Max Wilbert: Yes on 20-373 is a grassroots rebellion

Presenter: With a rights of Nature measure on the Lane County ballot May 19, we’ve been visiting with Max Wilbert, author of the newsletter Biocentric. He says supporting the rights of Nature in the U.S. is an act of rebellion. Max Wilbert:

Max Wilbert (Biocentric): You know, rights of Nature as we have worked on it in the U.S. is really a rebellion. It’s really a grassroots revolt against the regulatory regime, the top-down regulatory control of pollution that our country uses, and it doesn’t work. The regulatory model is failing in this country.

And that can be seen most clearly by looking at the climate crisis, by looking at the biodiversity crisis, the fact that we’re in the sixth mass extinction; the fact that most species which are listed on the Endangered Species Act are declining or stable in a crisis state, essentially, and not recovering.

You know, the regulatory regime has done some good things: the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the fact that we no longer have rivers on fire.

But instead we have a PFAS invisible contamination problem. We have a climate crisis that is pushing us towards absolute catastrophe. Billions of climate refugees coming in the future, and those people are both going to be fleeing places like Oregon and Lane County, and they’re also going to be coming here, because other places will be even harder hit than we are here.

So, this whole Measure 20-373, the Lane County Watershed Bill of Rights: I’m a supporter of it ’cause I live in Lane County and I love the water here. I love to swim. I love to fish. I love to hang out with family and friends next to the rivers. I love to go up into the mountains, to the lakes. 

These places are incredibly important, not just for wildlife, for our enjoyment, for our quality of life, for cooling down on a hot day on these increasingly hot summers that we’re having. 

But they’re critical for the future, for future generations for survivability, and the Lane County Watershed Bill of Rights is an attempt to assert democratic community control from the grassroots, from the bottom up over these issues.

I hope that people understand that even if the measure does pass, that’s really just the beginning because in previous cases where people have passed initiatives like this, like in Lincoln County, our neighbors on the coast, but also in places like Toledo, Ohio, grant Township, Pennsylvania, dozens of other places across the country where people have taken this rights of Nature approach, immediately corporations come in and they sue.

They try to overturn these laws, and often they’re successful. Not always, but often they’re successful in overturning these laws because these laws represent a direct challenge to some of the unjust provisions in the Constitution, in case law, in the legal system as it exists in the United States today, and that’s why I like to talk about this rights of Nature approach as community civil disobedience.

It’s a communal form of legal civil disobedience. And, you know, just like other forms of civil disobedience, it’s not necessarily always successful in a direct action sense at achieving its stated goals. But it’s a symbol, it’s a message. It’s an organizing force. 

And so I think people need to be prepared, whether or not this passes, to continue to fight for and enforce the rights of Nature, the rights of water and water protection, in Lane County and beyond, because there are many, many threats to our water here, not the least of which is the logging industry, which by some measures is the largest carbon emitter in the state, and also, just by the nature of its operations, destroys and harms the water cycle.

You know: harms salmon, harms, trout, steelhead, degrades spawning habitat, increases water temperatures, decreases stream flows in the summer, so really increases drought and increases flooding when there’s these big rain events. Huge, huge problems. You know, the forests really help regulate and cycle moisture and are really the pumps that make our entire hydrological function, the water cycle of our planet, continue. They’re what power it. 

And we need to protect our forests. We need to protect all the other elements of our ecosystem, our natural community that contribute to the water that we all rely on for everything.

Presenter: Those opposing the Lane County measure are very well funded. Max Wilbert: 

Max Wilbert (Biocentric): And just to be clear for folks, I’m not part of the core organizing group for the measure.

I work for an organization called CELDF, which has provided some support for their organization among with many other communities across the country who have attempted to use this ‘Rights of Nature’ approach to address the ecological crisis that we find ourselves in, in the nation and in the world today.

We know how the opposition to these projects, to these initiatives works, the corporate industries, which oppose community water protection have poured over $300,000 into opposing this initiative, a lot of that money coming from out-of-state, you know.

They’re hiring a PR firm based in Chicago to organize their opposition. You have money coming from the fossil fuel industry in California. You have money coming from the Koch brothers. All to squash this attempt at grassroots democracy.

And the reality is that corporate actors are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into opposing this measure because the real risk is not that the law passes and is, you know, simply, very quickly and directly enforced by the courts and that harm to water ceases.

No. The real risk is that people start getting ideas. People start getting ideas about democracy, ideas about water protection, about ecology, about the importance of these issues and about their own power, their own right to self-determination and decision making , in our communities, in our watersheds about how these things have to happen.

So corporations, of course, they want to keep the discussion focused on a respectability politics. They want to keep the discussion focused in this realm of, ‘Oh, you know, this doesn’t really accord with existing case law and so we’re going to have to challenge it because, you know, it’s just not specific enough.’ And, ‘There’s problems with the wording and implementation.’

What they’re really trying to do with that type of discourse is to squash the very idea of grassroots people’s democracy and decision making before it gets off the ground. They’re trying to keep the discussion in the realm of these sort of technical, legalistic discussions about state preemption and keep it in the realm of lawyers and big money where they have a lot of power and a lot of influence, when what they’re really scared of is the fact that a large proportion of the population want water better protected than it is now.

