S4E17: The War Against The Greens, Updated

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:01 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555 

0:00:27 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands. Again, it's time for 90 miles from Neil's the Desert Protection Podcast. 

0:00:45 - (Chris Clarke):Thank you, Joe, and welcome to this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and today we're going to be talking about something a bit more general that nonetheless definitely applies to the desert and to people working on issues in the desert, ranging from environmental protection to social justice to border issues, the whole gamut of desert activism. It's just that what we're talking about applies to a lot of other places as well. And in the process, we give me an excuse to catch up with somebody I've known for 30 years. So I haven't talked to him nearly enough for the last 15 of those years.

0:01:25 - (Chris Clarke): David Helvarg, who is an ocean activist. He is host of the marine protection podcast Rising Tide, which is on my short list of podcasts. I listen to and author of many books, including the War against the Greens, subtitled the Wise Use Movement, the New Right, and Anti Environmental violence, which is 31 years old this year. It came out during the very beginning of the Clinton administration. In the book the War against the Greens, David reported on anti environmentalists taking out their frustrations, sometimes with deadly results, always with frightening results, at the very least on environmental activists and on people who work to preserve public lands, whether employees of the federal government or otherwise.

0:02:13 - (Chris Clarke): And War against the Greens is clearly a book that has never really fallen out of relevance, but it is a hot topic right now. So I'm really pleased that we had a chance to speak with David, and I think you're going to enjoy this interview. Before we get to that, though, I wanted to give some big thanks to our newest donors, Chuck George and Sarah Dawn Albani, and to Cara Barbero, who increased her monthly contribution.

0:02:40 - (Chris Clarke): Folks, your generosity really made my week. Now, I just finished a wonderful book on the Grand Canyon and we might reach out to the author and see if he wants to talk to us here sometime before too long. But it made me think about that first moment when you get to the rim and you look down and it's been all conifers and pine trees as you drive toward the canyon and sort of relatively flatland, and then all of a sudden there is just this gaping hole in the world and all you can think about is, am I going to fall into this?

0:03:15 - (Chris Clarke): And that is very similar to the feeling I got last week when I was checking this podcast's bank account. It's always been a little touch and go here financially and now, you know, with prices going up and with people having to spend money on necessities that they could have saved before because necessities were a little cheaper. In addition to the fact that every single nonprofit in this country and some outside the country are in emergency mode begging people for donations, and rightly so.

0:03:47 - (Chris Clarke): We have a lot of work to do. Everything from feeding homeless people all the way on up to influencing policy, preserving journalism, just the whole field of nonprofit endeavor is more important than ever. So I thoroughly understand why we've been bleeding a couple of donors having people drop off here and there, and why it's been pretty difficult to get new ones. This all makes a lot of sense, but we'd really like to keep going into 2026 and beyond.

0:04:15 - (Chris Clarke): So Chuck, Sarah, and Kara, thank you for lifting my spirits this week. If you want to join up with the rest of our wonderful donors, you can go to 90milesfromneedles.com/donate. There are a couple of different options there. Choose the one you like the best and we will be ever so grateful and you will help make the difference and get us through to the end of the year. Putting a podcast out almost every week.

0:04:40 - (Chris Clarke): A couple more quick things before we jump into our interview with David Hellvarg. As you listen to this, I am heading for Salt Lake City to go to the Healthy Public Lands Conference, which covers grazing on public lands, and then down to the general vicinity of Four Corners to do a little bit of recording, hopefully some interviews in both places. If you're in Salt Lake or Moab or Monticello or Cortez or Mexican Hat or, you know, Four Corners, and you want to get some coffee, give me a Holler. Chris@90miles from needles.com

0:05:13 - (Chris Clarke): secondly, we are running a survey of listeners to the podcast. It would really help us out if you'd fill it out. Takes a few minutes. You can go to 9zero miles from needles.com survey and they'll take you right there. So let's get to our interview with David Helvarg, author of War against the Greens, the Wise Use Movement, the New Right, and Anti Environmental Violence. We are very lucky to have joining us here in our virtual studio.

0:05:45 - (Chris Clarke): David Hellvarg is a longtime author of just a huge number of different books, ranging from a profile of the Coast Guard called Rescue warriors to the US Coast Guard America's Forgotten Heroes and the Golden Shore, California's Love Affair with the Sea Blue Frontier, which is also the name of the nonprofit ocean protection group that David started. I certainly recommend checking out David's work on ocean defense, including the Rising Tide podcast, which is very entertaining and informative.

0:06:22 - (Chris Clarke): But in case you're wondering why we brought David onto a desert protection podcast to be interviewed, we are talking to David because of a book he wrote about 30 years ago entitled the War against the Greens, the Wise Use Movement, the New Right, and Anti Environmental Violence.

0:06:40 - (David Helvarg): And of course it makes sense to be on your desert show. Aside from the good work you do, a lot of our deserts were former oceans.

0:06:48 - (Chris Clarke): The ocean is a desert with its life underground. As I've heard said, 

0:06:53 - (David Helvarg): we're going back baeyond the 90s now. We're in the 70s.

