Larry Glass, NEC Board President
Caroline Griffith, NEC Executive Director
The Cannabis Saga Continues
Several years ago, while monitoring the County’s problematic enforcement of its own cannabis regulations, we determined that the County was not abiding by the regulations that it created. It was unevenly enforcing rules in a way that disproportionately punished the small operations, and benefited large, well financed operations.
When the Rolling Meadow Ranch project came forward, we decided it just went too far and was the opposite of everything the County said that it was working to do when it created the ordinance. Humboldt County’s original premise was to move people out of the backcountry and sensitive habitats, and get them closer to existing infrastructure. In complete disregard of its original goal, it supported and approved this project in a very remote part of southern Humboldt, with very little vehicle access, unavailable power and not enough water.
We joined with Citizens for Sustainable Humboldt and Redwood Region Audubon Society in filing a lawsuit against the project. Insiders led us to believe the Board of Supervisors was willing to negotiate with us to try and straighten out the problems with the ordinance. Disappointingly no real negotiations ever took place. We kept hearing, “If we elect a new supervisor in the 4th district then the balance on the board will change, and the supervisors will be willing to come to the table.” Then, a new giant project expansion near Petrolia was brought forward and approved by the County. More than 50 residents from the area appealed the project, but the board wound-up instead giving the large operator pretty much everything he wanted. Later in the meeting it also voted to spend more money fighting us in court rather than seriously listening to our concerns. This makes it seem more likely that the Cannabis Reform Initiative, when it appears on the ballot in 2024, will be supported by citizens who are upset about the current system.
Biden Administration Protects Wildlands
On January 26, the Biden administration revoked two decades-old mineral leases near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness area in Minnesota, the most heavily visited wilderness area in the country. Biden’s move extends a temporary decision from a year ago to block copper, nickel and other hard-rock mining that the Trump administration had tried to greenlight near the Canadian border. Officials said they determined the potential toxic leaching from mining would be too threatening to nature, local Indigenous communities and a growing recreation economy. The decision will affect 225,000 acres of federal lands and waters in the Rainy River Watershed, which abuts the wilderness area northwest of Lake Superior.
The Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said, “We take seriously our obligations to steward public lands and waters on behalf of all Americans.” This came a day after the administration took action to protect Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, and as it faces other decisions on hotly contested sites in Alaska and Nevada. The Biden administration has promised to set aside sacred tribal sites and to conserve 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030.
For nearly two decades, the Tongass, the country’s largest national forest, was protected under a federal policy from 2001 known as the Roadless Rule, which banned logging and road-building throughout much of the national forest system. The new decision reverses a Trump-era rule and reinstates the former protections. Road construction and timber harvest will be restricted in more than nine million acres in this southeast Alaskan forest.
No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice
Although it has been nearly three months since the police in Memphis beat and killed Tyre Nichols and nearly as long since Atlanta police shot and killed forest-defender Tortuguita, we are still reeling from the brutality of the videos released of these incidents. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 we wrote that there can be no climate justice without racial justice and we feel it’s important to reiterate this because, despite the proliferation of Black Lives Matter posters that summer, the situation has not changed. Although it may be difficult for those of us who have benefited from (or not been actively harmed by) our current social structure to understand, the same systems of control and domination that harm the environment also harm our Black, Brown, and LGBTQ+ friends.
At the heart of it is the idea that certain people, places and institutions are inherently better and deserving of protection, while others are expendable and are just resources to be used. We get pushback from some of our readers over ideas like this, but let’s look at the numbers: more than half of the people who live within 1.86 miles of toxic waste facilities in the United States are people of color, despite making up only 38 percent of the population; 26 percent of fatal police shootings are of Black people, despite the fact that they are 12.5 percent of the population meaning that they are 2.5 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than white people. These statistics, and many others, are why we are focusing our work on environmental justice and recognizing that environmental harm doesn’t happen in a vacuum; the intersections between social injustice and environmental harm are myriad and it will take all of us to turn this ship around. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.”