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Saturday, November 20, 2010

We Cannot Techno-Fix Our Way to a Sustainable Future By Rachel Smolker

We Cannot Techno-Fix Our Way to a Sustainable Future
By Rachel Smolker

If Cloudbusting Ever Became Officially Recognized

If Cloudbusting Ever Became Officially Recognized............

Iron pipes would be illegal.

Farmers would need a permit to buy irrigation pipe.

Nobody else would be allowed to own pipes.

A special police unit would have the power to search every barn in the country to make sure there was no cloudbuster hidden there.

All phone calls and e-mails would be monitored for tips on who was doing cloudbusting.
Anyone who complained about the weather would be listed in a database as a potential suspect.

Third-world countries would be ordered not to build cloudbusters or they would be invaded and occupied to restore democracy.

There would be Congressional hearings on what the weather should be, and the special-interest group with the most money for lobbying and campaign contributions would get the weather they wanted and the rest of the population would have to endure it.

The Mafia would extort money from farmers by threats of bad weather.

India and Pakistan would cause floods in each other´s territory.

The IRA would cause floods in England.

The ETA would cause floods in France and Spain.

Kids would make snow in the winter to stay home from school.

The Palistinians would cause floods in Israel.

The Mosad would cause floods in Arab countries.

Religious leaders would make rain to impress their followers.

Resort owners would prevent rain to improve their business.

Conspiracy-theorists would secretly build and use cloudbusters to break the government monopoly on weather control.

UFO-nuts would build cloudbusters to fight off invading spaceships.

Revolutionary groups would use cloudbusters to ruin the economies of opressive countries to bring down their governments.

The USA would use cloudbusters to ruin the economy of Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and other countries that would not obey orders from the Imperial Regime in Washington.

Cuba would direct every hurricane at Miami.

James DeMeo would use cloudbusters against Moslem countries.

And a long list of other things which would happen. It is one thing to pass a law. It is another to enforce it. Building a cloudbuster is too easy and the materials too easy to obtain in any modern, industrialized society, for such laws to be enforceable.

I once knew a guy in Ohio who blackmailed a golf tournament promoter into paying him $500 to not make rain that weekend for the golf game.

And I once met someone in Tucson, Arizona, who wanted to build a cloudbuster to defend Tucson when the Ant People came out of their holes in the ground under Area 51 and marched on Tucson as the ancient Hopi prophecies predicted they would.

And there was an Anarchist group in New York who tried to sabotage the Republican Party convention with cloudbusters.

You cannot stop such people by passing laws.

And sooner or later, the government would realize that and decide it is too dangerous to let anyone known to be interested in cloudbusting live. So all known or suspected Reichians would be rounded up and shot for the safety of the world.

Oranur: A Global Problem

There is a lot of nuclear material all over this planet now. Not only the large, power-generating reactors the public sees, but also there are more than 100 nuclear-powered ships, both surface and submarines, a lot of small research and training reactors at universities, and a lot of nuclear materials being shipped in both ships and airplanes all over the world for medical and industrial uses.

The worst single source of atmospheric oranur is the French nuclear fuel reprocessing station at Cap Le Harve, which releases more radioactive KR85 gas into the atmosphere than any other single source. The British nuclear station at Sellafield is in second place for a single source of radioactive pollution of the environment.

The United States alone has more than 40,000 nuclear warheads stockpiled, and every country which has an American miliary base has them. The American Air Force has one third of its planes in the air at all times, constantly moving to avoid being a target, and carrying armed nuclear weapons. Each such weapon, when armed, is a source of as much oranur excitation as an average-sized reactor.

The USA has also been using radioacive dust to contaminate large areas of Iraq, Afganistan, and Australia, and that dust does not just stay in the countries they are trying to poison; it travels on the wind and has been detected all over Europe by now.

Add in all the ships and weapons Russia, China, Japan, Pakistan, India, Israel, and the other nuclear-armed countries have, and you can see how much damage must be happening to the orgone field of the whole planet. Collectively, all these sources of oranur have reduced the orgone charge of the earth by about 35% since the early 40s, as measured by the change in breakdown rate of the blood seen in the Reich Blood Test.

Europe, like everywhere else, has had forest death, which is blamed on acid rain, AIDS, which is blamed on a virus, increases in cancer, which is blamed on better diagnosis techniques and longer life-spans, mental illness, which is blamed on stresses of modern life, alcoholism, which is blamed on drinking alcohol, drug addiction, which is blamed on poverty, and unusual weather, which is blamed on combustion of fuels.

