Tomorrow marks 16 months since I set up camp to #ProtectThackerPass with my friend Will Falk, the only man crazy enough to join me on a mile-high mountainside in the dead of winter to protect a wild and beautiful land from an open-pit lithium mine.
Since then, we've weathered insane storms, been harassed by the cops, began working with native allies, launched a lawsuit against the federal government, discovered that #PeeheeMuhuh is a sacred site and the site of a U.S. Army massacre of native people and that the government has been covering that fact up, been fined $50,000 for setting up latrines for native elders, been threatened with violence, organized as hard as we can, and shed blood sweat and tears for this land we love.
The fight to #ProtectPeeheeMuhuh continues, and so I continue to spend as much time as possible on the ground at Thacker Pass, organizing, reporting, and standing up against the #greenwashing and #ecocide of Lithium Americas Corporation and the federal government (both Democrats and Republicans).
If this fight speaks to you, I urge you to do three things:
1. Visit our website, sign up for updates, make some phone calls to build political pressure, and donate if you can.
2. Educate yourself and spread the word about the harms of lithium mining, the greenwashing of so-called "green technology," and the real solutions to the ecological crisis and global warming (I'm working on a piece tackling this subject - expect that soon).
3. Most importantly, stand the hell up and start organizing and building power against lithium mining and electric vehicle lies — in addition to fossil fuels, highways, logging, overfishing, sprawl, overpopulation, and all the rest of the ecological madness consuming the world. We need to do the hard work of stopping these atrocities by whatever means are effective and necessary. There are no shortcuts.
Feel free to reach out if you want to meet up at Thacker Pass. ✊🏼
PS - I made a mistake in the video. If you make $30,000, you're not in the top 1% globally. Depending on the source you look at, the top 1% in income was between $34,000 and $50,000 per person back in 2012. So it's higher now.
Sorry for your loss Max. Keep up the fight and speaking truth. I don't understand our death wish and lack of any sort of connection to the life of other creatures and living beings that we seem to so callously disregard for our own unnecessary wants. I was speaking to our neighbour the other day and she said she hated cats because "they kill everything". I thought to myself look in the mirror lady, what do you think we do every day?? I think it's that disconnection that is a huge part of the problem. Very hard to breakthrough the paradigm. Thacker Pass looks beautiful btw. And thanks for protecting sanity by calling out this bullshit. Take care.