Author: steve kelly

Resolution for 2023: Decolonize, de-imperialize, and restore sovereignty

As a child of the 1950s and ‘60s I cannot help but see flashes of Vietnam in Empire’s latest – hopefully its final – military expedition(s).  Social media platforms and television propaganda maintain a persistent numbness.  Institutional and individual indifference breeds a hunger for bread and circuses, football, Disneyland, talk shows and star-spangled “influencers,” who excrete toxic slime from every crack and crevice.  The system now occupies every square inch of terrain.  Bureaucrats, bored out of their minds, nevertheless read the latest memo from Washington directing street operations programmed to steer the “hive mind” hither and yon, round and round, to a place called nowhere. 

It’s hard aimless work averting eyeballs — already robbed of their gaze — day in, day out, away from the wretched, inhumane global slave quarters and killing zones where pillage of the last untrammeled forests, grasslands, and scenic vistas produce commodities and emerging, synthetic  “Green” markets needed to keep the insatiable machines, financial schemes and meaningless political simulations from totally melting down.  Down this road is one logical end: suicide. 

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Colonizing Montana Wilderness in 2022

The following is an op ed piece submitted to Montana’s print media with the hope of reaching some people who have been duped by the dupers. Whenever you hear about a western congressman or senator talking about “wilderness protection,” there is always more to the story, and more seizing native forest land for commerce than there is wilderness protection. My argument follows:

Technology and machines encroach into rural homes, schools and businesses, changing the private and public values that have long defined quality of life in Montana. Fragments of virgin forest fall to man’s replacement: expensive, more powerful machines.

Local, year-round residents in towns like Seeley Lake and Lincoln have always struggled to make ends meet. Local businesses always worked hard just to keep their heads above water. Life in Montana has always been a struggle to survive; it makes us smile.

Lately, political operatives with fancy titles and university degrees in political science and social engineering are now trying to sell Montanans a fable that these isolated communities were once thriving mining and logging towns.  According to Webster’s, to thrive is “to grow vigorously, flourish or to gain in wealth or possessions: prosper.”  My question to these (self-appointed) superior intellectuals: Is that so? 

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Crazy Mountains Update

Photo credit: Missoula Current

Two untrustworthy players, playing a game we know little to nothing about, except that if the past is prologue, we need another Yellowstone Club like a hole in the head.  Remembering the Lee Metcalf Wilderness trade-off (Jack Creek road) and Gallatin I and Gallatin II land exchanges, which I opposed, with only a handful of like-minded souls who could see the disaster (Big Sky/Yellowstone Club et al.) long before it materialized.  I cannot figure out what the Crow nation sees in this by accepting anything less than original, absolute title to their sacred land.  My .02, off the top of my head.

Anyone can submit commments. If you do not submit comments, you will be most likely barred from entering a federal court challenge due to lack of “standing.” Clever, aren’t they?

steve k

https://helenair.com/news/state-and-regional/forest-service-seeks-comments-on-crazy-mountains-land-exchange-proposal/article_837083e4-4e4c-5200-8ef6-a7cef22bd859.html#tracking-source=home-the-latest

Forest Service seeks comments on Crazy Mountains land exchange proposal

The public now has the opportunity to weigh in on a proposed land exchange that’s been brewing for four years on the east side of the Crazy Mountains, an idea first formulated by a group that includes area landowners.

The Custer Gallatin National Forest released a Preliminary Environmental Assessment for the East Crazy Inspiration Divide Land Exchange Projecton Wednesday morning, signaling a possible resolution to what has been a long-simmering dispute over public access to the region.

The agreement would exchange 4,135 acres (10 parcels) of forest lands for 6,430 acres of private lands (11 parcels), owned by six private property owners in the Crazy Mountains and near the Inspiration Divide Trail in Big Sky. The land near Big Sky is sought by the Yellowstone Club, a private community of multi-millionaires. 