The list of symptoms is as long as the list of causes, and it is not worthwhile usually to try to figure out which particular source of oranur is the cause of which particular symptom. The atmospheric breakdown due to oranur is all-pervasive. It is a global problem. Changes in local weather in any one part of the earth are only one of many possible symptoms.

But while oranur is already a global problem, cloudbusters are still a problem on a small enough scale that it is still possible to sometimes figure out which cloudbuster project is the cause of a particular weather event. At least, so far. But the point is now near when, thanks to the internet making it so easy to spread the word around about how to build cloudbusters, cloudbuster proliferation will be so extensive that it will no longer be practical to bother trying to figure out who caused any given weather anomoly. If there are too many cloudbusters operating all over the place without any of them knowing about each other, it would make little difference if there were a few more or a few less. The result would still be atmospheric chaos.

So, while oranur is still the greater problem at this time, it makes more sense to concentrate on the problem it is still possible to do something about.

Polar Warming

There is little doubt that the polar ice is melting. There is however, considerable room for debate about why. The conventional view that the whole earth is getting warmer because of a supposed "greenhouse effect" from a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere from combustion of fossil fuels is not really supported by the evidence. Neither is the usual dismissal of the warming trend as only another stage in a long-term natural cycle caused by variation in the output of solar energy. The warming of the poles is clearly of human origin, but is also clearly NOT caused by any "greenhouse effect" from burning of coal and oil.

What I think it is, is the widespread use of nuclear power. The reprocessing of nuclear reactor fuel rods releases a radioactive gas, Kr85, into the atmosphere. This gas goes up to higher levels, so it is considered harmless to life at the surface. No effort is therefore made to contain it. As a radiuoactive gas, it consists of charged particles. When charged particles enter the field of a magnet, they migrate to the poles. Since the earth is a giant bar magnet, the Kr85 tends to collect at the poles. There, at high altitudes, it interacts with the natural high charge at that altitude, resulting in a net increase in charge of the poles.

Strong tropical storms, including those that become strong enough to be classed as huricanes, form near the equator. These storm systems are highly charged systems. How far they travel toward the poles depends on two factors: the strength of the charge of the storm, and that of the pole that is attracting them poleward. As charge builds up at the poles, these tropical storms are being attracted farther and farther towartd the poles, bringing tropical heat with them. This transport of heat from the tropics toward the poles is warming up the polar regions and giving the illusion that the entire earth is getting warmer.

The increase in strong storms being drawn toward the poles is also causing more frequent and severe weather in the temperate zones, which give added support to the "global warming" theory because an increase in frequency and severity of storms is also predicted by that theory. This is coincidence, however, not really a confirmation of the "global warming" hypothesis.

That storm tracks in the North Atlantic are influenced by solar flare activity coinciding with the influx of charge from space which tends to build up at the poles has been known since the early 1970s, at least, from the work opf Ralph Markson, of M.I.T. The current ongoing increase in charge at the poles is from man-made, not astronomical, origins, but the effect is the same. The poles are attracting more and more storms and tropical air masses and the effects will accelerate as long as nuclear power is in use on this planet.

A Letter To A Correspondent In Germany

----- Original Message -----

From: joel carlinsky

To: ____________________________

Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 1:36 AM

Subject: Re: 25. Newsletter____________________

I agree. The cloudbusting project in Algeria was the cause of the heat wave in Europe and Russia this past summer. As for the jet stream, Trevor Constable did a lot of manipulating the jet stream in his time, and even though he is retired now and says he will never touch a cloudbuster again, he has left us a legacy of a lot of fans who think he is the greatest thing since Reich invented the orgasm. They are trying to copy his methods, and most of them are right-wing types who are into all the standard conspiracy theories and are the very sort of authoritarian personalities that should not be doing cloudbusting.

Most of the climate changes over the last few decades is due to oranur from the increasing use of radioactivity, but cloudbuster proliferation is rapìdly becoming the second-worst envronmental problem on this planet. In the next few year it may even move up into first place.

That idiot, Ash Palise, in Australia, has made a video about how to do cloudbusting and is pushing it all over the internet, trying to get publicity for cloudbusting. It includes instructions for jerking the jet stream around, courtesy of a fan of Constable, Ken Swartz, who threatened me with a "visit from some friends in Washington" if I ever said anything against any project he was involved in. It seems these people move in such small circles they just have no idea that most people do not share their paranoid fantasies and would laugh at such a silly threat.

