A Haunting Glimpse of Anonymous Humanity

Painting on negatives by Nick Gentry

What I love about the internet is that it is truly becoming the Earth's nervous system, a high speed causeway for information. Every photograph, film, voice, song, email, text, pdf, recipe, and memory, potentially causing a reaction in parts unknown, to people unknown. Every electron moving us closer to a sensate planet that has the ability to watch and consider itself as a whole. 

That's what this piece, Directed by Lei Lei, and Thomas Sauvin is. It collates more than 3000 found images into a collage that speaks, to me, of both the beauty and futility of humanity. It gives me unique glimpse into who and what we are, the remarkable similarities that we so exhaustively try to deny. 

Artist Lei Lei's describes the work as, "a dizzying, eerie animation. The effect is both a flip-book glimpse at three decades of Beijing's history, and an uneasy, voyeuristic peak into the private lives of thousands of people - or, as the artist describes it, 'an almost epic portrait almost epic portrait of anonymous humanity.'"

I find the film haunting —so many faces, so many stories reaching out from a recycling plant in Beijing.

Recycled from RAY on Vimeo.

Why I Won't Denounce Trump -- Yet

In one of the oddest election seasons in recent history, progressives and many conservatives have come to agree on one thing: that the caustic and divisive rhetoric that spews from Donald Trump's mouth is creating a dark age of overt intolerance. Republicans and Democrats are coming together to renounce his aggressive words and tactics. Some Democrats, ever in pursuit of a cause, have even urged their cohorts to switch party alliance for the primary, voting instead for one of Trump’s opponents. 

I don’t support this, and this is why: Though Trump is a bombastic narcissist and a habitual liar, and though his proposed policies would play hell on minorities and the downtrodden, we do not see the other Republican candidates as better. If anything, they are more partisan, more anti-choice, more tied at the hip with big-monied donors, and just as likely to leave a lasting legacy of intolerance by appointing right wing ideologues to the Supreme Court. Trump’s opponents are just as eager to destroy unions, stop gay marriage, and kill even the most meager attempts at gun control and immigration reform. They are just as adamant about reducing government regulations, subverting affirmative action, and ignoring climate change.

Texas Senator, Ted Cruz at rally

Even more than Trump, his conservative counterparts never fail to mix a good shot of religion in with their government, and they never miss an opportunity to spout their misguided and dangerous belief that the United States was created by and for Christians. Like Trump, they ignore history. Yes, his competitors talk about having empathy for women, the poor, immigrants and minorities, yet their first policy objectives once they reach office is to kill the Affordable Health Care Act and Planned Parenthood.

Republicans are freaking out because Trump is not one of their own. They want one of their own: someone they can keep on message. Yes, we think it is disgusting what Trump has brought to the surface of the American face. But the pus was there to be pushed out. The question is how do Republicans convince Republicans to start being more rational. The "Party of Lincoln" crossed the Rubicon when, in the 1960's, they decided to become the party of the status quo — protecting the rights of the white establishment while bowing to the social norms of the Christian right first by attacking abortion, then later, gay rights.

The Republican Party has done some important things in the past. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration were both a product of the Nixon Administration. But those days of rational pro-environment and pro-worker policies are long gone. Today’s brand of Republicans won’t even follow the Constitution they profess to love. If they did, they would hold hearings and vote to replace Justice Atonin Scalia. They would work to find reasonable ways to protect innocents from gun violence. They would not try to subvert women’s reproductive choice. And they would not support the increasing presence of religion in schools and government institutions.

Do we renounce Trump? Yes. He is a cancer, but he is a cancer galvanized by a party which traded its soul to the most radically conservative elements of our society. The voice of the moderate middle has been drowned out by the howling haters. Do I support those who suggest Democrats should shed their party affiliation and help the Republicans maintain this middle ground? No, I don't.

Republicans need to own this mess, and then clean it up. How do they do that? Moderate Republicans need to define a moderate path and then push for it every single moment of every single day. They need to dump the demagogues and stop pandering to social conservatives. They need to renounce calls by their leadership to implode government for the sake of partisan politics and stop obstructing everything Democrats are working on, and instead work with Democrats to craft middle ground policies which benefits more people than not. They need to stop the fear-based, hate-based, war-based rhetoric, and start treating voters like adults.

For the sake of our republic, Republican’s need to re-create their party into something more reasonable and humane.

-Naseem Rakha, 3/13/2016

Beyond Dancing

In the act of preserving land for the future, we have often neglected the future of people who considered those lands not just home, but hunting and burial ground, 

garden and god

Hopi dancer outside Hopi House, Grand Canyon South Rim, 9/2015

In the Grand Canyon I hike down to a place called Indian Gardens. It's on the canyon's south side, halfway between the rim and the river, and it's a pit stop for mules and hikers alike. Water is piped there from the North Rim. There are composting toilets, picnic tables, camp sites, a creek with duck weed floating on its surface—all shaded by redbud and giant old cottonwoods. Also at Indian Gardens, off the trail and unknown to most who hike by, are the remnants of two granaries and several other structures used by indigenous people that made the Grand Canyon home for at least 13,000 years until anglos came and called it their own. 

