Yes it is sad, we donkeys are indeed the 99% who are left behind. We are not really considered when decisions are made about our environment, and land stewardship. This is THE most important issue of our lifetime. We must protect this precious jewel we call earth and mother. We are killing her, and destroying her, and all of my lovely innocent fellow living things who need her to survive. Clearly, it would be wise to let me, Miss Abby take over running this planet. As much as I hate to say anything against my beloved humans, the ones making these decisions are not wise, not ethical, and are extremely selfish. I speak to the persons they call corporations. It is time to take away the title of person-hood from entities that don't need air to breathe or food to eat. Who do not have children to love and family to care about. They are cold, lifeless, destroyers of the planet. Their appetite for our finite resources is insatiable and non sustainable. My cousins, who are on the brink of complete annihilation in Big Bend Ranch State Park, want little. Their foot print is small. Why must we kill the animal most likely to survive our planet's warming? We may well look to burros in the future as a means of transportation again, when all our resources are used up, and the planet itself stands where we burros stand today, on the brink of man made collapse.
. We plan to demonstrate that my cousins have been falsely accused of destruction they did not do. There is no burro problem. In fact, what we have is a people problem. It is time to wake up, look around, and decide if our planet is worth saving, because we truly are at the tipping point, and we burros are not the cause.
Someone Got Rich and Someone Got SickNature Is the 99%, TooBy
Chip Ward
What if rising sea levels are yet another measure of inequality? What if the degradation of our planet’s life-support systems -- its atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere -- goes hand in hand with the accumulation of wealth, power, and control by that corrupt and greedy 1% we are hearing about from Zuccotti Park? What if the assault on America’s middle class and the assault on the environment are one and the same?
Money Rules: It’s not hard for me to understand how environmental quality and economic inequality came to be joined at the hip. In all my years as a
grassroots organizer dealing with the tragic impact of degraded environments on public health, it was always the same: someone got rich and someone got sick.
In the struggles that I was involved in to curb polluters and safeguard public health, those who wanted curbs, accountability, and precautions were always outspent several times over by those who wanted no restrictions on their effluents. We dug into our own pockets for postage money, they had expense accounts. We made flyers to slip under the windshield wipers of parked cars, they bought ads on television. We took time off from jobs to visit legislators, only to discover that they had gone to lunch with fulltime lobbyists.
Naturally, the barons of the chemical and nuclear industries don’t live next to the radioactive or toxic-waste dumps that their corporations create; on the other hand, impoverished black and brown people often do live near such ecological sacrifice zones because they can’t afford better. Similarly, the gated communities of the hyper-wealthy are not built next to cesspool rivers or skylines filled with fuming smokestacks, but the
slums of the planet are. Don’t think, though, that it’s just a matter of property values or scenery. It’s about health, about whether your kids have lead or dioxins
running through their veins. It’s a simple formula, in fact: wealth disparities become health disparities.
And here’s another formula: when there’s money to be made, both workers and the environment are expendable. Just as jobs migrate if labor can be had cheaper overseas, I know workers who were tossed aside when they became ill from the foul air or poisonous chemicals they encountered on the job.
The fact is: we won’t free ourselves from a dysfunctional and unfair economic order until we begin to see ourselves as communities, not commodities. That is one clear message from Zuccotti Park.
Polluters routinely walk away from the ground they poison and expect taxpayers to clean up after them. By
“externalizing” such costs, profits are increased. Examples of land abuse and abandonment are too legion to list, but most of us can refer to a familiar
“superfund site” in our own backyard. Clearly, Mother Nature is among the disenfranchised, exploited, and struggling.
Democracy 101: The 99% pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions, and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for
debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.
Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labor, it’s called a “bonus.” If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who
designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.
If you
drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverize an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you
disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you
get two years in jail.
In campaigns to make polluting corporations accountable, my Utah neighbors and I learned this simple truth: decisions about what to allow into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are soon enough translated into flesh and blood, bone and nerve, and daily experience. So it’s crucial that those decisions, involving environmental quality and public health, are made openly, inclusively, and accountably. That’s Democracy 101.