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Plundering Wilderness for “Financial Certainty”

A highly organized, extravagantly financed, top-down campaign to seize and dominate (plunder) undeveloped forestland near Lincoln, Montana is well underway.                                         

A nice place with lots of wilderness, an outdoor sculpture park and the former “Unibomber’s” cabin site to brag about. That’s not enough. It’s never enough.

Intense gaslighting techniques are making it difficult for Montana’s commoners to discern what’s truth and what’s propaganda.  The recent flurry of opinion pieces, political polling reports, and the promotion of the 50th Anniversary celebration of the designation of the Scapegoat Wilderness in 1972 are representative elements of yet another elaborate anti-wilderness scam: The Lincoln Prosperity Proposal. 

https://www.lincolnprosperity.com/

Sorry, no prosperity for wildlife.  

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Another land grab

Holland Lake Lodge

Well, we are embroiled in another huge land grab, this time in the Swan Valley, in western Montana, a magical place near and dear to my heart.  I lived in Swan Lake between 1977 and 1992 and enjoyed an “early retirement” at age 30 for several years, just to get a feel for what retirement meant.  I hiked, climbed, camped, boated, fished, hunted, and all the things one can possibly imagine in a valley with little private land, and even fewer local, year-round residents.  It’s all up for grabs now, and the prognosis does not look or feel good.

A while back POM discussed a land grab in the Crazy Mountains, located between Livingston and Big Timber, where an elite developer wants to heli-ski and trek and generally exploit the undeveloped forest and mountains for private profit, catering to the .01%.

Rather than write an article, per se, I’m just going to paste my comments to the U.S. Forest Service, who are facilitating this transfer of land and assets from a “mom and pop” lease/operator to a global, heli-ski/ski area/destination resort conglomerate who will mow down what’s there and put up a mini-Disneyland with all the glitz and glitter necessary to attract celebs and uber-rich jet-setters to play in the once-wild forest and mountain environment that has become super popular since the “lockdowns” of the past few years.  The Great Reset is moving at warp speed in Montana.  Fasten your chin straps if you intend to stay and fight (v. selling out and moving to Ecuador, or Costa Rico, like so many others have already done).

The U.S. Forest Service is accepting comments until September 21, 2022, so if you are so motivated, add your .02, and help make history.  Game on!

Use the following comments in any way you see fit.  Copy, cut and paste, paraphrase, whatever.  Just remember to file your comments before the 09/21 deadline.

Enjoy.

 

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Dirt First!

It’s tree-planting season.  My annual order of 24 native seedlings arrived today via Fed Ex from the State nursery in Missoula, Montana. Minimum order is 24 “plugs” or bareroot stock, grown for “conservation” purposes and sold throughout the state.  This year, I selected P-pine (Ponderosa).  Last year it was juniper, and western larch the year before.  I treat this as a ritual of Spring, that for me goes way back to the mid-1980s.  The serious woman at the nursery – maybe a tree scientist —  I ordered from this year wasn’t thrilled about my selection because the seeds were gathered at a much lower elevation, and from a site West of the Continental Divide, somewhere in the Blackfoot River watershed.  I’m planting East of the divide in much poorer dirt, in a more hostile setting with less annual precipitation (drought prone) and generally lower humidity.  After a robust discussion she agreed to send my 24 Ponderosa pine. 

Ponderosa pine seedling (“plug”)

These little beauties are now in 1-gallon pots.  It didn’t take long at all.

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Endless pressure, endlessly applied.

Backyard, Bozeman, Montana. Dreaming of summer.