0:06:56 - (Chris Clarke): David, welcome to 90 Miles from Needles. It's a pleasure to be talking to you. Just full disclosure. David and I have known each other for almost as long as the War against the Greens has been out. He was a contributor to Terrain, which was the newsletter that the Ecology center in Berkeley put out, which I edited way, way back in the day during the Clinton administration. And it's a pleasure to have you here.

0:07:19 - (David Helvarg): It's pleasure just to talk to you again, Chris. Been too long. You wandered off like a sagebrush.

0:07:24 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. Tumbleweed.

0:07:25 - (David Helvarg): Tumbleweed.

0:07:26 - (Chris Clarke): I think I'm technically invasive, but as are most humans. Yep. The political climate has definitely evolved to the point where your book seems pretty prescient. It's almost nostalgic to read about a Wise Use movement that was merely extremely well funded and nibbling away at the margins of our body politic. And now that the heirs of the Wise Use Movement are apparently in control of all three branches of government, I figured it was time to take a look at the situation and see what you thought about how things have changed and what environmental activists who have been the targets of opposition ranging from slander and libel to actual violence, what we might be able to do to prepare ourselves for the next few years.

0:08:16 - (David Helvarg): It's again, even when I wrote the War against Greens in 1994, the WISE agenda that had been written in 88, that was this early example of astroturf synthetic grassroots funded by Western public lands industries. Most people, most politicians, most Republicans even then saw it as an extremist document. It was calling for drilling and mining on public lands, opening the Tongass Forest for logging, abolishing the Endangered Species act.

0:08:46 - (David Helvarg): Even in the 90s, it's considered extreme. But today, of course, that is a Trump administration policy. It was the Bush administration back then. And the reason that wisers came together was after the Reagan revolution, they thought that George Bush Sr. Was too much the environmentalist. And so they came together essentially to protect public lands industries, logging, mining and the beef cattle industry from any regulation and at the same time to protect their subsidies on public lands.

0:09:18 - (David Helvarg): And the east coast had the equivalent with the property rights movement that had this very radical notion of law called regulatory takings. The idea that any regulation that denied you access to profit on your property was a taking that the government owed you. But of course, any government service that benefited your property, like roads and clean water, that was just a given. Again, the Federalist Society pushed these legal briefs and eventually had a Supreme Court that embraces them 30 years later in the West. The public lands industries felt after Oklahoma City, they felt like they created a Frankenstein monster.

0:09:57 - (David Helvarg): All they wanted was a rowdy movement to provide a front for their continued subsidies, like the 1872 Mining Act.

0:10:05 - (Chris Clarke): There were a couple of glitches as we were recording this interview, and one of them apparently ate a word or two of what David said here. So just as a footnote, basically what David's talking about is the General mining Act of 1872, which is still the law of the land, though it's been tweaked around the edges a couple of times. The General mining Act of 1872 basically says if you find minerals on public lands in the US you can file claims on federal lands that are open to mineral entry, and you can extract those minerals with a few minor restrictions and pay nothing to the US Federal government, the US treasury, the American taxpayers.

0:10:42 - (Chris Clarke): The Mineral Policy center estimates that mining companies extract 2 to 3 billion in minerals from public lands every year in the U.S. but there are no royalties required. It's one of those laws that needs to be at least completely gutted and rewritten, if not abolished altogether. And the chances of that happening in the next couple of years are extremely minute. Back to David.

0:11:03 - (David Helvarg): But what they got was as wise use fail to grow, it turned increasingly violent, targeting environmentalists, particularly women in rural settings, torching buildings, beating up people, shooting their dogs, and also targeting federal lands rangers. I wrote about Nevada, where a Forest Service ranger who was kicking cattle off public lands and allowing forage to regrow for wildlife had both his office in his home pipe bombed. And at a certain point where I saw the Wise Use movement integrating with the militias, I wrote a letter to the Clinton Justice Department saying, people are going to get killed here.

0:11:42 - (David Helvarg): And it was pretty much ignored until Oklahoma City happened. 268Americans killed at the federal building in Oklahoma city by Tim McVeigh, who was very much aligned with the militias. His family was aligned with the property rights movement, working actively. And a lot of these people who had joined the 90s militias, a lot of the Wise users scared their industrial backers. And so the mining association, the American Farm Bureau, the Cattlemen's association withdrew their support. And Wise Use as a movement, like the Sagebrush Movement before it, fell apart in the West. But the ideology, the basically scapegoating of environmentalist, never went away. In fact, it expanded at the end of the book I'd written that if the oil industry, the largest industrial combine in human history till that time, were to adapt the rhetoric, tactics and violence of the Wise Use movement, that the future could be very stark. And we're now living in that stark future.

0:12:44 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it seems like there's a straight line to be drawn from the warnings at the end of the most recent edition of the book, which was in Bush 2, wasn't it?

0:12:55 - (David Helvarg): Right. My one failing was the subtitle should have included Wise Use in the White House because that was the title of the last chapter and that was the beginning where a lot of Wise Use veterans like Gail Norton from the Mountain States Legal foundation became the Secretary of Interior. And a lot of veterans of that movement found ways to move into government via the Heritage foundation and others.