And I think if you didn’t have the, like I said, hundreds of thousands of dollars pouring into the community influencing people, buying propaganda, paying for the street signs that you’re probably seeing out and about. 

There are fewer of the street signs against the measure than there are in support of it, thankfully, and thanks to the hard work of a lot of volunteers who have been out handing out those signs and talking to people and educating about this measure.

But a lot of people, a lot of people support water protection and without this propaganda even more would, a lot of people unfortunately, have bought into the narrative that this type of measure isn’t realistic. That it doesn’t fit into the existing legal structure that we have today, and therefore it’s going to fail and there’s no reason to put energy into it, and it’s only going to be a waste of money and resources for the county.

That’s what Lookout, the news source, that was the position that they took on the measure. Thankfully, the Eugene Weekly has supported it, and I think that as long as you’re taking that perspective, that this measure is a waste of resources and that it’s not realistic because it doesn’t fit into the existing legal structure, you’re resigning yourself to failure on these issues.

You’re essentially conceding that we have to work within the existing legal structure and the existing legal structure is what has gotten us into this crisis in the first place. So if you concede that point that we have to work within the existing structure, then you’ve conceded the entire issue.

You’ve conceded yourself to global warming, continuing and accelerating. You’ve conceded to an increasing crisis of water quality and quantity. Salmon populations continuing to decline, steelhead crashing, our forests continuing to be degraded by industrial forestry and on and on and on. And I’m not willing to do that.

And I think that hundreds of thousands of people throughout Lane County also aren’t willing to concede that point. You know, a lot of us understand that there are fundamentally flawed issues within our legal system and our system of government that are reflected in the ecological policies, the economic realities that we have in Lane County and beyond, and that we need to change those.

We need to challenge those systems. And so that’s what this measure is ultimately about. It’s planting our flag in the ground as a county, as a place. You know, Lane County has always had this countercultural element to it, this strong cultural sense that the mainstream way of doing things is not right.

It’s fundamentally wrong. In fact, in many, many cases. And of course when it comes to ecological politics, that’s one of those cases beyond a doubt. And so that’s why I think strongly that people should support this.

Presenter: Max says the campaign finance records on the Oregon Secretary of State website clearly frame the issue.

Max Wilbert (Biocentric): All you have to do is look at the funding and you’ll see the disparity here, you know, the average donation to the group opposing the measure is very high and they have a very small number of donors.

And the average donation to Protect Lane County Watersheds, the group which is advancing this rights of Nature measure, is very small and they have a much, much larger number of donors. 

So this is really about the elites versus the people. It’s really about the wealthy versus working class.

And one of the things they are doing is sending out threats to the organizers of this Watershed Bill of Rights. Weyerhaeuser Corporation sent a letter to the Protect Lane County Watersheds folks the other day, accusing them (spuriously) of creating this pamphlet, which they claimed was lying about them and denigrating their business and so on.

First of all, the pamphlet had nothing to do with Protect Lane County Watersheds. It wasn’t created by the group. I don’t know who created it. The Lane County watersheds folks don’t know who created it.

And Weyerhaeuser just assumed because Protect Lane County Watersheds was one of perhaps five or six groups that was mentioned in this pamphlet (which was a very sort of innocuous educational piece of material that somebody made and distributed to a group of neighbors about a logging project south of Eugene, kind of between Eugene and Cottage Grove area)—

Nonetheless, Weyerhaeuser decided that it would be a good idea to send a very aggressive letter from their attorney to Protect Lane County Watersheds, demanding that they cease and desist disseminating this pamphlet that the group had absolutely nothing to do with.

They are incredibly rich, wealthy, politically powerful, connected, and they’re going to throw that weight around as best they can. So that’s what they’re trying to do.

Presenter: We asked why he thought EWEB and some watershed groups and conservation districts oppose the measure. Max Wilbert:

Max Wilbert (Biocentric): It makes sense to me because EWEB is an institution. They’re an incorporated corporate organization. Nonprofit, but they exist to deliver power and water at the most affordable rates and they have some environmental initiatives that they’re involved in, but this isn’t, EWEB is not an environmental group.

It’s not about environmental protection. It’s not about salmon, it’s not about forests. It’s about providing a service to the city. And the same goes for conservation districts and these types of organizations, they sure they’re involved in some good work that I absolutely applaud. 

But often they can as well serve as these sort of vehicles for greenwashing where corporations, logging companies, and other extractive industrial corporations can make a big donation, they can do some cooperative projects, and that’s really good for their PR and it doesn’t fundamentally threaten their profits and their business interests.

So. I think that we should be aware that just because organizations do some good things and have some really good people involved in them and may have some really good rhetoric about environmental protection, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they, uh, are thought leaders on these issues who really have, uh, watershed protection.

At the core of their mission and the core of their interest, these are institutions. They’re deeply embedded in a web of local politics, which is dominated by the timber industry, the logging industry, in other words, and some other highly polluting industries. And this, of course, is going to influence them.

