The Empire and The Resistance
18 interviews, updates, trainings, videos, and inspirations
This is Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. I’m author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free.
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In this issue:
Exploratory drilling approved for the next lithium mine north of Thacker Pass
The Empire and the Resistance
Thacker Pass update
“The Precedent is Flint” — Oregon data centers are hyper-concentrating polluted water
The Real Models for Sustainability in Brazil Are to Be Found Outside COP30
Fascinating first-hand report from some of the last swidden cultivators in Southeast Asia
“Long Live John Brown” — Essential reading as Luigi Mangione faces the death penalty
Misanthropy is bad and unproductive
We don’t need any more renewables
Blue Earth Defense launch event
Interview for the “Reciprocity” series
Interview with Dina Gilio-Whitaker about indigenous identity and resistance
Interview about COINTELPRO, movement repression, and security culture
Conspirituality and climate denialism
We all hate technology now
Why is Your Electric Bill Going Up?
Deep Sea Mining
Discount on paid subscriptions
Behind the scenes (updates for paid subscribers)
Exploratory drilling approved for the next lithium mine north of Thacker Pass
Another proposed lithium mine proposed for the northern McDermitt caldera, about 14 miles north of Thacker Pass, on the Oregon side of the border, has received approval from the BLM to begin testing for lithium. The Australian company Jindalee plans to bulldoze 20 miles of roads and drill into the earth at 168 sites starting this spring or early summer.
This location is critical habitat for sage-grouse, Lahontan cutthroat trout, burrowing owls, and thousands of other species — and like Thacker Pass, it’s an extremely significant cultural site for Northern Paiute people. Mining here would be an absolute disaster. Test drilling too.
I won’t be able to be there in person to oppose these operations, but I think it’s critical that these mines be fought early and hard. Can you be there? Are you prepared to resist this project? If so, I’d be happy to share ideas, connect you with a network of supporters, and assist. Please let me know.
The Empire and the Resistance
As ICE terror and the police state attempts to deepen control, tens of thousands of people are participating in spontaneous grassroots resistance to the raids in Minneapolis and beyond. Here are a few stories about it.
Thacker Pass update
As many of you know, it recently came out that Karen Budd-Falen, third in command at the Trump Administration’s Department of the Interior, is part-owner of “Home Ranch,” which sold water rights to Lithium Nevada Corporation for the Thacker Pass mine for $3.5 million dollars.
In the wake of the sale, the Department of the Interior issued a permit for the company to mine Thacker Pass. The company wants us all the believe “there’s nothing to see here, folks,” but it sure feels like a clear-cut case of high-profile corruption — something I’ve documented before in regards to Thacker Pass.
Just before this news broke, Alan Halaly at the Las Vegas Review-Journal released a 6-part series of articles about the Thacker Pass lithium mine and the resistance to it. Myself and many friends were interviewed for these pieces, which are worth reading for those who followed this fight in detail. Here are links to the articles:
Part 1, focused on historical Mercury mining and the town of McDermitt
Part 2, focused on the economics of the project and national + state-level politics
Part 3, focused on Orovada and the nearby farming and ranching communities
Part 4, focused on indigenous perspectives at the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Reservation
Part 5, focused on the lawsuit against myself and other land defenders
Part 6, focused on indigenous consultation
LNC comes out looking secretive, combative, and like what they are: an occupying entity:
“Company spokesman Tim Crowley, who declined an interview for this series, abruptly canceled the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s pre-planned, on-the-record tour of the Thacker Pass construction site days before it was set to take place in July. Only after an in-person interview led Winnemucca Mayor Rich Stone to ask the company to give the news organization a tour of the site did executives agree to a tour of its workforce housing and the mine site, with the understanding that no employees or representatives could be interviewed. The company demanded editorial control over photography, but the Review-Journal elected not to take photos because such a demand is against its standards.”