0:13:18 - (David Helvarg): It was interesting. The Mountain States Legal foundation called itself the legal arm of Wise Use. Until the bombings, until they were discredited, Mountain States Legal was part of a network of 20 plus self serving nonprofit law firms that basically operated on behalf of industry founded out of the Heritage Foundation. And of course, in the late 70s and early, when I went to Central America, the Heritage foundation went from right wing fringe think tank to policymaker under the Reagan administration. And their policy was let's go to war in Central America.

0:13:52 - (David Helvarg): Later they evolved with the Republican right and it got further right as it became the MAGA movement. The Heritage foundation then gave us what's now being implemented, Project 2025, which reads like a reprint of the 1988 Wise Use Agenda, only more radical. Whereas they just wanted oil drilling back then, there wasn't a robust clean energy industry like today. And today they not only want to follow through on the Wise Use agenda of opening up all public lands to mining and drilling, they want to kill off the market competitors, which is offshore and onshore, wind and solar.

0:14:32 - (David Helvarg): And so you have this attack by this administration on all Things that are basically the future of energy. Trump declares an energy emergency, but clearly the emergency in his mind is not only that being the number one producer of oil and gas in the world isn't enough. You have to kill off the competition. You have to go after solar and wind and all other options that might transition us off fossil fuels.

0:14:58 - (David Helvarg): There was not really an end to the wise use. It just simply integrated some of its high end people into the government, Some of its people who go back to the Federalist Society, which was again burst out of early post Cold War, coming together on the right through the Heritage foundation and others, looking for new enemies. Once the communists were gone, it became the watermelons, the environmentalists. Green on the outside, red on the inside, and the regulatory state and the need to make it so small you can drown in the bathtub. Really.

0:15:29 - (David Helvarg): For 40 years, since the Reagan administration, Ronald Reagan said government's the problem. And since then, the Republicans have been taking power to prove that government doesn't work. And they're proving it in a lot of ways Democratic government doesn't work. So let's go for an authoritarian strongman.

0:15:50 - (Chris Clarke): The thing that made me really start wanting an update to the book took place in 2014 when Cliven Bundy decided to round up a whole bunch of militia folks to defend his claimed right to illegally graze his cattle on protected tortoise habitat and national monument land.

0:16:12 - (David Helvarg): That was classic wise use. It was like a rebirth. And the difference being that during wise use, the Internet was just coming online and people got in chat groups and said, yeah, I saw a black helicopter over me in Ohio and somebody in Nevada would say the same. And Rush Limbaugh would occasionally give them some credit. Literally. There was a rancher who had the same battles in the late 80s and early 90s who mobilized folks to make armed threats against the BLM and said, There are 50 men with guns who are willing to open fire if those guys hadn't backed down.

0:16:46 - (David Helvarg): It was like replay, only this time you had Fox News amplifying it every day. And you had this whole new social media network that brought the second wave militia folks from around the country. And of course they had a victory, the BLM back down there, and that just encouraged them to move on and seize the National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, which led to another confrontation and a killing exchange of fire that was classic Western public lands issues, but amplified now by right wing media and a Republican party that was increasingly adapting the language of wise use.

0:17:27 - (David Helvarg): Even 20 years ago, when I started my ocean policy group, Blue Frontier. There was an ocean caucus that was bipartisan in the House. Six members, three Republicans, three Democrats, moderate environmental Republicans like Saxon of New Jersey, Gilchrist, Maryland. They distributed my Rescue warriors book, my coast guard book, my 50 Ways to Save the Ocean, with a Dear Colleague letter to every member of the House and Senate.

0:17:53 - (David Helvarg): Saxon, Gilchrist and the others, Senator Olympia Snow from Maine. They were all pretty much purged. As the party moved to the right, it somehow decided that the Wise Use rhetoric against the environment and climate change in particular would be adopted. And it wasn't for ideological reasons so much as that the Republican Party increasingly became adopted by the oil industry. Back when I wrote the War against the Greens, the oil industry was giving money out of both pockets to Democrats and Republicans.

0:18:25 - (David Helvarg): Increasingly, as climate became an issue, they adapted the Wise Use playbook. Except instead of buying western politicians, which the public lands industries had done really since time immemorial, since western colonial settlement of the West. The Economist magazine once said the west was a combination of rugged individualism and government socialism because so much of the industries are subsidized there.

0:18:50 - (David Helvarg): The oil industry adopted a lot of the tactics. They created Astroturf and put their refinery workers into meetings I've attended to claim that control over pollution was killing jobs. But more importantly, they invested in politicians and this network of right wing think tanks and policy directions and of course, the anti government rhetoric that was also widespread through the Heritage foundation and all of these networks of right wing ideologues. A lot of regulation protects our public health and food, safety and environment.

0:19:24 - (David Helvarg): And those were the targets they took. And we know there's this new existential threat. Like when I was growing up in the 20th century, the two existential threats were really fascism in World War II and the nuclear balance of terror that could have led to an apocalypse. Today it's a collapse of biodiversity and specifically fossil fuel fire, climate disruption.

0:19:46 - (Chris Clarke): Right.

0:19:47 - (David Helvarg): Exxon knew back in the 70s their scientists were in the lead and recognized that problem. And then their corporate bosses decided the tactic was to cover it up. So confusion and by themselves a political party. And the Republican Party became the voice of big oil, also more recently, the voice of erratic celebrity fascism. That's what you get. You spend 30 years putting out racist dog whistles to avoid the fact that most voters aren't going to vote for capital gains tax deductions or support of offshore oil.

