Her latest book, TRUE WEST: MYTH AND MENDING ON THE FAR SIDE OF AMERICA, was published this Fall by Torrey House Press. She received a doctorate in Environmental History from Montana State University in 2017, her dissertation focused on Mormon settlement and public land conflicts. She has studied various religious traditions over the years, with particular attention to how cultures view landscape and wildlife. The rural American west, pastoral communities of northern Mongolia, and the grasslands of East Africa have been her main areas of interest. She is the president of the Board of Directors of Wild Earth Guardians.
Although TRUE WEST focuses primarily on the intermountain west, what goes on in this region is having tremendous effect on our national politics and well-being. Just two days ago, the Colorado Supreme Court decided in favor of a suit brought by CO Republican and unaffiliated voters, working with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, CREW, against CO Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Donald J. Trump, taking advantage of a CO law that allows voters to challenge a candidate’s eligibility. In this case the eligibility was challenged under Section 3 of the 14th amendment, claiming that the former president had engaged insurrection , based on his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack by his supporters at his urging. As you will hear in this interview with Betsy Gaines Quammen, recorded in the Beyond the Deep End Studio on the Winter Solstice of 2023, extremist organizing in this region over more than a decade contributed to that insurrection. We share it with you now.
Dannagal Goldthwaite Young is a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware. In addition to being an award winning scholar, she has also been an improvisational comedian. Her 2020 TED Talk (link below) explaining how our psychology shapes our politics and how media exploit these relationships has been viewed over 2 Million times. She publishes extensively in the popular press with essays and Op-eds in outlets including Vox.com, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Her earlier book is Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States.
Her book, WRONG: HOW MEDIA, POLITICS, AND IDENTITY DRIVE OUR APPETITE FOR MISINFORMATION, was just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
As Jaime Settle, author of FRENEMIES: HOW SOCIAL MEDIA POLARIZES AMERICA, writes of it ‘Powerful, distinctive, and utterly compelling, Wrong argues that the way we satisfy our needs for comprehension, control, and community is shaped by our social identities, which are at the core of both the supply and demand for misinformation. Because politicians and the media know this fact, they behave strategically in order to structure politics through this perspective.”
We spoke with Dr. Young on November 7, 2023 via Skype.
Links to articles/videos pertinent to this interview:
In this edition of Forthright Radio our guest is journalist, author, environmentalist, Greg King. I first became aware of Greg’s work back in the late 1980s, when we who lived in the remnants of the once great redwood biome organized to protect what remained of that ecosystem from voracious predatory capitalists, who proudly vowed to “log to infinity.”
Greg King in All Species Grove 1987 (courtesy of Greg King)
Greg is the fifth generation of his family to live in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties of northern CA, – his ancestors having arrived in the 1860s and owned what was then one of the largest redwood mills, the King-Starrett mill in Monte Rio. The The King Range Mountains were named for his great-great uncle, John King, who lived north of Westport in Mendocino County, due to his hospitality to the government surveyor before his mapping that steep coastal range in the Lost Coast. Long before Greg was born, the last of the great redwood forests in Sonoma County were cut, but there were second growth stands and massive stumps of 20’ or greater diameter which served as his childhood playground. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 1985, he joined the staff of the West Sonoma County Paper, now called the Bohemian, where he won his first of two Lincoln Steffens Investigative Journalism Award.
Investigating Louisiana-Pacific’s “logging to infinity” in his neighborhood led him to the Maxxam Corporation’s hostile takeover, financed by junk bonds, of Humboldt County’s Pacific Lumber Company and the ensuing accelerated destruction of the last intact, ancient redwood groves in private hands to pay off the debt. Exploring these untouched forests with the largest, oldest trees on the planet inspired a reverence and awe unlike anything he had ever experienced. The rest, as they say, is history.
In his book, THE GHOST FOREST: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods, he describes how he left his home and promising career to devote his life to identifying and protecting those few remaining giants and the biome centered on them. He is credited with mapping the remaining groves, including The Headwaters Forest, as well as pioneering tree sitting to prevent logging of redwoods in Humboldt County.