“The Precedent is Flint” — Oregon data centers are hyper-concentrating polluted water
Data centers in Oregon using polluted water from industrial agriculture aquifers, the pollutants are concentrated via evaporation, and people are getting sick.
“Amazon has come to the state’s eastern farmland, worsening a water pollution problem that’s been linked to cancer and miscarriages”
https://thefern.org/2025/11/the-precedent-is-flint-how-oregons-data-center-boom-is-supercharging-a-water-crisis/
The Real Models for Sustainability in Brazil Are to Be Found Outside COP30
Very important piece from Peter Gelderloos, writing in Truthout:
“The lands of the Ka’apor people are an island of green in a sea of scorched earth and monocrop plantations. They live in eastern Amazonia, most of which is already deforested. One reason they still have a home — and a thriving ecosystem — is because they haven’t relied on governments or private investors to protect their territory.
Since 2013, they have kept the loggers out and restored 80 percent of their deforested lands by turning to direct action, closing logging access roads, burning bridges, torching hundreds of logging trucks, and temporarily capturing hundreds of loggers, stripping them and tying them up before expelling them from the territory. Their territorial defense has included kicking out the FUNAI, the Brazilian government agency responsible for protecting Indigenous peoples, which they accuse of complicity with loggers. The Ka’apor are also eliminating influences from the state — for example, through the abolition of the single-chief system of governance imposed by FUNAI in favor of their traditional Tuxa ta Pame, a more decentralized council system.”
Fascinating first-hand report from some of the last swidden cultivators in Southeast Asia
The ever brilliant David B Lauterwasser, writing at Animists Ramblings, shares the story of his wife Karn visiting some of the last swidden cultivators in Southeast Asia. Swidden refers to “slash and burn,” a name that calls to mind agribusinesses cutting down and burning pristine jungle on Amazonian frontiers to replace it with monocrops.
The story David relates is far different: small hill tribes in remote northern Thailand growing a huge diversity of domesticated and wild foods and medicines in parcels of land divided by respected and protected ancient forests in what is essentially a communal permaculture system.
It’s a beautiful, reverential homage — and a reminder that there are real alternatives surviving today on the fringes:
“if something were to happen to modern society (gosh, what could it be?), the various hill cultures of Southeast Asia would fare rather well – to them, the collapse of techno-industrial civilization will merely be a slight inconvenience, which they would have little problem adapting to and recovering from.”
“Long Live John Brown” — Essential reading as Luigi Mangione faces the death penalty
This fascinating and important piece was written by painter, activist, and writer Robert Shetterly. As fascism ascends and Luigi Mangione faces the death penalty, it is very relevant today. Robert wrote this thought-provoking piece while painting John Brown’s portrait in 2012.
“It was my attempt to sort out the complex aspects of [Brown’s] character and clarify my attraction to legacy, my admiration for his fierce courage and commitment despite his darker reputation.”
Misanthropy is bad and unproductive
The idea that humans are inherently destructive is common among certain communities of eco-radicals. I have friends who hold this perspective, and while I value and appreciate them — many of them have done and continue to do incredible work to protect the natural world — I disagree with the thesis.
My friends Jake Marquez and Maren Morgan, writing over at Death in the Garden, addressed this topic in a recent essay:
“from a purely practical point of view, I don’t understand how the belief that humans are inherently parasitic is at all helpful. I have witnessed with my own eyes countless examples of humans restoring ecosystems around the world and being a positive keystone species. I don’t see how it’s even remotely productive to spread the idea that humanity is incapable of this particularly at a time when nihilism, suicide, and despair on the rise.
What is one supposed to when they feel the weight of grief and suffering of the world, only to be told that essentially there’s nothing one can do to make the world a better place? That they are just inherently bad?
This is particularly pernicious when it’s spread by people who call themselves environmentalists because it essentially justifies the maintenance of the status quo. If it’s actually impossible for us to be anything other than greedy and exploitative, then of course we should drill-baby-drill, mine the oceans, raze entire landscapes. Why not? If the best thing we can do is go extinct, then what’s the point in doing anything good for the world? From my perspective, these ideas breed nothing but a nihilistic complacency. It’s a very dark and dangerous worldview to be espousing...