0:20:22 - (David Helvarg): But they'll vote cultural issues. And you had really, going back to Nixon, you had this sort of racist dog whistle that eventually got themselves a dog. And that top dog now is in charge. I encouraged my aunt before she passed to write for the Denver Post about her experience as a child going with her parents to vote in the 1933 election in Germany, their last chance as German Jews to vote as German citizens and try and stop Hitler and vote for Hindenburg.

0:20:51 - (David Helvarg): We've seen this too many times where you'll get a thin majority in or a large majority in places like Turkey or Hungary that vote in somebody who doesn't necessarily believe in the voting process. We saw that with Trump, of course, in 2020 and January 6, 2021. Like another authoritarian of the past from my family's history. Failed coup followed by winning an election and consolidating power. When my mom was interrogated by the Gestapo when she was 9 years old, Jews were less than 1% of the German population.

0:21:27 - (David Helvarg): Today, if you start targeting government workers and migrant workers and students, dissidents and universities and environmental activists, pretty soon you're targeting most people and you're going to get a reaction that's not the one you're seeking.

0:21:42 - (Chris Clarke): Right.

0:21:44 - (David Helvarg): Also, you can't really crash the economy and consolidate power at the same time. Or we hope you can. But between trade wars and targeting migrants who are significant part of our agricultural and service industries and hospitality and construction, a lot of it is also targeting the things that work our national parks, noaa, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. I mean, back in the days of wise use, it was fishermen in the Gulf not wanting to use turtle excluder devices.

0:22:16 - (David Helvarg): Today it's the head of Fish and Wildlife being an anti endangered species activist. They got a few of these sort of wise use radicals into power during Bush 2. And you have Gorsuch, for example, the Supreme Court justice whose mom was Reagan's head of EPA until she got caught making corrupt deals with the minerals industry. And her assistant went to jail and she got kicked out. And her son, who was 15 at the time, developed a serious grudge against the EPA and the environment, which he's taken all the way to the Supreme Court.

0:22:50 - (David Helvarg): And so you have this continuity. Need to know the history that the environmental backlash started with the boomers who were opposing the creation of public lands. Teddy Roosevelt was taking on Western logging interest who when it created national forests, they set fire to them. And after the boomers came the Sagebrush Rebellion, which didn't want any federal land, and, and the Tundra rebellion in Alaska, where I just was.

0:23:16 - (David Helvarg): But things are changing even today. I just wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times recently on how Alaska is both the victim and perpetrator of climate change. It's oil dependent, but it's also warming three times faster than anywhere else. And so a lot of, you know, Trump's ideas of we'll just open it all for mining and logging and more oil doesn't really work on the ground where the salmon are disappearing from the rivers because of the changes and subsistence livings are at risk and people's homes are literally collapsing as the tundra begins to thaw.

0:23:51 - (Chris Clarke): Just to clarify something here, you mentioned boomers in a context that is, I think, different from how it's usually used on social media.

0:24:01 - (David Helvarg): I'm talking about 1890s boomers, private interests in the west call themselves because they believed in an industrial boom for the West. And Teddy Roosevelt said, the public lands belong to the people and I'll not be intimidated by arsonists and land thieves. Back when Republicans were actually environmentalists, which was most of that party's histories. But then they were also abolitionists under Lincoln. So they've come a long way from the party of Lincoln and Roosevelt to the party of racist and anti environmentalists.

0:24:34 - (Chris Clarke): You mentioned the issue of deportations or exiling those folks who are technically not able to be deported because they're American citizens, like some of the kids that are getting swept up in this. But in my experience in working in the desert the past few years, it's increasingly the case that the people that are working on desert protection, and maybe it's just increasingly the case that I'm noticing this, but seems more and more the people that work in the desert protection field are likely to be brown skinned.

0:25:07 - (David Helvarg): And when we see this, particularly here in California, the largest population is Hispanic. That's 40% of our population. Certainly when I've been out with Cal Fire, a lot of Latino folks on the fire line. So indigenous, because California Native Americans known how to do fire management for generations, since time immemorial. And I've written about that. But yeah, a lot of our first responders, the reconstruction of New Orleans after Katrina, when I covered that, that was the arrival of a lot of Mexican construction workers. Mexican American, but a lot of undocumented. We rebuilt the city and added to the mix of Cajun and black and white, and now it's also Hispanic.

0:25:49 - (David Helvarg): It's like his thing on trade wars. We're not going to grow our own avocados or build car parts here. And the craziness is when his treasury secretary suggests that we could get those jobs where Americans with tiny screwdrivers could be assembling the apple phones here. Just like we have a global integrated production system, our American workforce is integrated with a lot of people who'd like to have their papers in a road to citizenship because they've been living here for generations, 20, 30 years. And actually under pressure, Biden pretty much shut down the border in the last six months of his administration.

0:26:25 - (David Helvarg): So there's little or no border activity in terms of crossings. And not only that, there's little or no tourist activity because quite frankly, a lot of people don't want to come to America right now. They're afraid they could be arrested by government agents without identification. I spent years covering dictatorships, repressive military governments, and we've got all the makings in terms of not just ICE and the Border Patrol, but the Homeland Investigative Service with its 6,000 thugs were acting that way.