This, of course, is going to have ramifications for how they conduct themselves. We can’t look to these organizations to really be leaders who are bold and come up with transformative ideas. They’re going to be status quo type organizations by their very nature.

But we don’t live in a status quo time. The status quo is leading us step by step deeper into catastrophe ecologically. And we can’t rely on the status quo anymore. We need to go past it. 

If it doesn’t pass, I think that’ll be a testament to unfortunately, how many people’s minds are still dominated by this status quo- type thinking—that we can’t challenge the status quo, that it’s a waste of time, a waste of energy, a waste of money and resources to even attempt to challenge the status quo in these sort of more direct head-on ways like this measure does.

I think it’ll be a testament to the strength of the propaganda that the industry forces have been able to manipulate to bring to bear on this issue.

And, you know, that’s sad for the state of our democracy, for the state of our inherent political will or sense of ability to influence and change the world around us. And it’s sad for the state of money and politics and how much it dominates things.

Now if the measure does pass, that would be great, obviously. But like I said, that’s only the beginning because , again, it’s almost certain that corporate interests would, within hours of the vote being finalized, would file a lawsuit seeking to invalidate it, and it’s likely that a court would side with them.

Now, that doesn’t mean the fight is over because if people vote this in, that means regardless of what happens in the courts, there’s now a democratic mandate in Lane County that says we need greater protection for our watersheds, our rivers, the whole hydrological cycle, which really means the entire ecosystems of Lane County, and that’s a powerful thing, symbolically, politically, culturally, in a communal sense.

And so, you know, regardless of what happens with this law, ultimately what matters is, is the water physically protected from harm or is it not?

And that is going to depend on not just voting by a 19th, but on a whole other set of actions which may look many different ways. It may look like people filing lawsuits and complaints based on this law if it passes, which any Lane County resident will be legally able to do that.

So, you know, if a corporation is clear cutting and spraying chemicals next door to you and this log goes into effect, you’ll be able to file legal action against that company, and if the letter of the law was followed, you would be able to force them to halt and in fact, to pay for reparations of the ecological damage that they cause.

And yeah, that represents a big change to our legal system, that represents a huge challenge to corporate power, to our economic way of life and the way we built our society. 

But that type of shakeup is exactly what we need in this time. We need disruptive approaches to moving forward disruptive paths that we can take in this era of climate catastrophe in the six mass extinction event.

And it will bring all kinds of new challenges, not least of which, how do we deal with the economic repercussions  of such a law coming into effect? 

But we’ll have to deal with that. And I think that’s a far better problem to have to deal with than gradually losing all of our water, than the glaciers, all melting, than the climate crisis spiraling out of control and billions of refugees flooding the world and a collapse in food supplies and very, very serious crisis that is gradually unfolding.

And beyond filing these complaints under the law, I think that people have to enforce the law directly in different ways. You know, CELDF, the organization that I work with, one of the things that we’ve written into some rights of Nature laws around the country say if the government fails to enforce the rights of Nature law, then the people have the right to enforce it themselves.

This is essentially like a citizen’s arrest or something like that, right—to explicitly put into effect a rule that says, democratically, we the people have decided that you can’t destroy our watersheds, you can’t harm our water, and if you do it, we’re going to physically stop you.

And we the people have the right to do that and the government shall support the people in those actions., So it would essentially be legalizing the type of direct action in defense of forests and watersheds that we’ve seen in Lane County and across the region for many, many years.

I mean, this region used to be the epicenter of the forest defense movement with tree sits all over the place and people working to protect old growth and protests, in town and rallies and road blockades to stop these destructive projects. 

There’s obviously a huge appetite for that type of action and more deeply, you know, for protecting these sacred and ecologically critical forests and watersheds in our area. And that’s the type of thing that I think we’re going to need more of in the future, regardless of whether this initiative or this measure passes or not.

In terms of defending our forests and our watersheds, it’s not all about this measure. There’s work going on before and outside of this election, and there’s work that will continue afterwards.

I’ve been bringing people out to some old growth forests, near Eugene, just 20, 30 minutes outside of Eugene, which are threatened under the planned BLM quadrupling of logging, including a lot of old-growth logging in our region that they’re working on right now.

The government is planning to come out with a final environmental impact statement in November for this logging and then probably push ahead incredibly quickly after that to start logging old growth in our area, by the end of the year, early next year.

And we can’t wait until then to start building opposition. We need to fight now. We need to build connections to these forests, bring people out to see what’s at stake, to walk in these groves of 400-500-600-year-old trees, eight feet thick, more than 20 feet in circumference, these ancient, ancient beings who help make our place so wonderful to live.

So I’ve been bringing people out to these forests to meet and to discuss and to be in the presence of these incredible beings. So if folks want to be part of that, to come out to the forest, to get together and in these beautiful places and discuss how to protect them.

Please reach out to me. Again, my name is Max Wilbert, W-I-L-B-E-R-T, and you can find my contact information online if you just look up my name. And I would love to help bring some more of our community members out to these places as part of building this opposition, this movement to defend the sacred, to defend the water.

Presenter: Max Wilbert is author of the newsletter Biocentric, at maxwilbert.substack.com.