"One shouldn't differentiate between all that breathes"

Birds as our teachers

A few weeks ago, after I recorded the interview for this post, a family of Cooper’s Hawks — a mated pair and two juveniles — took up residence outside my home. Photo by the author.

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass.

If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. In return for supporting my activism, paid subscribers receive access to occasional private posts containing behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts. This post contains free material at the beginning, but portions at the end are limited to paid subscribers.

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On July 18th, I had the pleasure of interviewing two brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud, for my podcast, The Green Flame. Nadeem and Saud run an organization called The Wildlife Rescue in Dehli, India.

Their work came to my attention when I watched an incredible film last year called “All That Breathes.” The film won Best Documentary at both the Sundance and Cannes film festivals (the first documentary to ever win both), was nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary feature film, and won at least 37 other major awards. The trailer alone is a work of art.

It was such a joy to have a conversation with Nadeem and Saud. We talked about the experience of holding a wild bird in your hands, the ineffable communication that passes between human helper and injured animal, and the joy of releasing them to fly free into the air again.

You can listen to our conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Pocket Casts, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

Cooper’s hawk. Photo by the author

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News and questions

• In Serbia, the government has made a deal to reinstate Rio Tinto Corporation’s license to mine lithium, three years after mass protests and determined local opposition forced its cancellation. Thousands rallied across Serbia on Monday to oppose the new mining plans. An organization called Marš Sa Drine is leading the struggle, with the brilliant Bojana Novakovic as the spokesperson.

• I was interviewed along with my friend Dean Barlese, Northern Paiute elder and spiritual leader, for Lyla June’s show Nihizhí, Our Voices: An Indigenous Solutions Podcast. We talked about Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh in Paiute.

• Back in April, I spoke at a rights of nature event in Cleveland, Ohio, which was organized by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). I’ve looked up to CELDF’s work for a long time, and it was a pleasure to meet all their organizers in person. They just released a video from the event, which includes a brief excerpt of my presentation starting around 10 minutes in.

• Natalie Koch wrote a great piece on the colonial folly of plastering the Sahara Desert with solar panels to power Europe.

• A panel of 15 judges at The International Court of Justice ruled on July 19th that Israel’s actions in Palestine prior to 2022 — including “the building and expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, use of the area’s natural resources, the annexation and imposition of permanent control over lands, and discriminatory policies against Palestinians” — violate international law. To get a sense of how the apartheid system functions, I recommend reading this piece Chris Hedges wrote after a visit to the West Bank.

• Earlier this week I had a conversation with a pair of research scientists about the Thacker Pass campaign. One of the questions they had for me was quite interesting: how can academics and researchers gather and publish information that is useful to frontline campaigns? I had a few ideas for them, but if you have any yourself, please share them in the comments. What sort of data and science is useful to you in your activism?

White-crowned sparrow. Photo by the author.