0:26:55 - (David Helvarg): I just was in D.C. a few days ago. I was talking with Representative Jared Huffman from Northern California, talking to him for my next book on kelp forest. But also we had to start the conversation with what's going on. And he made the point. He says no totalitarian system has ever been very sustainable or supported sustainable policies. He was talking, he's an ocean champ. He was just talking about the decimation, the gutting of noaa.

0:27:24 - (David Helvarg): And particularly because it's the world's leading authority on climate science, global climate scientists look to NOAA for just consistent, effective data collection. And of course, that's also predictive. The congressionally mandated report every two years on how climate change will impact different regional economies in the US he's just killed that. Although again, illegally, Congress is supposed to make the laws and the President's not supposed to be able to abrogate them. But you have a quizzling Congress right now.

0:27:59 - (David Helvarg): And so we're seeing this gutting of Noah, part of Project 2025, the sort of model of how to build an authoritarian state. They also have kept talking about privatizing the weather service, because who wouldn't want to pay $40 to fly that if there's a tornado headed your way? A lot of these ideas, what they're doing are just dangerous. People are beginning to face the backlash of realizing that their favorite national park or national seashore doesn't have the resources anymore to maintain or support. Forget the signs, just the visitors.

0:28:33 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it's going to be a shit show this summer. And especially the desert national parks, where people, even with previous staffing levels, but the parks haven't been fully staffed for decades.

0:28:43 - (David Helvarg): Same offshore, I mean, both in the marine sanctuaries, but really also We've created large like Papahanamakuakeo off of Hawaii is like one of the largest marine protected areas in the world. And there are several in the Pacific that act as biological reserves. They're trying to open these areas up for commercial fishing. So it's just chopping away at vital organs. You're not just chopping your nose off, despite your face, you're stabbing yourself in your liver and kidneys.

0:29:13 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, that's a very apt and nonetheless distressing metaphor. Curious if you've been tracking the recent public lands disposal bill that I think is still in the House at this point with it seems like there's some reluctant bipartisan support for at least the concept of disposing of public lands, either trading or just privatizing them for development purposes. Southern Nevada has long, thanks to Harry Reid, been able to expand economically because of disposal of public lands around Las Vegas.

0:29:50 - (Chris Clarke): And some of the folks in Las Vegas want more land to expand into. Another quick footnote here, the privatization of public lands measure, which was initially a part of the so called big beautiful bill that the House at this telling, has passed and it's making its way to the Senate. Had the amendment that would have allowed the sale of 500,000 acres of public lands in Utah, Nevada removed from the bill. So it was a major victory for people that care about public lands. The bill itself, which has a fairly high chance of passing, is still horrible in Canada.

0:30:27 - (Chris Clarke): Catastrophic. But it doesn't sell off half a million acres of public lands in Utah, Nevada. So go us. But between Utah and Nevada, which has always struck me as the yin and yang of bad land management practices in the west, seems like there's going to be more attention paid to whether or not we want to have public lands at all from this administration and its cohorts in the Congress.

0:30:56 - (David Helvarg): I mean, it was the Sagebrush Rebellion, which was pre wise use, the idea that the public land should be turned back to the states. And that was quashed, oddly by James Watt, Reagan's first Secretary of Interior.

0:31:10 - (Chris Clarke): Remember when he was the worst Secretary of the Interior we'd ever had?

0:31:14 - (David Helvarg): Oh, I remember as a kid thinking Nixon would be the worst president of my lifetime. Was I an idealistic young youth? Yeah. And wanted to actually privatize the public lands. And the real estate industry, among others, said, whoa, don't dump all that land at once. We're just beginning to sell, you know, many estates and McMansions in Montana. So that collapsed again. An unthought out plan.

0:31:37 - (Chris Clarke): Don't go away.

0:31:39 - (David Helvarg): We'll be right back.

0:31:40 - (Chris Clarke): Now, those of you who heard our last episode know that we're starting a new feature on 90 Miles from Needles. So far we haven't come up with a name for it. Maybe you have one you can suggest. We're working with a wonderful nature sound recordist, Fred Bell, based in Las Vegas, to bring you a little message from the non human part of the desert. We're hoping to do this every episode. In this episode we have the sounds of Grapevine Canyon in southern Nevada, which is a profoundly sacred place for local tribes in Lake Mead National Recreation Area and the relatively newly established Avi Kwame National Monument.

0:32:16 - (Chris Clarke): It's just a beautiful place. This recording was taken during April and May and you'll hear a few different things, including gambols, quail, morning dove, ash, throated flycatcher, and the bird with my favorite song in the entire desert, the canyon Run. Let's listen.

0:33:35 - (David Helvarg): Foreign.

0:33:39 - (Chris Clarke): You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the desert protection podcast. Leave the snakes Alone. And now back to our interview with David Helvarg, author of the War against the Greens.

0:33:52 - (David Helvarg): There's this active suppression of climate data. They're going after the observatory in Hawaii where I first learned about climate change from Roger Revella, kind of father of modern American oceanography, where the Keeling curve, Keeling was out there studying the growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the 1950s. And that's been a continuous baseline of study for going on 80 years. Now they want to shut it down. They want to basically suppress science. We just revived our Peter Bench the Ocean Awards a few weeks ago, which is the Academy Awards for the ocean we had at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. It was nice because you realize people are still working on climate, on social justice and the environment, on protecting the ocean.