The corporations that shred habitat and contaminate your air and water are anything but democratic. Stand in line to get your 30 seconds in front of a microphone at a public hearing about the siting of a nuclear power plant, the effluent from a factory farm, or the removal of a mountaintop and you’ll get the picture quickly enough: the corporations that profit from such ecological destruction are distant, arrogant, secretive, and unresponsive. The 1% are willing to spend billions impeding democratic initiatives, which is why every so-called environmental issue is also about building a democratic culture.
First Kill the EPA, Then Social Security: Beyond all the rhetoric about freedom from the new stars of the Republican Party, the strategy is simple enough: obstruct and misinform, then blame the resulting dysfunction on “government.” It’s a great scam. Tell the voters that government doesn’t work and then, when elected, prove it. And first on the list of government outfits they want to
sideline or kill is the Environmental Protection Agency, so they can do away with the already flimsy wall of regulation that stands between their toxins and your bloodstream.
Poll after poll
shows that citizens understand the need for environmental rules and safeguards. Mercury is never
put into the bloodstreams of nursing mothers by consensus, nor are watersheds
fracked until they are flammable by popular demand. But the free market ideologues of the Republican Party are united in opposition to any rule or standard that impedes the “magic” of the marketplace and unchecked capital.
The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts
unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.
Beware of Growth: Getting the economy growing has been the refrain of the Obama administration and the justification for every bad deal, budget cut, and unbalanced compromise it’s made. The desperate effort to grow the economy to solve our economic woes is what keeps Timothy Geithner at the helm of the Treasury and is what stalls the regulation of greenhouse gasses. It’s why we are told we must
sacrifice environmental quality for
pipelines and why young men and women are sacrificed to protect access to oil, the lubricant for an acquisitive economic engine. The financial empire of the one percenters and the political order it has shaped are predicated on easy and relentless growth. How, we are asked, will there be enough for everyone if we don’t keep growing?
The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: we have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a percent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits. This isn’t complicated: There’s only so much fertile soil or fresh water available, only so many fish in the ocean, only so much CO2 the planet can absorb and remain habitable.
Yes, you can get around this contradiction for a while by exploiting your neighbor’s habitat, using technological advances to extend your natural resources, and stealing from the future -- that is, using up soil, minerals, and water your grandchildren (someday to be part of that same 99%) will need. But the limits to those familiar and, in the past, largely successful strategies are becoming more evident all the time.
At some point, we’ll discover that you can’t exist for long beyond the boundaries of the natural world, that (as with every other species) if you
overload the carrying capacity of your habitat, you crash. Warming temperatures, chaotic weather patterns, extreme storms,
monster wildfires,
epic droughts,
Biblical floods, an
avalanche of species extinction… that collapse is upon us now. In the human realm, it translates into hunger and violence, mass migrations and civil strife, failed states and resource wars.
Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99% will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris, or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.
An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair, and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.
Occupy Earth: Give credit where it’s due: it’s been the genius of the protesters in Zuccotti Park to shift public discourse to whether the distribution of economic burdens and rewards is just and whether the economic system makes us whole or reduces and divides us. It’s hard to imagine how we’ll address our converging ecological crises without first addressing the way accumulating wealth and power has captured the political system. As long as Washington is dominated and intimidated by giant oil companies, Wall Street speculators, and corporations that can buy influence and even write the rules that make buying influence possible, there’s no meaningful way to deal with our economy’s addiction to fossil fuels and its dire consequences.
Nature’s 99% is an amazingly diverse community of species. They feed and share and recycle within a web of relationships so dynamic and complex that we have yet to fathom how it all fits together. What we have excelled at so far is breaking things down into their parts and then reassembling them; that, after all, is how a barrel of crude oil becomes rocket fuel or a lawn chair.
When it comes to the more chaotic, less linear features of life like climate, ecosystems, immune systems, or fetal development, we are only beginning to understand thresholds and feedback loops, the way the whole
becomes greaterthan the sum of its parts. But we at least know that the parts matter deeply and that, before we even fully understand them, we’re losing them at an accelerating rate. Forests are
dying, fisheries are
going, extinction is
on steroids.
