News from the Center | Feb. 2024

Larry Glass, NEC Board President
Caroline Griffith, NEC Executive Director

Although we could start off 2024 talking about the extreme weather that’s sweeping across the US, we thought we’d kick this issue off with some good news from the end of 2023. After more than 20 years of petitioning by environmental and wildlife groups the US Fish and Wildlife Service has finally listed the North American wolverine as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Wolverines are medium-sized, solitary carnivores that live mostly in high-elevation habitats. These fascinating critters used to be fairly abundant in Northern California at one time, but like so many furbearing mammals they were hunted, trapped and poisoned to the point where there’s been few sightings of wolverines in Northern California in recent decades. Another challenge for the wolverine is their reliance on deep snowpack for rearing their young; as snowpack decreases, wolverines are impacted.

Under the new protections, Fish and Wildlife must prepare a wolverine recovery plan, identify protected critical habitat in the future, and possibly plan for reintroduction of the species into Colorado. We look forward to a future with wolverines, even if we’ll probably never get close to one.

In other news of threatened species, the northern spotted owl is the focus of debate again with many in the environmental community supporting plans to save this iconic species by eradicating (shooting) its competition, the barred owl. While there is scientific evidence to show that reducing competition from the barred owl benefits the spotted owl, we have to admit that this causes us a great deal of cognitive dissonance. We support following science, but also have concerns that putting too much faith in “solutions” like this can distract us from the need to stop the human behavior that got us to the point of having to make the dystopian decision of hunting one bird to (hopefully) save the other. Barred owls ended up in the Western U.S. because of changes to the landscape made by settlers and the northern spotted owl has been gravely harmed by habitat loss due to logging, both of which were done at the hands of humans.

This reminds us of Western medicine’s race to find a cure for cancer while we simultaneously still allow cancer-causing chemicals to be used. Yes, by all means let’s find a cure, but we also need to be addressing the causes. As the leader of one barred owl removal experiment, USGS research wildlife biologist David Wiens, said, “The results of the study showed that long-term survival of northern spotted owls will depend heavily on reducing the negative impacts of barred owls while simultaneously addressing other threats such as habitat loss” (our emphasis).

While one federal agency (the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) has proposed to kill nearly half a million barred owls over the next 30 years, another agency (The U.S. Forest Service, locally the Shasta-Trinity National Forest) continues to log in the spotted owl’s critical habitat. We think the main focus needs to be on protecting what’s left of all of the spotted owl’s critical habitat, and creating more of it. The desperate act of killing barred owls should only be used as the last resort and not as any kind of final solution.

We’ve written before about the Humboldt Sawmill Company (HSC) biomass plant in Scotia, which is part of the “renewable energy” portfolio of Redwood Coast Energy Authority (RCEA), and local concerns about emissions and air pollution associated with the power plant. It has now come to our attention due to the diligent sleuthing of local clean energy activists, that the plant has been operating without a Clean Air Act permit for the past 2 years. The Scotia biomass plant is located in one of the most economically disadvantaged communities in our county, meaning that once again we are burdening low-income people with the byproducts of our energy consumption. RCEA can end its contract with HSC for letting this permit lapse, but they’ve neglected to do so. Let them know that you don’t want dirty power in our communities, and stay tuned in future EcoNews for more news on this.

Diné ‘Land Defender, Warrior,’ Klee Benally walked on the morning of December 31, 2023 at the age of 48 years old. Benally was an Indigenous land defender, an Environmentalist, a defender of human rights and a talented musician who played in the punk band Blackfire, which has performed here in Humboldt County. Benally was well known as an advocate for the cleanup of abandoned mines on the Navajo Nation, where uranium ore was extracted over decades to support U.S. nuclear activities during the Cold War. Benally was from the Tódích’íi’nii and Wandering People clans.

On November 18, 2023 Benally published the book, No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred, which is described as “a searing anti-colonial analysis rooted in his experience fighting for sacred places and why he does it to protect nahasdzáán (Mother Earth).”

You can find excerpts from his books and links to his music at kleebenally.com.