0:34:34 - (David Helvarg): Day in and day out. There are a lot of people that are continuing to do good works and good projects, despite the clown show in Washington right now. But one of the people made a indirect reference. She stood up, she said, I'm black, I'm a woman, I'm a scientist. And despite what some people want you to believe, none of those three things are bad.

0:34:56 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, it's startling that someone has to say something like that.

0:35:00 - (David Helvarg): When I read the War against the Greens, I thought, okay, this is an extremist movement, but it's going to reach an end point. Unfortunately, it was a tragic endpoint with Oklahoma City bombing, which was driven by the militias at that time, Integrated wise use in the west, anti abortionist in the Midwest, the old racist Klan members in the deep south and came up with anti government theories that basically justified violence.

0:35:26 - (David Helvarg): And we saw this again with the rise of the proud boys and the pro Trump militias that essentially function outside the law. And now that their Coup failed in 2021, but came back with an election in 2024 and pardoning all these proud boys who were in jail and rioters and insurrectionists gives him a base for the kind of violence that I saw 30 years ago when I began looking at the violence associated with groups like People for the west, they were beating up people and then the Adirondack militia, they were fighting firebombing, a woman author's home, setting fire to a Greenpeace woman scientist's home, killing the dog and trying to sink the boat of Diane Wilson down there in Texas, they were targeting a lot of rural environmental activists, men and women, more single women living alone. And then they got emboldened. They started shooting up, firing arrows and manure in the Adirondacks. What was interesting is that was the first Cuomo governor, the father.

0:36:29 - (Chris Clarke): Oh yeah, Mario.

0:36:30 - (David Helvarg): Mario sent in the state police to talk to these guys, said, cut it out or you're going to jail. And the violence dropped radically in the West. A lot of the violence, the local sheriffs were tolerating it. At the least you had the county supremacy movement, which is re emerging in New Mexico. That said, the only legal authority under the constitution is the county sheriff, and he has the power to arrest federal fish and wildlife agents and what have you. A lot of the violence in the west was pretty much because it was against people who were challenging the large interests, the mining industry, the logging industry.

0:37:03 - (David Helvarg): That violence was either ignored or even complimented. In California, during the redwood summers, the Humboldt county sheriffs were arresting protesters and then in jail, taking pepper spray and putting on cotton swabs and rubbing it in the eyes of the arrested. Violence in the west is a long tradition of anti environmental engagement without serious law enforcement. When I was writing War against the Greens became clear the FBI was more interested in going after what they called eco terrorists, the at the time, Earth first.

0:37:36 - (David Helvarg): And whenever they were approached about violence against environmentalists, they said, well, that's a local law enforcement issue. Let your local sheriff in rural Idaho handle it.

0:37:46 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:37:47 - (David Helvarg): And the perception was violence directed against dissidents was not organized, but organized violence was like today, burning Teslas as organized violence.

0:37:57 - (Chris Clarke): That seems a little disorganized to me.

0:37:59 - (David Helvarg): Oh, it's really sad. Somebody who's acting out and commits vandalism could go to jail as a terrorist. For 20 years, people who are threatening judges who rule against Trump or doing violence get pardons. People who are beating the crap out of police officers on Capitol Hill are suddenly on the streets. And now the one rioter who was shot, Trump's trying to give a federal compensation to her family.

0:38:26 - (David Helvarg): This is how police state works. You turn the judiciary against the people. You, you know, use the FBI as, I guess in some ways it's like some relief to me. When I was young, the FBI were like the political police state under Biden. They were actually doing some work. They were going after these rioters at the Capitol. Now they're being run by a bunch of thugs. And the Attorney General is just a political hack who does whatever Trump says.

0:38:53 - (David Helvarg): This is what authoritarian states look like. I fear that the anti environmental violence, the anti gay violence, the anti dissidents violence, this will all expand. I don't see it at the level of the wars I covered in Central America, but my first reporting out of Northern Ireland, I sense that kind of sectarian potential there, and I worry that each situation is different. But America has a long history of violence. The war against the Greens was when they couldn't get what they wanted politically, they used vigilante tactics. And I see that increasingly today.

0:39:28 - (David Helvarg): I hope that we the people will bring the country back to a more balanced and law based society. And I know that from my own experience covering countries that have transitioned both ways, but particularly countries where the transition's been from dictatorship to democracy, and where I've been in Poland and Turkey and Central America and Fiji. Democracy doesn't guarantee environmental stewardship, but it is a prerequisite. No authoritarian state has ever cared about the health of the air and the water and the biodiversity and the whole web of life that we too are dependent on.

0:40:08 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, just to loop back quickly, there seemed to be a period, and maybe this is just anecdotal and luck of the draw kind of thing, but when I was working in Berkeley on Terrain, which, for those of you who aren't familiar with environmental publications from the Bay area in the 1990s, was a monthly free newspaper that went out to most of the counties in the Bay Area, I attracted a bunch of militia wise use leaning people at that point, at least half a dozen who wanted to be my friend and wanted to work with me and wanted me to write articles on what they were doing and claim to be environmentalists deep down.

