Forest genocide is not new. Its cumulative detrimental effects now threaten our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. A warming planet and extended regional drought drive air and water temperatures higher, simultaneously as baseline and trend. Clearcutting and long-term deforestation are accelerants that must stop.
The U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management speak in a cryptic language of words with no source, no reference, no definition, and consequently no meaning. This is a deliberate blinding process designed to deprive the American public of sight and understanding.
In his seminal (1983) book entitled "Sterile Forests," Ned Fritz warned of the renewed "onslaught ..." inflicted by the "modern clearcutters, by burning, poisoning and other methods preventing the original forest composition from ever returning."
Legislative efforts to reform federal land management agencies and gain control over the commodification and sterilization of public forests have failed miserably. Indiscriminate clearcutting and bulldozing logging roads into untrammeled forests proceeds unabated. Massive agency-arson programs burn, masticate, and cultivate the fragmented forest creating man-made "temporary deserts."
"Multiple-Use" is a ruse. As always, America's working class, what's left of it, is literally paying for the destruction of sacred forests, water quality and quantity, cold-water fisheries, wildlife and wildlife habitat, contemplative pursuits, and scenic quality. Wilderness fragments, solitude, and spiritual values that remain on the landscape after centuries of institutional efforts to erase any trace of the divine in Nature are being hunted down and exterminated, with extreme viciousness and prejudice.
When desertification intersects with lack of foresight and plain old stupidity, what shall we call this expanding desert, which now extends beyond external territories, encroaching into the landscapes and dreamscapes of human minds and bodies.
I'm imagining a time not too far away when the U.S. Department of War will commence bombing forests to control insect infestations and conquer "encroaching conifers," wolves and space aliens. Who is the enemy? Wildness, we proles, and Nature herself.
Conifer encroachment. What does this mean? This is a term of art, which implies that natural reproduction of conifers on BLM and USFS land is bad. Conifer encroachment is a simulation, a copy of a desired synthetic landscape imagined, analyzed, and modeled by computer programs. These machinations exist as a twin, with no reference to a real landscape, to be copied and reproduced ad nauseam until the common folk accept it as an object (a thing) that can be manipulated.
It's hard to ignore how this all resembles a scaled-up version of the mental illness Munchausen syndrome by proxy -- driven by a psychotic desire for ever bigger budgets and sympathy.
It's time to abandon the failed dogmas of capital and materialist technology and science and stop pretending that we already know all the answers. Science's future will be shaped by recognizing that natural, self-organizing systems, including native forest ecosystems, like all lifeforms, are constantly evolving, impermanent processes rather than things, organisms, not machines. Society's future is interdependent with Nature and man's unpredictability and impermanence. The entire universe operates as a developing organism.
Seeing this from an artist's perspective I imagine the process as a complex, ineffable, work-in-progress functioning beyond our ability to know.
According to the Declaration of Independence when a citizen faces the domestic threat of despotism, an appropriate human response is to rebel -- as individuals, and in cooperative groups. End the desertification and sterilization of landscapes and mindscapes. Billionaire assassins (oligarchs) who scoff at the Constitution and fund violent global forms of neo-colonialism, genocide, and desertification must be stopped.