Greg King on traverse during a tree-sit in the middle of 1,000 acre All Species Grove, September 1987. Note sleeping platform on the tree in the background, tied under the lowest branch 150′ above the forest floor. (photo by Mary Beth Nearing, courtesy of Greg King)
What might have been merely a memoir became a shocking exposé of the all too successful efforts of financiers and industrialists via their creation of the Save the Redwoods League in 1917, to subvert the growing desire of the public to protect and preserve the remaining redwoods, by promoting instead small “beauty strips” along roadways to hide devastating clearcuts. As one of the first to delve into The League’s archives at U. C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Greg followed the history back to the federal acts of the 19th century, that allowed well organized land fraud syndicates to place what had been 2 million acres of undisturbed ancient forests into private corporate hands. His research led him to the connections between the Save the Redwood League creators and the so-called “scientific racism” eugenics movement, which was so helpful to the Nazis in Germany, and which still plagues our nation even today. We spoke with Greg King on October 18, 2023 via Skype.
In 1996 more than 8,000 people protested ancient redwood logging at the Pacific Lumber log deck along Yager Creek, in Humboldt County. More than 1,000 were arrested. It remains the largest single-day arrest number for an environmental protest in U.S. history. photo by Greg King
On Wed., October 25, The Bozeman Film Society will be screening Butcher’s Crossing, which was filmed in just 19 days entirely in Montana, mostly on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Glacier National Park and Nevada City in Madison County were also locations. We spoke with producer, Molly Conners, about Butcher’s Crossing and producing it here in Montana.
Molly Conners is founder and CEO of Phiphen, an independently owned film, television, and digital media company focused on producing creative, smart productions for a global audience. Her films have been Emmy nominated, and she has produced or executive produced 35 feature films over the last 15 years that have earned a total of 4 Academy Awards and 11 Academy Award nominations. Some of Molly’s notable credits include the 2014 Academy Award-winner BIRDMAN, the 2009 Academy Award-nominated FROZEN RIVER, as well as the films: KILLER JOE, THE IMMIGRANT, JOE, and RULES DON’T APPLY.
Her latest film, Butcher’s Creek, is based on the seminal 1960 novel of the same name by John Edward Williams, with a screenplay co-written by director, Gabe Polsky. An epic frontier adventure, Butcher’s Crossing, is a riveting commentary on human nature, ambition, masculinity, and man’s relationship to his natural environment. Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage stars in this tragedy about the last of the buffalo hunters in the Old West. Young greenhorn, Will Andrews, played by Fred Hechinger, has left his undergraduate life at Harvard to find adventure in the wild west. He teams up with Cage’s character, buffalo hunter, Miller, a taciturn frontiersman offering a hunt of an unprecedented number of buffalo for their pelts in a secluded valley in the Colorado Rockies. Their crew must survive an arduous journey, where the harsh elements will test everyone’s resolve, leaving their sanity on a knife’s edge.
We spoke with Molly Conners on October 13, 2023 via Skype.
Robert P. Jones is the author of the book, THE HIDDEN ROOTS of WHITE SUPREMACY and the PATH to a SHARED AMERICAN FUTURE, published by Simon and Schuster.
His earlier award winning books include WHITE TOO LONG: THE LEGACY OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY; THE END OF WHITE CHRISTIAN AMERICA; and PROGRESSIVE AND RELIGIOUS: HOW CHRISTIAN, JEWISH, MUSLIM AND BUDDHIST LEADERS ARE MOVING BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS AND TRANSFORMING AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE.
In this latest book, he reminds us that the enslavement of Africans was not America’s original sin, but rather the continuation of a pattern of genocide and dispossession that began with the first European contact with the Indigenous peoples of this land. His reframing of America’s origins explores how the founders of the US could build a democratic society on the foundations of mass racial violence, and why this paradox survives today in the form of White Christian Nationalism. Through three stories from our history and current re-examination and reckonings by those living today, he has illuminated the possibility of a new American future in which we finally fulfill the promise of true democracy.
We spoke with him on September 20, 2023 via Skype.
Naomi Oreskes is Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. A world renowned earth scientist, historian and public speaker, she is the author or co-author of nine books, including the best-selling book, Merchants of Doubt, and a leading voice on the role of science in society, the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and the role of disinformation in blocking climate action.