I actually feel a lot of empathy for people who believe that the human race are nothing more than parasites. That worldview indicates to me an extremely impoverished life devoid of experiences which would counter that narrative — experiences which I have been extremely privileged to have.
It’s a worldview that arises from an alienated, atomized civilization where one cannot drink from the stream outside their home, where one is disconnected from the beauty of feeling part of the world. It’s a worldview of profound grief for what our species has done to the living world — but it’s a grief that has turned to despair, a grief with nowhere to go.”
We don’t need any more renewables
I really appreciate TheLastFarm for the simple reason that it’s refreshing to see someone lay out reasonable degrowth policies in direct, simple terms while accepting both the necessity of challenging capitalism and the immorality of continued “green extraction” — something that, as I have written, often goes unchallenged in the degrowth movement.
This recent essay outlines a basic common-sense approach to reducing electricity demand. If we had sane political leaders, this is the direction we’d be moving in.
The claim is ubiquitous: if we’re to meet our climate goals, we need a mass buildout of renewable energy production. But this claim is false, and worse yet, attempting it will accelerate climate collapse.
Let’s start with the assumptions baked into this claim: 1) Demand is natural and untouchable, 2) Renewable energy production reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
Both are untrue.
The first assumption posits that all demand is good and essential; it’s an inevitability that must be met. Any reduction in demand represents a decline in quality of life and rising demand is natural. The second assumption flows from the first: if demand isn’t met by renewable energy, it must then be met by fossil fuels.
In this second assumption, the point is not that renewable energy reduces greenhouse gas emissions in an absolute sense but that it does so relatively: the greenhouse gas emissions created by renewable energy production--such as the mountains of coal burned to produce solar panels, the carbon-sequestering forests and deserts bulldozed for their installation, the F-gases (which are ~20,000 more potent than CO2) released by wind energy infrastructure, and so on--are lower than if this sacred demand were instead met by fossil fuels.
So in plain language, here is the actual claim: “We have no choice but to meet all electricity demands and doing so via renewable energy increases greenhouse gas emissions by a lesser amount than fossil fuels.”
Now that we have clarity on the actual claim, we can break it down. The reality is this: 1) We absolutely do have a choice because demand is politically, economically, and socially constructed, and 2) The choice between renewables and fossil fuels is a false binary, like telling a healthy person they must chose between losing an arm or a leg.
Blue Earth Defense launch event
Last month, I spoke as part of the launch event for a new international activist coalition, Blue Earth Defense. Helmed (for now) by a friend of mine in the Phillipine archipelago, BED is a powerful group that’s already bringing together a wide range of grassroots activists for skill-sharing and building collective power.
Blue Earth Defense came together April 1st 2024. We are a confederation of grassroots activists and organizations committed to restoring the balance of life on Earth. We value all life intrinsically and recognize the vital role of Indigenous People and women in defending nature. We address the root causes of environmental and social issues, including imperialism, colonialism, industrialism, patriarchy, and commodification. Our movement embraces diverse ways of life as alternatives to the dominant culture, uniting rather than dividing. We take our lead from our members from colonized countries.We are not defending the planet, we are the planet defending herself.
Here’s the video from December’s launch event:
Interview for the “Reciprocity” series
Julie Gabrielli from Homecoming interviewed me for her series of conversations with Substack nature writers. She just published the conversation this morning. Here’s an excerpt:
I look at nature writing as a combat discipline, because the land is ultimately the source of everything that we rely on. Every breath of air, every sip of water, every bite of food, all our clothing and homes and medicine, it all originates in the natural world. And that world is under assault. We’re living in a time of dire ecological crisis.
