as well as the bounce-back of biota on the planet after these events, one thing is clear;  The Earth, as a complex system, tends toward climate stability in its natural state.  The fact that life on Earth is still here is proof that the climate is not prone to various runaway conditions.

None of the above is reason to dismiss the valid concerns about how humans affect the climate. At the same time, we should increase research on what is actually more immediately important – the weather.  Weather is downstream of climate, and more easily disturbed on a local and regional level.  Even regional disturbance by humans is poorly understood, and can likely interfere with local stable weather patterns that are important for the thriving of human societies and the biosphere.   We endorse more data collection, theoretical modeling, and improved computational methods in this area, precisely because one of the biggest questions, as well as deep historical legacies of the scale humans are likely to affect, is where the rain will fall.

We believe that with appropriate direction and more research, we can resolve both human needs for a stable climate, as well as a deeper understanding of how regional climatic phenomena, such as how forests create ‘biotic pumps’ that bring water inland, can be meshed with the larger planetary climate system. We believe that we have not gone past the point of no return (and the data supports this view) nor seen large-scale changes in weather patterns across the globe.  Because of this, we urge immediate and resolute protection of our remaining wild ecosystems, from the Amazon, Congo and Indonesian rainforests, to the boreal forests of Siberia and Canada, as buffers from CO2 emissions.  Grand schemes of atmospheric, oceanic or landscape modification by human effort hold the likely and ominous potential for backfiring in unknown, unprecedented, and possibly catastrophic ways.  We must remind ourselves of our need for humility regarding how these systems interact with the climate.. 

We also want to hold all scientists involved in this contentious issue to a Gold Standard of debate – recognizing what is truly known, as well as what is unknown.  There are deep scientific disagreements within the scientific community on this issue.  We, the undersigned, are calling on the entire community to avoid the perils of political pressure, and work diligently to form a truly systemic view of our planet’s climate.  We call on the formation of a Blue Ribbon panel to lay out knowns and unknowns in the state of our science, and urge all parties to strive for a better, globally systemic understanding.

The main point of the Monterey Declaration is this: we must not sacrifice the functioning systems of the natural world in the name of saving the world.  As Aldo Leopold said “the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts.”  We are at the precipice of deleting some of the most important pieces in the name of saving the world.  We strongly encourage all parties to step back from the brink.

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You’d think all of this would be unnecessary. But it’s not. One of the things people can’t seem to accept about any issue in the public eye is that they all have psychopathic elements, who are more than happy to leverage your emotions regarding an innocent stand-in to get their way. Or cause chaos. And they’re specifically counting on you to not notice incongruence in the details. As well as create a premise that allows them to kill your gods. So much about dealing with them is remembering this one fact. I saw it over and over fighting over the last few groves of old-growth forest. The timber industry would double down on the places most precious to us, regardless of commercial value. They were going to teach us a lesson, not unlike the sacrifice of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan ordered by the Taliban in 2001. Psychopaths have no bottom, so if you think you can go low, trust me — they can go lower.

The project is sponsored in part by the Norwegian and Danish governments, and the local rich people are largely in support of it — looking for a path to virtue-signaling redemption. Isolation of local ingrates and malcontents come far too easily in this day and age, and this project is no different. And the saddest part of this — the over 90K take of dolphins and basically extinction of the right whale population, continues a long history of ecological collapse off the coast of Massachusetts.

If I’ve learned anything in the context of working on any issue in the U.S., or even the world, it’s that Wild Nature is always the first thing under the bus. Why? Because people are decalibrated that it even exists.

But those of us that know, well, we know. In my own little tome of environmental literature, Wild to the Last: Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater, I ended the book with the line:

“Who will take care of my soul when the wild country is gone?”

Lordy.