Recently I have been campaigning against a group called the Weather Rangers, who think they have a machine to control the weather. It is nothing of the kind. It generates an oranur field that can break up small clouds. This was observed by David Wells, a retired electrical engineer,and he has convinced himself and about 50 followers that it can make rain, stop hurricanes, prevent tornadoes, and just about everything you can think of. They do not bother with evidence because they are so certain of it. They are a cult.

They have a theory about invisible beams of power that are all based in Sedona, Arizona, and cannot be detected by any instruments. The machine is thought to create more of these beams to Sedona, which control the weather. They think the weather all over the world comes from Sedona.

What it really does is create oranur. Not as much as a nuclear reactor, but enough to break up small clouds and maybe divert a storm from the area they are operating in. Their imaginations do the rest. They think they are comic book superheros, "saving the innocent" from bad weather. What they are is an ecological menace.

They have even named themselves after a TV cartoon group of superheroes, the Power Rangers! If they were children, it would be good fun, but these are suposedly adults.

If you get a chance, please write to them and express concern about their interfering with hurricanes and tornados. If they get some letters from other people besides me, maybe they will realize it is not a case of just one person who is against their insane plots.

And DeMeo is still at work. I do not have details, but I hear he is still cloudbusting and so are his friends.

Except Blasband, who is now convinced that Russian psychic, Nicolai Levashov, is the way to go. Levashov was on TV in Russia telling the audience it is the American government that caused the heat wave with weather control weapons in space to starve the Russians so they would have to buy geneticly modified grain from America and that grain is designed to cause sterility in the third generation. And this is what Blasband is believing now!

And it gets worse! Levashov thinks the ultimate goal is to wipe out--get this--THE WHITE RACE! Because America is controlled by Blacks! How far out in cloud-kookoo land can you get? I wish I could get the Reichians in Berlin, who are such fans of Blasband, to take a look at Levashov's website and ask Blasband how he can be a follower of this paranoid racist.

Well, keep in touch and let me know what happens.

Joel

The Crazies

The project in Algeria is using a real cloudbuster, and really is getting real results, though I remain skeptical of the long-term environmental impact of what they are doing.

But I regard any stories of chemtrails, electromagnetic weather control, secret government weather control programs, Nicola Tesla, HAARP, and any other method of weather control besides the Reich cloudbuster as pure fiction. Period. There is no other way to control weather besides the Reich cloudbuster and there never will be. It is impossible to control weather by any electrical means and it always will be.

There are no secret government civilian or military organizations using the cloudbuster. If there were, I would know about it. And there are no secret government plots to control weather by some other means because it could not be done.

HAARP is a boondogle, not a weather control machine. There are no airplanes spraying any chemicals. All these ideas are nothing but stupid fantasies. There was never any government interest in Reich's work while he was alive and there has never been any since. No government anywhere thinks there could possibly be anything to the orgone theory.

That includes the ex-Soviet Union. There never was any interest in the Soviet Union in weather control as a weapon. There could not be because their mechanistic scientists would have told them it was impossible.

All this nonsense is nothing but a distraction from the real and serious problem of too many ordinary people finding out about cloudbusters and building them at home to "find out if they work". Arthur C. Clarke said "98% of everythinbg is crud". He was not talking about the information on the internet, but he might as well have been.

I estimate there may be as many as 500 cloudbusters in existence at any one time. That is at least 494 too many. It is possible to use a cloudbuster correctly, but hardly anyone does so. Most of them are insane. Orgonomy in general, and cloudbusting in particular, appeal to irrational people.

The overwhelming majority of the people who build cloudbusters do so for crazy reasons like fighting UFOs, finding out if it works, finding out if orgone exists, convincing the government, convincing the world, proving Reich was right, making rain for farmers, greening deserts, and other nonsense.

Hardly anyone even mentions restoring a damaged atmospheric energy field to normal, removal of DOR, or helping the climate return to normal. Hardly anyone mentions that the atmospheric energy is being damaged and killedby human actions and the cloudbuster can help save it. Hardly anyone mentions that the droughts, floods, etc. have a cause and that cause is nuclear power plants and nuclearbombs.