When Southern Pacific railroad built their tracks to the Grand Canyon's South Rim in 1901, Havasupai Indians still lived and grew crops at Indian Gardens. They accepted the white men's intrusion into their isolated lives, and even allowed them to grow crops beside their own. Then, in 1928, when the canyon became a national park, the Havasupai were forced to leave.

It's much the same throughout the Colorado Plateau. You hike and you come across the curve of kivas, the hollow of granaries, the geometry of rock weirs. There are agave roasting pits, flint chips, arrowheads, petroglyphs, grinding stones—all set within a landscape so big and bold and breathtaking it's impossible not to think of the Devine. 

The people who once inhabited these places were eventually driven away. Some by other tribes, some by desertification, and some by white man and their diseases. The ones who survived were eventually routed to reservations. 

Havasupai Girls playing game, Indian Gardens, 1898
By James, George Wharton [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

The Ahwahnee did not survive. Their home was what we now call Yosemite. During the 1851 Mariposa War, anglo miners "discovered" what the Ahwahnee called "the gaping mouth place" while pursuing the tribe into the mountains. The only thing that remains of Ahwahnee now is a lodge that bares their name. A lodge that will soon lose that name because of a trademark dispute between the concessioner and the National Park Service.

Mount Desert Island, off Maine's coast was once home to the Wabanaki—People of the Dawnland. It was there that they fished, collected clams and sweetgrass. Now that area is known as Acadia National Park. 

Yellowstone was used by the Crow, Cheyanne, Nez Perce, Flathead, Bannock, Shoshone. All of these tribes were displaced as a result of the christening of the parks. 

This idea, that conservation projects must be cleansed of their ancestral inhabitants, is not unique to the United States. It is happening in the jungles of India, Brazil, and Central America. It's occurring in China's lowlands and in the savannas of Africa. Around the world, indigenous people have been and continue to be jerked from their homeland and tossed onto less valuable, less productive lands, marginal places for a people often treated as marginal, at best. 

To bring awareness to this issue, the human rights group Survival International has started a "Stop the Con" campaign which calls for governments and conservation groups throughout the world to work with native people to preserve land and wildlife. Instead of evicting people from their land, and then turning away as they struggle to survive, enlightened conservation plans include tribal people in efforts to build biological diversity and sustainability while protecting the area from poachers, vandals, and developers.

The Grand Canyon is a good example of a place where this kind of cooperation is sorely needed. The national park only occupies a portion of the canyon. To the southeast is the expansive Navajo Nation, to the Southwest, the Havasupai and Hualapai reservations. Over the years, development plans on these reservations have come in conflict with the national park's conservation goals. 

On the Hualapai reservation, a Las Vegas developer David Jin built the notorious Skywalk. The Skywalk is a curved glass balcony which juts over the canyon like a giant toilet seat. Visitors pay seventy nine bucks to be bussed in and greeted by a tired looking group of native dancers, who will let you take their pictures, for an additional price. From the Skywalk, many visitors are then bussed down to one of several heliports, where for an additional two to three hundred dollars they will be flown over and into the canyon.

when tribes are not part of a conservation plan, 

their plans for economic development can be become part of a conservation problem 

The experience, from the air, is considered unsurpassed. But the experience from below—for wildlife, for hikers, for rafters—is more than jarring, it is an affront to everything the canyon is about: peace, quiet, isolation, spiritual renewal. From sunrise to sunset the western end of the canyon is more like a scene from Apocalypse Now than the natural wonder it is. What makes the intrusion even more jarring is that the helicopter tours are in direct conflict with the National Overflights Act of 1987, which aimed to preserve the quiet in Grand Canyon National Park. In 2000, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted the Hualapai a hardship exemption. Baring bad weather, the Hualapai heliports are today among the busiest in the country, flying hundreds of visitors into and over the west end of Grand Canyon National Park every single day. The FAA exemption allows the Hualapai to fly up to 300,000 flights a year.

In 2011, the Navajo's applied for a similar exemption. A portion of their land also borders the Grand Canyon, and tribal members who support the idea imagine drawing from the millions of tourists who visit the national park every year. Navajo leaders are also considering teaming up with a Scottsdale, Arizona-based development firm to build a gondola that will carry people from the rim of the canyon to the confluence of the Colorado River with the Little Colorado River. The project is very controversial. The gondola would offload its passengers just feet from the national park boundary, and put them within walking distance of one of the Hopi's most sacred sites—the place where they emerged into this world. The gondola proposal has split tribes between those wanting the Grand Canyon Escalade and those trying to Save The Confluence from the spoils of unfettered tourism.