Wildness, wilderness and roadless areas are all words that we use to describe lands that remain as nature intended, untrammeled by man’s unquenchable thirst for comfort, convenience and attachment to shiny objects. Fragments of Montana, Idaho, Alaska and smaller parcels scattered about the Lower 48 are all that remain of the once vast wild landscape that existed before Europeans occupied (colonized) and exploited anything and everything that could be converted into gold, silver of fiat money. It was all wilderness once. Lately I’ve been reflecting on experiences and events that have influenced my life in the Northern Rockies. Yes, I’m a transplant, originally from “The East.” College in Denver, and then migrating to Missoula, Montana in the winter of 1974-75. I wrote the following piece for a group I helped to found in 1987 in Swan Lake, Montana, The Friends of the Wild Swan. wildswan.org

After 35 years of grassroots wilderness and forest-ecosystem activism, it’s worth reflecting on one of Friends of the Wild Swan’s most important accomplishments:  wildlands protection.  In 1987, the social, cultural and political climate surrounding the wilderness/roadless-areas debate was highly contentious, to put it mildly.  All across western Montana, and in the Swan Valley in particular, public outrage and resentment was growing rapidly against the rapid expansion of clearcut logging on Plum Creek’s (“checkerboard”) corporate holdings, and indiscriminate clearcutting on publicly-owned forest land managed by the U.S. Forest Service.

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Privatization: Turning The Commons Into Gold

Introduction

Thanks, Alison and Stephers, for the inspiration and love of life struggling to survive. And love the paradox.

This piece was something I wrote in 2005. A lot has changed, but the general process and trend has not. Today’s enclosure laws and regulations give to oligarchs and take from commoners. The mode of production is today, as it has ever been: colonialism.

Plight of the Commons

“By the law of nature these things are common to all mankind, the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea,” proclaimed the Roman Emperor Justinian.  Justinian’s code, the original protection of the public trust, or commons, become the law of the land in 528 A.D.  Over the centuries that have followed this precept has become widely known as the Public Trust Doctrine. 

Today, the commons face unprecedented new threats from an American 21st Century Emperor and the expansion of so-called neo-conservatism, or privatization.  From a neo-conservative perspective, laissez-faire individualism and free-market (corporate) economics, the conceptual building blocks of a bold return to medieval feudalism, offer efficiency, smaller-sized government, and greater individual choice.  Public tradeoffs or costs (public losses) are seldom discussed. 

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Crazy court ruling threatens all public lands

[East side, Crazy Mountains of Montana]

Change is coming to what I think is Montana’s most alluring “island” mountain range, the Crazy Mountains.  It’s about to become the latest in a long, tortured history of celebrity destinations dotting the American West.  As the success of Big Sky ski resort, the Yellowstone Club, and Moonlight Basin (northwest of Yellowstone National Park) have demonstrated, there is plenty more opportunity here in Southwest Montana if you’ve got deep pockets and high-level political connections in Washington, D.C.

Hikers and hunters have been battling the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to maintain access to public lands for decades.  Local ranchers have been illegally posting “no trespassing” signs to keep hunters and hikers out of their backyard, and off their private land.  But the ownership pattern is complicated in a “checkerboard” of private and public sections (640 acres, or 1 square mile, per section) that originated when the railroad was given title to every other section.  Under the Union Pacific Act of 1862, Congress granted every other section along the railroad – in one square mile blocks — to Union Pacific and retained the alternate sections as federal government lands.

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Green Party deja vu?

The fight to have a political presence in the two-party “duopoly” continues. What democracy, right?

I may have said I was no longer involved in electoral politics.  I changed my mind last week after talking to Richard Winger over at Ballot Access News out of San Francisco.  https://ballot-access.org/  The battle over ballot access for “3rd Parties” is not over yet, and the filing deadline was Monday, March 13.  Nobody else seemed to be interested, so what else could I do?  I really do want to see this battle to final resolution, win, lose or draw. 

I filed online, paid my $15 fee with a credit card, with the Montana Secretary of State to be a Green Party candidate in State House District 61 in Bozeman, my home district.  It was a last-minute decision with purpose relating to an ongoing lawsuit against the Montana SOS challenging the signature requirement for acquiring ‘new party’ status in the 2016 election.  I’ve written about it before.  https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/08/montana-ballot-access-decision-suppresses-green-party-voters/ …and here:  https://pieceofmindful.com/2021/11/10/green-party-prevails-at-9th-circuit-court/

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