And NONE of them has any real knowledge of ecology. And none of them gives a damn about ecology anyway because all of them are anthropocentric. I have never heard any would-be cloudbuster operator express an attitude of Deep Ecology. They are all stuck in a "humans first" mode. And until they unlearn that and start to put the earth and all it's species first, they will continue to be a part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Wolves And Water

Ultimately, this is a conflict between two world-views, Mechanism Vs. Functionalism.

What Reich called "Fuctional thinking" is practially unknown to modern science. With only one exception that I can think of, modern science is exclusively mechanistic in outlook and values. The sole exception is Ecology, which is the only functional science to enjoy widespread acceptance, or, in other words, the only mainstream science to employ functional thinking.

That is why this article below is a good example of the sort of thing you need to study a lot of before you are in a position to decide what the weather should be. It illustrates perfectly the interconectedness of the world we live in.

A good grounding in ecology should be considered a prerequisite for responsible cloudbusting. This article explains why cloudbusting alone will never solve water problems in the West and how wolves are needed to ensure sufficient water suplies in the Rocky Mountains.

The Big Bad Wolf Makes Good
The Yellowstone Success Story and Those Who Want to Kill It By Chip Ward

At long last, good news. Fifteen years have passed since wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and the results are in. The controversial experiment has been a stellar success. The Big Bad Wolf is back and in this modern version of the old story, all that huffing and puffing has been good for the land and the creatures that live on it. Biggie, it turns out, got a bum rap.

The success of the Yellowstone project is the kind of good news we long for in this era of oil spills, monster storms, massive flooding, crushing heat waves, and bleaching corals. For once, a branch of our federal government, the Department of the Interior, saw something broken and actually fixed it. In a nutshell: conservation biologists considered a perplexing problem -- the slow but steady unraveling of the Yellowstone ecosystem -- figured out what was causing it, and then proposed a bold solution that worked even better than expected.

Sadly, the good news has been muted by subsequent political strife over wolf reintroduction outside of Yellowstone. Along the northern front of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado, as well as New Mexico and Arizona, so-called wolf wars have added fuel to a decades-old battle over the right to graze cattle or hunt on public land. The shouting has overwhelmed both science and civil discourse. This makes it all the harder to convey the lessons learned to an American public that is mostly ecologically illiterate and never really understood why wolves were put back into Yellowstone in the first place. Even the legion of small donors who supported the project mostly missed the reasons it was undertaken, focusing instead on the “charismatic” qualities of wolves and the chance to see them in the wild.