Her latest book, co-written with Erik Conway, is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, published by Bloomsbury Press.
The week beginning August 14th, 2023 has been historic for first rulings and actions for the environment and democracy. That morning, MT District CourtJudge, Kathy Seeley, rendered her masterful 103 page closely reasoned and well cited verdict in the case of Held v MT, ruling that the 16 youth plaintiffs’ constitutional rights under the Montana State Constitution were being violated by the Montana government’s laws and practices, including amendments to the Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) that specifically prohibited consideration of climate change in the granting of permits by the Dept of Environmental Quality.
Ann Hedges of MEIC
We spoke with Anne Hedges of the MT Environmental Information Centerhttps://meic.org/, who testified in the case, as well as Claire Vlases, one of the youth Plaintiffs who testified.
Claire Vlases testifies as Judge Kathy Seeley listens intently
Then, on August 17, in The United States District Court for the District of Montana, Federal Judge Donald Molloy, rendered his judgment in favor of The Alliance for the Wild Rockies & Native Ecosystems Council suit against the US Forest Service, to protect the dwindling remnant grizzly bears population and to stop the Black Ram massive old growth logging project in its tracks. https://allianceforthewildrockies.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/093-ORDER-Granting-MSJ-2023-08-17.pdf This is historic, because it’s the first time in the Federal Courts that climate change was cited in a ruling. We spoke with Mike Garrity of the Alliance for the Wild Rockieshttps://allianceforthewildrockies.org/ about that decision.
Then, on Sunday, August 20th, Ecuador became the first country in history to restrict fossil fuel extraction through the citizen referendum process. Nearly 60% of Ecuadorian voters backed a binding referendum opposing oil exploration in Block 43, a section of Yasuní National Park, the most biodiverse area of the imperiled Amazon rainforest, which is home to uncontacted Indigenous tribes, as well as hundreds of bird species and more than 1,000 tree species.
Maya K. van Rossum
Finally, we spoke with Maya van Rossum, founder of Green Amendments for the Generationshttp://www.ForTheGenerations.org about her decades long efforts to secure Green Amendments in state constitutions nationwide. According to van Rossum, currently only 3 states benefit from Green Amendment constitutional environmental rights — Montana, Pennsylvania and New York. In addition to leading the effort that secured New York’s Green Amendment just over 2 years ago, and being responsible for the litigation that brought strength to Pennsylvania’s amendment, van Rossum is working to pass Green Amendments in 15 other states with more getting in contact since hearing about the Held victory.
It is worth quoting the relevant parts of the Montana State Constitution, upon which Judge Seeley based her verdict.
Article II, Bill of Rights, Section 3, Inalienable Rights:
All persons are born free and have certain inalienable rights. They include the right to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities, enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and seeking their safety, health and happiness in all lawful ways. In enjoying these rights, all persons recognize corresponding responsibilities.
(1) The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations. (2) The legislature shall provide for the administration and enforcement of this duty. (3) The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.
I recorded the entire proceedings and produced Daily Audio Digests. After the trial, I produced archived editions of each witness’s testimony, as well as closing arguments. Unlike the trial transcript, from which the plaintiffs’ witnesses’ pre-rebuttal testimony was stricken, in these archived recordings of their testimony is intact. Here are the links to those recordings in the order in which they occurred:
For the past couple of years Bozeman Tenants United has been meeting regularly to address and find solution to the high cost of housing here. We met with two members of the Bozeman Tenants United’s Steering Team, Katie Fire Thunder and Olive Nakano Sohn, to talk about their goals and perspectives. We spoke with them at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Bozeman on August 1, 2023.
Since the historic Held v. State of Montana trial began on June 12, 2023, in the Lewis and Clark County District Court in Helena, MT, Judge Kathy Seeley presiding, we have recorded and archived the audio testimony to preserve the record to inform our listeners, and allow you to hear for yourselves what transpired.
In this special Ecotones edition of Forthright Radio, we share the testimony of our own Bozeman youth plaintiffs, Claire Vlases and Georgianna “Georgi” Fischer.