0:40:52 - (Chris Clarke): And one that really sticks in my mind is Mike Matson, who used to show up at the Ecology center in Berkeley where I Worked out of at 8:15 in the morning to talk to me on his way to his job. And he's mostly notable for being, I think, the one person that died as a result of the Republic of Texas rebellion a few years after that. The lesson being, if police helicopter is chasing you, don't shoot at it.

0:41:19 - (Chris Clarke): But it just seemed like there was some thought, at least in the people that knew of me and got in touch with me, that there might be some common ground between their complaints and our complaints. And that doesn't seem to be even a glimmer of a possibility at this point.

0:41:37 - (David Helvarg): It's hard. I mean, Ralph Nader once said that if you go to the beach and it's shut down by pollution, you bring your family there. You're very unlikely to say, oh, well, that's okay by me because I'm against government regulation. Yeah, I think I'm an ocean guy or a desert guy. I think people do still have a connection with the lands and the waters and so that's a place we can build from. I just, when I was in Alaska, this guy Rob, he said he's the hunter for the Native Conservancy up there.

0:42:09 - (David Helvarg): And so he's hunting every day to help feed the elders. And other folks are fishing salmon every day so they have healthy traditional foods for the tribe. He's a white guy. He says he voted for Bernie and actually wrote him in in 2016, but he was voting for Trump this time. I'm like, why? And he, he started spouting all this stuff that you get in this disinformation sphere that's been created. And part of it is I've written recently about the decline of mainstream media, largely because of corporate consolidation and hedge fund takeovers and the loss of local newspapers and the degrading of journalism. It's kind of like, first they came for the journalist and then we don't know what happened.

0:42:50 - (David Helvarg): And the growth of this right wing media sphere that's well funded and you look into a lot of it and the oil industry is there too. So I think there's a lot of people who just got a head full of misinformation. People are not mediating fact from fantasy. And I think there's still that possibility when you get people out in the natural world to make those connections. I was out with a lobsterman for my next book on the kelp forest, and he's now growing kelp part time because he sees the lobster moving north and moving out to sea for colder water. And he says, of course you can't work in this field and not know climate change is real. He's say it's 85 degrees this past summer. It's the first time in 45 years he had to buy air conditioning.

0:43:34 - (David Helvarg): And so the reality of it is fast media to me is like ABC News, which every night is reporting on extreme weather events without ever mentioning climate change. But you can try and suppress the data, claim there's an energy emergency which requires only oil, gas and coal. Those are not the energy sources that are coming back anymore than whale oil is coming back. And the experience that people have in their daily lives in terms of not just their economics, but the growing number of disasters linked to a change in climate change, at some point we're going to face reality and have to deal with it. The question is how much damage is done in the interim.

0:44:12 - (David Helvarg): And the damage, the most damage is the loss of democracy. Because without democracy you really can't deal with these other issues of the economy, the environment or equity. So I think the big fight today is what I was reporting on with the war against the Greens was one set of industries and people willing to go to extremes to defend their subsidies and defend their rights. And that's now expanded to a global battle.

0:44:40 - (David Helvarg): Today there's an English based nonprofit that tracks environmentalists under attack. A number five, I believe, of the Goldman Award winners, international grassroots environmentalists have been murdered. And there's another group, the Committee for the Protection Journalist, that tracks the killing of my folks. And being a journalist, being an environmental activist there, at a global level, there's a very dangerous, you can lose your job, you can lose your life.

0:45:06 - (David Helvarg): And I think Trump's bringing that kind of threat home to America because you now have a president who doesn't understand or care about the Constitution. That was set up with an ideology that said all men are created equal. And for 250 years we've been expanding that all people are created equal to. We've got this idea of we the people that was radical and revolutionary in 1776 and that has continued for 250 years to expand our recognition of the rights of all humans and the rights of a healthy environment in which humans can thrive.

0:45:44 - (David Helvarg): And all that's on the block now. So it's, I think, as I said, we got a power mad president, we got a quiz link Congress, we've got a judiciary that's headed up by some right wing ideologues. My lawyer friend says you pretty much know how the Supreme Court will vote, you just don't know how they'll rationalize it in terms of the Constitution.

0:46:02 - (Chris Clarke): Right.

0:46:03 - (David Helvarg): But you know, it all comes back to we the people. So it's, we got two years to the midterms. We got to be in the streets and in the voting booths. We gotta elect progressive people. They don't have to be Democrats, they just have to be sane. And the number one job for environmentalists today, I think is defending democracy and educating the public on how the public's at risk if we do lose Noah or put mercury back in the tuna or any of the crazy stuff that's coming down the pike at the moment.

0:46:29 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, I know that you've got a huge amount on your plate, what with Blue Frontier and the ocean work you're doing, but is there any chance of an update of the War against the Greens book?

0:46:43 - (David Helvarg): Probably not right now. I think there are a lot of people who are just day to day tracking the madness. I updated it for the second Bush administration. I think right now, my next. Yeah, I'm working hard on my book. Just people know coral reefs are in trouble. Most people don't know what a kelp forest is. So my next book for next spring is the Forest and the Sea Kelp Climate and the Future of the Ocean.