No Wolves, No Water
Here’s the piece we still don’t get: when we exterminated wolves from Yellowstone in the early 1900s, killing every last one, we de-watered the land. That’s right -- no wolves eventually meant fewer streams, creeks, marshes, and springs across western landscapes like Yellowstone where wolves had once thrived.
The chain of effects went roughly like this: no wolves meant that many more elk crowded onto inviting river and stream banks where the grass is green and the livin’ easy. A growing population of fat elk, in no danger of being turned into prey, gnawed down willow and aspen seedlings before they could mature. Willows are both food and building material for beavers. As the willows declined, so did beaver populations. When beavers build dams and ponds, they create wetland habitats for countless bugs, amphibians, fish, birds, and plants, as well as slowing the flow of water and distributing it over broad areas. The consequences of their decline rippled across the land.
Meanwhile, as the land dried up, Yellowstone’s overgrazed riverbanks eroded. Life-giving river water receded, leaving those banks barren. Spawning beds for fish were silted over. Amphibians lost precious shade where they could have sheltered and hidden. Yellowstone’s web of life was fraying and becoming threadbare.
The unexpected relationship between absent wolves and absent water is just one example of how big, scary predators like grizzlies and mountain lions, often called “charismatic carnivores,” regulate their ecosystems from the top down. The results are especially relevant in an era of historic droughts and global warming, both of which are stressing already arid Western lands. Wolf reintroduction wasn’t a scheme designed to undermine vacationing elk hunters or harass ranchers who graze their cattle on public lands. It wasn’t done to please some cabal of elitist, urban environmentalists eager to show rural rednecks who’s the boss, though out here in the West that interpretation’s held sway at many public meetings called to discuss wolf reintroduction.
Let’s be clear then: the decision to put wolves back in Yellowstone was a bold experiment backed by the best conservation science available to restore a cherished American ecosystem that was coming apart at the seams.
The Biggest Losers
Today, wolves are thriving in Yellowstone. The 66 wolves trapped in Canada and released in Yellowstone and the Idaho wilderness in 1995-96 have generated more than 1,700 wolves. More than 200 wolf packs exist in the area today and the effect on the environment has been nothing short of astonishing.
There was one beaver colony in the park at the time wolves were reintroduced. Today, 12 colonies are busy storing water, evening out seasonal water flows, recharging springs, and creating habitat. Willow stands are robust again and the songbirds that nest in them are recovering. Creatures that scavenge wolf-kills for meat, including ravens, eagles, wolverines, and bears, have benefited. Wolves have pushed out and killed the coyotes that feed on pronghorn antelope, so pronghorn numbers are also up. Riverbanks are lush and shady again. With less competition from elk for grass, the bison in the park are doing better, too.
Elk are the sole species that has been diminished -- and that, after all, was the purpose of putting wolves back in the game in the first place. The elk population of Yellowstone is still larger than it was at its low point in the late 1960s, but there are fewer elk today than in recent decades. The decline has alarmed elk hunters and the local businesses that rely on their trade.
Worse yet, from the hunting point of view, elk behavior has changed dramatically. Instead of camping out on stream banks and overeating, they roam far more and in smaller numbers, browsing in brushy areas where there is more protective cover. Surviving elk are healthier, but leaner, warier, far more dispersed, and significantly harder to hunt. This further dismays those who had become accustomed to easy hunting and bigger animals.
A lively debate is underway among game wardens, guides, and wildlife biologists about just how far elk numbers have declined, what role drought and other non-wolf variables may be playing in that decline, and whether elk numbers will -- or even should -- rebound. State wildlife agencies that once fed hay to bountiful populations of elk to keep them from starving during harsh winters depend on hunting and fishing licenses to fill their coffers. Predictably enough, they have come down on the side of the frustrated big game hunters, who think the wolves have killed too many elk. Hunters have been a powerful force for conservation when habitat for birds and big game is at stake, but wolf reintroduction hits them right in the ol’ game bag, and on this issue they seem to be abandoning former conservation allies. Of course, wolves themselves can be hunted and selling the privilege of doing so has proven lucrative for state wildlife agencies. Montana recently expanded its wolf-killing quota from 75 to 186, while Idaho licensed 220 wolf kills in 2009.
Beyond the Bovine Curtain
As wolf reintroduction took hold and wolves migrated out of Yellowstone as far as Oregon to the west and Colorado to the east, it became clear that surrounding states needed plans to deal with their spread. Once regarded as an endangered species and legally protected by the Endangered Species Act, wolves were taken off the formal list of protected creatures wherever states created plans for restoring and managing them. The intention of the federal government was to allow states to participate in, and so take some control over, the recovery process in the West.
As it happened, however, most states took a strikingly hostile approach to their new wolf populations, treating them as varmints. A federal court took away Wyoming’s power to regulate wolves within its borders when it decided that the state’s management goal would be no wolves at all outside of the Yellowstone and Teton national parks. Other Western states are now planning to keep their numbers as low as possible without triggering a federal takeover, too low to play their ecological role, or even survive over the long run, according to conservation biologists. After wolves were “delisited” in Idaho in 2009, 188 of them were killed by hunters before the year was out.