For the first time in the United States, youth plaintiffs were able to present their case in a court of law, that their inalienable constitutional rights under Article II Section 3 of the Montana State Constitution“to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities, enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and seeking their safety, health and happiness in all lawful ways.” ….. were being denied and violated by the policies and actions of their government. Further, that The State was in violation of their responsibilities as required under Article IX, Environment and Natural Resources, Section 1. Protection and Improvement that “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.Section 2.The legislature shall provide for the administration and enforcement of this duty. and Section 3. The legislature shall provide adequate remedies for the protection of the environmental life support system from degradation and provide adequate remedies to prevent unreasonable depletion and degradation of natural resources.”
Furthermore, the Montana State Constitution includes under Article II Declaration of Rights: Section 15.“Rights of persons not adults. The rights of persons under 18 years of age shall include, but not be limited to, all the fundamental rights of this Article unless specifically precluded by laws which enhance the protection of such persons.” It is said that it is the only state constitution to specify this, and the youth plaintiffs in Held v State of Montana are holding the state to the letter of this supreme law of the state of Montana.
In this special Ecotones edition of Forthright Radio, we bring you the testimony of two of the youth plaintiffs from Bozeman, MT, Claire Vlases and Georgianna “Georgi” Fischer. Although they and the other 14 youth plaintiffs are the first to have their case heard in the United States, they are by no means alone in their efforts. There are at least five other youth led climate change suits.
In the matter of Juliana v United States, filed by 21 young Americans in 2015, in the US District Court in Oregon, asserting that the federal government’s fossil fuel energy system and its affirmative actions that cause climate change violate their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as their rights to essential public trust resources like air and water. It had seemed that the legal maneuvers by the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump had succeeded in blocking their efforts. However on June 1, 2023, Federal Judge Ann Aiken, of the US District Court in Oregon, granted their motion to amend their complaint, putting their case back on track to trial, where evidence of the government’s conduct will be heard in open court.
These 21 youth plaintiffs are seeking a judicial declaration that the US fossil fuel energy system is unconstitutional, and violates their fundamental right to a safe climate. According to ourchildrenstrust.org’s website, “A victory in their case would mean that U.S. climate and energy policy – whether executive or legislative in nature, and regardless of political majority or party – would need to adhere to the court’s declaratory judgment, protecting the rights of our nation’s children and ending the physical and mental harm they have experienced due to the actions of their own government.”
However on June 22, 2023, The Department of Justice of the Biden Administration filed yet another motion to dismiss Juliana v. United States, one day after receiving an online petition signed by more than 255 organizations and over 50,000 individuals delivered by the People vs. Fossil Fuels coalition, urging Attorney General Merrick Garland to end opposition to the Juliana case proceeding to trial, and only two days after the plaintiffs rested their case in Held v. State of Montana, which now awaits the decision of Judge Cathy Seeley.
Meanwhile, the 14 youth plaintiffs in Navahine F. v Hawaii Department of Transportation, whose case was filed in June of 2022, succeeded on April 6, 2023 when the Environmental Court of First Circuit in Honolulu denied the State’s motion to dismiss. They are awaiting a trial date to be determined, after their motion to maintain their September, 2023 trial date was denied, when Judge Crabtree granted the State’s motion to continue the trial date to give the State more time to prepare their defense.
This special edition of Ecotones is the final daily audio digest of the historic Held v State of Montana trial.
On the final day of this trial, one day before the summer solstice, on June 20, 2023, closing arguments were given before Judge Kathy Seeley, presiding judge of the Lewis and Clark District Court in Helena, MT.
Our Children’s Trust Senior Staff Attorney, Nate Bellinger, delivered the plaintiffs’ closing arguments, followed by Montana Assistant Attorney General, Michael Russell, delivering closing arguments for the State.
Before these remarks, plaintiffs’ attorney Philip Gregory, offered further information attacking the credibility of the State’s lone outside expert witness, economist Dr. Terry Anderson, submitting a report documenting errors of his sources and information, and asking the court to take judicial notice, which the court granted. The audio of this portion of the proceedings, which came before the closing arguments was problematic, and our best efforts only made marginal improvements, so we have put this portion at the end of this recording after the closing arguments.
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