Degrading the planet’s operating systems to bolster the bottom line is foolish and reckless. It hurts us all. No less important, it’s unfair. The 1% profit, while the rest of us cough and cope.
After Occupy Wall Street, isn’t it time for Occupy Earth?
OCCUPY BIG BEND RANCH STATE PARK!!!!! BRING YOUR CAMERAS AND LONG LENSES AND LET THE PARKS PEOPLE KNOW YOU ARE THERE. ASK THEM WHERE THEIR SHOOTERS ARE LOCATED. THEY MUST TELL YOU AS A MATTER OF PUBLIC SAFETY.
It's me, Miss Abby
It was wonderful to hear my friends sticking up for my family on Marfa Public Radio too. (to listen click this link) Marfa Public Radio Interview 11/16/2011 They really did a great job, and then that evening at the Granada Theatre, I felt the love! Little Liberty stood outside the theatre and got pictures taken of her all night. It was like a strobe light outside!! The good will of the people flowed everywhere! Meanwhile inside the theatre people spoke up and made it clear they want their cultural history protected, and that absolutely includes the burro. In fact, one kind lady said she was very angry that they were taking away her livelihood, as an artist. And, native Americans have a say in this too. The burros played a part in their history as well, and the area, including the Rio Grande has achieved Historical Preservation status. 
Yes, my dear friends are digging up the facts, and the truth will set us all free. There is nobody better at this than Karen Van Atta, who uses her environmental sciences degree to great advantage in her research. Why won't those people in Austin listen to the people who really care about the entire environment? The Chihuahuan biosphere is recognized as precious globally, so it seems to me that they would put science to use and conduct the studies that are required to save these precious lands, and all the wildlife that calls it home. My smart friends tell me this independent study would take at least five years to measure all the impacts and interactions of species within the ecosystem. To do this the parks officials need to stop the shooting. Governor Perry YOU can make them stop. Why haven't you stepped up for your constituents who want this madness to end? Why are you so stubborn about real land stewardship, Governor? Yes, humans can be unpredictable, and either be as mean as Rick Perry or as kind as dear Chey Rondeaux. I love her and her family, Rachael and Rod.
I have found people who know a thing or two about land stewardship, why is it so hard to convince people it is the right thing to do? Holistic land stewardship (click link) These techniques of land management are inclusive of all species as they exist, and a careful use of land by a variety of species is healthy rather than trying to keep everybody off of it. That is not natural, and it does not work. Recently, Marjorie and I were able to discuss land stewardship with Christopher Gill who owns Circle Ranch in Southwest TX. In fact, its boundary is 1000 feet from Big Bend Ranch State Park. There he has all kinds of animals sharing the land and thriving. Circle Ranch (click link). Mr. Gill believes the burros have a place too. And says so on his blog. 
In fact, we talked to so many people when we were in Alpine TX and they overwhelmingly believe the burros belong. We heard stories about burros in the lives of the people who live there. The real history, not the history TPWD is trying to re-write.is important to spread. Yes, I was proud to be with my friends on Saturday when the Wild Burro Protection League marched in the Art walk parade. I pulled a wagon that had a cover on it, and I even had to jump over rail road tracks, which really made me nervous. Marjorie was sure proud of me. And, Chey rode my big friend Hannah, while Zachary led little baby Liberty. So many people shouted out at our group in solidarity with my wild cousins. I was so proud to know these humans, and felt much better when we left Alpine TX. Marjorie said she needed to know how committed the people were to keeping the burros. Now that she knows we are planning our next step. Soon, we will be back in Alpine to share with everybody what we can do to save the few of my cousins that remain. We are making an action plan.
It is becoming really critical too. We got eye-witness accounts of the parks people using helicopters to chase my dear cousins. These neanderthals can't seem to comprehend that these native burros have families too, and that they are not harming anyone. They cannot seem to understand that my cousins are falsely accused, and instead of causing damage we actually enrich the desert, helping to stave off desertification. 