The bottom line: when tribes are not part of a conservation plan, their plans for economic development can be become part of a conservation problem.

The experience, from the air, is unconsidered unsurpassed. But the experience from below is an affront to the canyon

Stop the Con is right. Governments and conservationists need to do more to include ancestral people in the planning, management and development of protected lands, and they need to aggressively support sustainable and economic development projects which help native people thrive. 

It's difficult to pass judgement on the Navajo for trying to find ways to cash in on the millions of tourists who come to see the Grand Canyon when you learn that more than 40 percent of their tribal members are unemployed. It's difficult to criticize the tribe for not developing other opportunities in other regions of their nation when you learn that there are more than 600 abandoned and unreclaimed uranium mines scattered over that land, that their water often is contaminated, and that many of their streets, sidewalks, houses, and schools were built with radioactive tailings (A Killing Wind, 2013). It is difficult to square white man's history of paternalism, abuse and neglect and not realize we owe a debt to native people who considered the lands we hike and raft and climb not just home, but hunting and burial ground, garden and god. 

If there is a way to actually "conserve" land and wildlife then the steps to do this must not just align with native values and goals, but native people should be part of their very design.

-Naseem Rakha, February 22, 2015

A Few Facts About Flint Michigan

To save money, officials in Flint, Michigan stopped using water from Lake Huron to draw it instead from the Flint River.

The problem: Flint River water was polluted and corrosive causing lead to leach from the city's old pipes.

Eden Wells, Michigan's chief medical executive, has said that all children who drank the city's water since April 2014 have been exposed to lead. That's 8,657 children, based on Census data.

There is NO safe level of lead in the body, but the impacts of lead are considered most severe on the developing brains and nervous systems of children and fetuses.

Astoundingly, Flint, Michigan based General Motors stopped using Flint River water when they recognized it was too corrosive. City officials were aware of this, and hoped it didn't "set a precedent for people to jump off the Flint system." (Michigan Live, GM's decision to stop using Flint River water will cost Flint $400,000 - 10/14/2014) 

Flint River water has also been linked to an uptick of Legionnaies' Disease. State officials have been warned about this, but did nothing. 

It's not just Flint, Michigan that is experiencing this crisis. As the NPR report Beyond Flint Michigan indicates, communities around the county, particularly in the rural south, have contaminated drinking water.

On the Molalla

Fluted basalt columns wound into a nautilus
turquoise water 
moss covered trees
rain-licked ferns 
slick-capped mushrooms feeding on rich black soil
the scent of origin and rot

-Naseem Rakha, 2/4/16

Everything is Temporary

Walking along the Colorado River, RM 179.5 in the Grand Canyon, I see a twisted outcrop of columnar basalt. Pillars of hardened lava protrude right then left, up then down, a stark contrast to the basalt on its sides, tall and vertical columns—sentries guarding a renegade piece of the past.

Typically, columnar basalt is very linear, either standing upright or lying horizontally to the ground. Vertical basalt is formed by lateral lava flows, horizontal basalt, vertical flows. All of it very orderly. This twisted belt of rock, however, it speaks of pandemonium. Clashing forces. Disarray.

But even more compelling then this specific flow on this specific part of the Colorado River, is the question of how these blocks of stone settled into their distinct shapes. Most geologists believe columnar basalt is created by constriction; the cooling lava shrinks, causing cracks or joints similar to those seen on dried lake beds. Then you have others who think the shrinkage theory is, "too simple," favoring, instead an action they call, "viscous fingering," or what I think of as geologic foreplay. In essence, "vertical loading and progressive cooling and crystallization" work together to ease the basalt into its forceful forms.

Whatever the real mechanism for basalt's symmetrical semblance, geologists tend to agree it takes hundreds of years for the rocks to cool into these features, perhaps even longer. It's often that way with earth science. The Grand Canyon may or may not have been carved in 6 million years, the basalt columns may or may not be the result of viscous fingering. We can do field studies on the subject, write papers, have conferences, but we don't really know the answer for sure—not yet.  I think that's what draws me to the science—its tangential relationship with certainty.

∞

RM 179. I leave the river path and scramble up a scree slope toward the chaotic columns, grabbing anything solid to boost my way. I brush a nettle plant, feel its sting, scrape against a fishhook barrel cactus, feel a spine embed in my leg. At the base of the outcrop I stop, catch my breath, then begin to climb the twisted and uneven stone.