In August 2010, a federal judge ruled that wolves everywhere but in Minnesota and Alaska (where wolf populations are plentiful and healthy) must be relisted as an endangered species and afforded more protection. How this major decision will shape the debate from here on out is uncertain. Since relisting precludes sport hunting, state wildlife agencies are now making plans to kill more wolves themselves to keep their numbers low. Critics worry about a return to the days when wolves were routinely shot, trapped, poisoned, and gassed in their dens.
Up until now, where wolves and cows mix, cows have ruled. What wildlife advocate George Wuerthner calls the “bovine curtain” limits full wolf restoration to within Yellowstone’s park boundaries. Outside the park, where the feds have less power and control, wolf packs continually form but are often slaughtered, usually at the insistence of ranchers who can legally shoot wolves that attack cattle. They are also compensated for wolf-kill losses from both state funds and privately donated ones. Wolf predation accounts for only about 1% of livestock deaths across the northern Rockies, but those deaths generate disproportionate resentment and fear.
Ranchers are the first to understand that, in the arid West, a cow may require 250 acres of forage to live. In the states where wolves are spreading, cows wander wide and don’t sleep safely in barns at night as they do in the east. Wolves need room to roam, too. Overlap and predation are the inevitable results. If wolves are ever to effectively play their ecological role again across the West, significant changes in animal husbandry, like adding range riders and guard dogs, would be required, as well undoubtedly as less grazing overall. The implied threat to limit grazing provokes fierce opposition from cattlemen’s associations, a powerful and influential Republican constituency throughout the West. Real cowboys don’t sip tea, but as anger over those wolves builds they may be riding off to the nearest tea party nevertheless.
At public hearings across the rural West wherever wolves are rebounding, near-hysterical locals claim that their children will be carried off from their yards by those awful beasts set loose by evil Obamacrats willing to sacrifice life and limb to win favor with tree-hugging easterners. In New Mexico, such hostility has led to poaching that has decimated an endangered species of gray wolves reintroduced 12 years ago after the last survivors of that species were trapped, bred in captivity, and released into the wild.
Eco-Commodities or Ecological Communities?
Today’s wolf wars pit opposing perspectives on how (or even why) our public lands should be managed against each other. The disagreement is fundamental. On one side is a historic/traditional resource management paradigm that sees our Western lands as a storehouse of timber, minerals, and fresh water; on the other side, a new biocentric orientation driven by conservation biologists who see landscapes as whole ecosystems and all species as having intrinsic value. At one end of the spectrum lie strip-mining coal companies; at the other, deep ecologists. In between you can find conflict, contradiction, and confusion as we sort out a new consensus about how to manage vast public land holdings in the West.
In the beginning, Americans assumed that nature was inefficient (if efficiency is defined as getting the most bang for the buck) and that humans could manage the planet better than Mother Earth. Wild rivers, after all, spill their liquid bounty where they will and then empty themselves into the sea. What a waste! In the same way, forest fires were viewed as a prime example of Nature’s wanton destruction. To a rancher who is leasing public land, wolves and cougars are monsters of inefficiency.
It’s far clearer now that nature is, in fact, efficient indeed, if creating healthy, viable ecosystems is what’s on your mind. Matter and energy are never wasted in food webs where synergy is the rule. Because we have come to appreciate how rich nature’s interconnections are, we are now committed to protecting species we once would have wiped out with little regard. Health (including the health of the planet), not wealth alone, is becoming a priority. Think of wolf reintroduction, then, as a kind of hinge-point between the two paradigms. After centuries of not leaving the natural world’s order to chance, micro-managing wherever we could, we are now encouraged to take a chance on Nature, to trust the self-organizing powers of life to heal ecosystems we have wounded.
While organizing campaigns to make polluters accountable, I learned that citizens generally won’t take them on until they grasp that the deepest link they have to their environment is their own bloodstreams. Once they understand the pathways from a smokestack or a poisoned watershed to the tumors growing in their children’s bodies, they can become a powerful force. But first they have to know what’s at stake.
In this regard, ecological literacy is not a side issue. It’s a prerequisite for survival. The articulation of reality is more primal than any strategy or policy. If greed is turning the Earth into a scorched planet of slums, ignorance is its enabler. Just as American farmers once realized that erosion follows ignorance and learned how to plow differently, just as most of us finally learned that rivers should not be used as toxic dumps, so today we must learn that environments have the equivalent of operating systems. Predation by large carnivores is written deep into the code of much of the American landscape. Today, a rancher who expects to do business in a predator-free landscape is no more reasonable than yesterday’s industrialist who expected to use the nearest river as a sewer. Living with wolves may be a challenging proposition, but it’s hardly impossible to do -- as folks in Minnesota or Canada can attest.
Hard days are ahead as the weather, once benign and predictable, becomes hotter, drier, and ever more chaotic. Western landscapes are already stressed -- whole forests are dying and deserts are becoming dustbowls. To maintain their vitality in the face of such dire challenges, those lands will need all the relief we can give them. We now understand far better the many ways in which nature’s living communities are astonishingly connected and reciprocal. If we could only find the courage to trust their self-organizing powers to heal the wounds we have inflicted, we might become as resilient as those Yellowstone wolves.
Chip Ward lives in Capitol Reef, Utah, where songbirds are eaten by housecats, housecats are eaten by coyotes, and coyotes are eaten by mountain lions. He is the author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope’s Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land.

Tomgram: Chip Ward, A West Raised by Wolves

Posted at 9:20AM on September 28, 2010.