0:47:07 - (David Helvarg): And then I want to update 50 Ways to Save the Ocean. And then I just want to work with people like you to say the next environmental reporter, investigative reporter, wants to follow the money. You can start with the war against the Greens and, and they're winning at the moment. The war against the Greens is succeeding, but I don't think sustainable. I think that in the next year or two, you're going to see when they try and gut all these protections that we've put in place, you're going to see some very bad outcomes.

0:47:34 - (David Helvarg): And when the next climate intensified hurricane hits and there's no FEMA there to help people out, we the people are going to have to like just bring it back in a new way. Yeah, we're going to start having to envision what our future is that's going to be more democratic. And also I'm not optimistic or pessimistic, but I strongly believe in triage. We got to save what we can while we can. And that starts with taking action.

0:47:58 - (David Helvarg): I think just writing the War against the Greens alerted a lot of people who thought they were alone, who didn't understand why they were under attack and suddenly it made sense. And I think that we just have to like ignore the fire hose, look at what's really being done at a structural level and then come back and build a new structure stronger than before.

0:48:19 - (Chris Clarke): So where can listeners find your work?

0:48:22 - (David Helvarg): Go to bluefront.org and we have links to my writings. We've got the Rising Tide Ocean podcast, of course. We have our Blue Frontier substack where I'm putting recycling a lot of my articles from the LA Times, the New York Times, American Indian or wherever. Just bluefront.org is a good place to start because a lot of our work is just making those links between what's happening in Washington and what's happening at your local beach, just like they can find you for what's happening in your local desert wherever.

0:48:56 - (Chris Clarke): You have a very expansive ecosystem that is largely unknown, whether that's arid lands or saltwater. I think people like us are doing some occasionally thankless but pretty important work.

0:49:12 - (David Helvarg): Yeah, I gotta say, I just got back from diving in Plow with my nephew and a bunch of friends and this is like out in the central Pacific. It's a healthy coral reef system and there were manta rays doing flips. There were, you know, I call it shark enhanced. Not infested waters watching hundreds sharks and red snappers doing their spawning thing, going up to the surface, releasing their eggs and sperm and mass and then rushing back to their 10,000 comrades down below.

0:49:38 - (David Helvarg): Parrot fish nipping at you and trigger fish. And it's just the diversity of life. You got to balance the wonder and the warning. We've lost half the coral reefs, but half of them are still there. We've lost half the kelp forest. I'll be diving next week in a beautiful kelp forest. You protect what you love. And what we love is under attack right now like never before in our lifetimes. It's up to us. It's nice that they're government structures and laws, but it's always been we the people who have to move things forward.

0:50:05 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. David Hill Varg, very grateful to you for joining us today. I know you're probably battling jet lag after late night flights and time zone changes, but just very much appreciate your time and we'll have to have you back on to talk about vaquitas sometime soon.

0:50:24 - (David Helvarg): Sometime, Chris. And just great to be back in touch. Chris Clark.

0:50:28 - (Chris Clarke): All right, thank you.

0:50:29 - (David Helvarg): Take care.

0:50:31 - (Chris Clarke): And that brings down the curtain on this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection podcast. Huge thanks to David Hellvarg for joining us. If you want to pick up a copy of his book the War against the Greens, you can go to 9zero miles from needles.combooks and that'll take you to our Desert Bookstore where you can buy a bunch of different books on the desert and related issues without having to deal with any space faring billionaires and they're increasingly useless online online commerce sites.

0:51:03 - (Chris Clarke): Thanks as well to Chuck George, Sarah Dunn Albani and Cara Barbero for their touching generosity. You can join them and our other donors by going to 90 miles from needles.com donate a bunch of options there you can choose from. You can also text needles to 53555 and that will allow you to donate with whatever smartphone payment system you use. Makes it a little easier. I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, Martine Mancha, our podcast artwork creator, and Fred Bell, who provides our absolutely necessary audio reminders of how beautiful the desert is. Our theme song, Moody Western is by Bright side Studio.

0:51:53 - (Chris Clarke): And as I mentioned earlier, if you're listening to this within a day or two of it going up live, I am in Utah at the Healthy Public Lands Conference in Salt Lake City and then traveling through the Four Corners in southern Utah for a couple of days hoping to pick up some material for the podcast. Depending on how things go and what kind of opportunities I have to do editing and uploading and wi fi connections out in the boondocks, we may or may not have an episode next week.

0:52:26 - (Chris Clarke): We will certainly have one the following week if not. And stay tuned for news about us celebrating our hundredth episode since we launched in 2022. That's just last count, eight episodes away, couple of months. We want to celebrate and we want you to be there with us to celebrate, either in person or virtually. I will let you know the details when we have them. I am really looking forward to this trip folks.

0:52:53 - (Chris Clarke): It hasn't been really that long since I've been in Southern Utah. It was in the north last year about this time. And on my way home I did sneak in a little hike in Zion national park in one of the lesser known hidden areas. It's been a couple more years than that since I've been in Moab. Bears ears, Mexican hat, etc. I'm hoping it hasn't changed too much. Well, Moab probably has. They've had developers and floods and other disasters happen to that town.

0:53:31 - (Chris Clarke): But hey, change is the only thing that's constant. I want to thank you for listening. Your voice is more important than ever. Please take care of yourselves and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.