Interview with Dina Gilio-Whitaker about indigenous identity and resistance
Also last month, I interviewed Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) about her two most recent books: “As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock” and “Who Gets to Be Indian?: Ethnic Fraud, Disenrollment, and Other Difficult Conversations About Native American Identity.”
Interview about COINTELPRO, movement repression, and security culture
Last October, I was interviewed about my article “We Must Understand Repression to Be Able to Resist It: A primer on COINTELPRO, surveillance, and how our movements are attacked and undermined.” The interview didn’t air until a couple weeks ago. Here’s that recording:
Conspirituality and climate denialism
I wasn’t familiar with the term “conspirituality,” a portmanteau of conspiracy-spirituality, until reading this piece from the brilliant Margi Prideaux, PhD:
“In the loops of Instagram yoga feeds and holistic health pages that once whispered only of kombucha and self-care, a darker thread is tightening. Climate change recast as hoax. As an evil agenda. As control.
Some wellness influencers—surfing pandemic mistrust and anti-institutional sentiment—frame a warming world not as scientific consensus written into land, sea, and sky, but as an elite plot to regulate bodies and freedoms. Wildfires and floods become ‘engineered events’. Climate policy a straitjacket.
It is conspirituality—the marriage of New Age wellness and conspiracy culture—and it races like a super-charged storm because it offers certainty and agency in a world our soil and seasons insist is anything but stable.”
We all hate technology now
The rise of AI slop and the resulting dis-information war is rapidly turning people who used to (at least partly) enjoy the internet, smartphones, and digital technology into luddites who’d be happy to see the whole thing burn to the ground. As Kollibri terre Sonnenblume’s recent piece argues, the rise of AI and data centers is poisoning public opinion against technology:
“I have never witnessed anything like this much pushback against a technological development. During my life, many new inventions have been foisted upon the public without consent which transformed society in part or in whole: video games, cable television, CDs, VHS, personal computers, digital photography, the world wide web, cell phones, social media, smart phones, and streaming media. All of these were criticized, but only marginally, and ‘progress’ always marched on.
AI and data centers are decidedly not enjoying the same reflexive and nearly universal acceptance as everything on that list did. For the first time, I feel like the basis of the ‘progress’ myth is being questioned, if only implicitly. Enough people are asking ‘Do we need this?’ and ‘Do we even want this?’ that I daresay this time is different. And that’s exciting.”
Speaking of Kollibri — both him and Vincent Kelley were kind enough to list me among their end-of-year recommendations to readers. As Vincent wrote:
This Substack is an excellent mix of political analysis, on-the-ground journalism, content creation, activism, and personal writing. Wilbert puts care into every post and the organization and aesthetic of the publication is superb. It “focuses on topics such as greenwashing, degrowth, strategy, ecological collapse, grassroots organizing, people’s movements, deep ecology, and nature connection” in a way that is both rigorous and accessible, broad and deep. The moral compass guiding Wilbert’s work is evident throughout his writing on Biocentric.
Favorite Post of 2025: “Tesla Is Killing the Planet”
Thank you both so much. I feel the same about your important writing.
Why is Your Electric Bill Going Up?
Speaking of data centers, Basin & Range Watch published a piece two weeks ago specifically breaking down how transmission lines ostensibly built for “green energy” in western Nevada are supply power directly to expanding data centers and contributing to energy bills rising.
If the environmental damage and outright grift of the AI project at large aren’t enough to turn you against your nearest data center and the Greenlink transmission line, let the final straw be your rising electricity bill. Nevadans have now joined the ranks of ordinary working people subsidizing the destruction wreaked by Big Tech through their local electric utility.
Deep Sea Mining
A reader asked me to share this update: The Metals Company, one of the leaders in the deep sea mining industry, is seeking U.S. licenses to unilaterally bypass the International Seabed Authority and destroy the oceans. The Deep Sea Mining Campaign has more analysis. Follow them, and my friends at Deep Sea Defenders, to get updates and assist in fighting this disaster.
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