Halfway up I find the perfect place to pause and eat a few crackers. There is a seat for me, a ledge for my feet, another for my canteen, and yet another for my backpack. Beside me, lying prone to the ground, is a dead and desiccated barrel cactus. The living one, the one whose spine is now lodged in my thigh, was striking with its yellow and magenta plumage. But this one, this dead one, also has a certain beauty. Its body is ashen and has collapsed in on itself. Its spines look like rusted nails. In this brittle environment, where decay is so slow, the cactus may have died a decade ago or more. I know from its size it may have lived eighty years, maybe one hundred.

I watch the river go by, thinking about it and the curve of time. A barrel cactus which lived longer than my parents, a series of lava flows which temporarily dammed this river well over a million years ago. Either one, eighty years or a million, they are infinitesimal compared to the age of the bedrock that surrounds this place: 1.8 billion year old granite and schist.

It's one of the reasons I come to this canyon. All those years piled on top of one another, a lexicon of what's been. What is my existence in all of that? All of human civilization would amount to barely a hairline in the these walls. The idea calms me, puts my own losses in perspective. All things are temporary. Heartburn, heartache, heart attacks. Politics, politicians, preachy puritans. Guns, laws, dams, disease. All of it making the rounds, from germination to termination.

The canyon is an open book, giving me a glimpse of what was, what is, and what has yet to be.

-Naseem Rakha, February 1, 2016

After the Oregon standoff: can lost goodwill be recaptured?

As the standoff in the Oregon desert draws close to a very American end—a barricade, a shoot out, one dead cowboy, several arrests—the conflict over western lands is far from over.

During the first week of the three-and-a-half week standoff, things were fairly amicable between the militants and local authorities. But before long, the out-of-state gun bearing cowboys were destroying property, and threatening local officials. All along, the police and FBI remained mostly out of site, not approaching the militants or commenting to the press about the situation, which left many across the country wondering what they were waiting for.

That changed on Tuesday night. As leaders were driving about 100 miles to a meeting with supporters, authorities stopped the militants on the remote snow-lined highway, and captured the group. In the confrontation, one leader, Robert LaVoy Fenicum, was shot and killed. With their leaders gone, many of the militants left the refuge, and presumably, Harney County. Still, five or six people remain, promising to stay no matter what.

Their continued resistance indicates that the sentiments which brought people to this cold and windy part of the country are not going to just blow away. While everyone may agree that public land has many meaningful purposes, it is the people who earn their living from that land that often feel left in the dust by state and federal regulations. 

To them, wolf introductions, wilderness proposals, bans on timber harvest and reduction in grazing units clearly prioritize environment over livelihood. Shuttered mills and feed stores, abandoned libraries, anemic public services are perceived to be a product of an overreaching, unsympathetic and aggressively arrogant government infrastructure lubricated by urban and urbane values, rather than what it really is: a symptom of an economic system gone amuck. 

For them, multiple use is often portrayed as a multiple menace, with the needs of wolves and fish and hikers competing with the needs of local people trying to feed their families.

The answer to this problem, however, is not the demonization of government nor in the privatization of land. Ironically, the answer according to Harney County rancher, Fred Otley, lies in just the kind of cooperative plans that he and other ranchers and conservationists helped create with the Malheur Wildlife Refuge and Bureau of Land Management in 2013. 

The landmark effort brought together all interest groups to develop a shared vision for the land which included economic, environmental and social needs. It took more than five years of hard work, long conversations and detailed biologic assessments to complete the project. 

In the end, ranchers signed a 30 year agreement with the government to protect sage grouse habitat on their private lands, in exchange for the continued use of public lands for well monitored grazing. 

The cooperative effort included 53 ranches and 320,000 acres of pubic and private land. In March, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell visited Harney County, dubbing the Malheur plan, “the Oregon Way.” It and similar work in other parts of the west have been credited for the recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife decision to not list the sage grouse as endangered. 

sage grouse

“We started saying what’s good for the bird is good for the herd,” said Tom Sharp, a Harney County rancher who helped launch the cooperative effort. 

Sharp, Otley and Harney Country community members are concerned that the militants illegal occupation of the refuge and their incendiary claims that the federal government has no right to own land in the state, will derail the goodwill that has been created in the county. After generations in the area, they know how quickly misunderstandings can lead to decade long feuds. 

These concerns were voiced to Bundy and his crew at a Town Hall meeting last week in Burns, Oregon. The meeting drew over 400 locals, most of whom called on Bundy to go home. At the end of the meeting Bundy and his friends got up and walked out, not saying a word to the group. 

And while it appears Bundy and his gang are on the way out, their God-loving, gun-toting, live-free-or-die message is not likely to go away. The reason Bundy and other leaders were caught last night is they were heading out to meet with more than 100 supporters in the next county over. Before he was arrested, Bundy said he been invited to attend another community meeting later this week. “We have a lot of support,” he told reporters. 

Unfortunately, he may be right. 

-Naseem Rakha, 1/28/16 for The Guardian