The Nature of Resources
-preface-
I wrote an essay about briefly contributing last year to Peri Lee Pipkin’s botanical survey in Nevada. It’s difficult for me not to nihilistically dismiss the writing as “what I did for my summer vacation” while everything else in the world feels so bad, so immediate, so threatening. But ultimately, the interconnectedness of these issues is what feels so salient in the midst of expedient policy measures and swift, violent ends to life on this planet.
Last week we watched idly as another deadly storm washed away whole communities thousands of feet above sea level who thought they were immune to hurricane catastrophe. Last week Israel dropped bombs on four countries in one day, the continuation of a yearlong genocidal assault whose fatal cruelty, the consistent murder of thousands upon thousands of civilians in Palestine, has gone unchecked by our government–and whose impact is increasingly devastating on an environmental level. The Guardian reported back in January that “the planet-warming emissions generated during the first two months of the war in Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations,” not to mention the massive emissions created over the past 9 months’ expanded bombardment since the article was written.
$18 billion dollars in weapons have been sent to Israel by the U.S. in the past year with another $20 billion announced to continue its assault, while people impacted by Helene, the deadliest hurricane since Katrina (but probably more so, the numbers are nearly impossible to tally at this point), garnered only $8 billion from our government. Climate scientists adamantly acknowledge that these sorts of disasters–not “hundred year storms” but rather “not recorded in anthropogenic Appalachian history” level storms–are the direct result of our uncurbed carbon emissions. While our dependence upon fossil fuels furthers this havoc, capitalist notions of a “green future” that is dependent upon the elemental components for batteries is equally ecologically disruptive. And, as we have witnessed across our lithium-powered smartphone screens, is violently exploitative to the people who extract these precious minerals for our various technological devices–devices which we have become dependent upon as society morphs to move at such a fast pace that we couldn’t continue to be employed in this gig economy were we not continually and instantaneously updated with the carrot on a stick possibilities of incoming spare change opportunities. In many ways, the idea of establishing more mines on American soil instead of overseas could potentially *limit* some human rights abuses, but ultimately, the watersheds affected by American extraction have always been plumbed straight to poor, indigenous or POC communities, causing horrific health consequences.
Last week the Bureau of Land Management made its final assessment of whether or not building another massive lithium mine in Esmeralda County, Nevada would potentially endanger a federally protected wildflower. They decided, against all research to the contrary, that a tiny plant with a ten acre growing radius and a lithium plant 20 football fields long could “coexist” on the same hillside.
A year and a half ago, I accompanied my friend and botanist Peri Lee Pipkin as they worked to collect samples of the extensive rare plants slated for removal through the creation of this new lithium mine in The Silver Peak Valley. Their multi-year thesis project, a historic botanical survey of a 450 square mile valley whose plants had barely been documented but whose geologically elemental yields had been written about in countless volumes, has provided an incredible case for the crucial biodiversity. I wrote this essay over a year ago and pitched it to multiple magazines, with the hopes that some interest in or knowledge of this stunning and special place could protect it. No publications were interested in the story. So I’m posting it here now, with the aspiration of opening up more conversation about our lithium dependance and put the spotlight on the fallacy of greenwashing within the extractive industries.
Over the past two years, my artwork has become more attuned to ecological transformation due to extraction. Counting each tiny flower last summer was a way of thoughtfully saying goodbye to each one before it is potentially unearthed by the creation of a Lithium Mine. The survey was a two month process of sitting with and noticing a beautiful bloom that no one on earth may ever see again. This slow practice of bidding farewell feels like the anti-monument I crave to build in a society that relies on ecologically destructive “new technology” and “new ideas”. This battle between human use and ecological longevity is exactly the nexus of the monument conflict that I am interested in debating. How do we grieve continual ecological devastation when we don’t have the proper time to sit with each incursion?
Deserts are considered uninhabitable wastelands–this narrative is used in our society to justify its destruction. P. Lee’s botanical project sits in the middle of a fascinating paradox of our “green” futures that rely on mountain top removal, a new power plant and a giant tailings pile in the natural environment that is home to the flora and fauna we hope to protect in this era of massive die-offs.
Ultimately, this wordy, diurnal opinion piece always feels incomplete to me. To truly understand this place requires many more seasons living in this valley. I am no expert. There are so many more dialogues to have within this nexus–I hope this piece provides an opportunity to get into them.
The Nature of Resources: Compromising our Green Present for Green Futures
Lithium is key to our country's plan for a sustainable future. But what happens to the rare Nevada ecosystem that stands between us and this precious material?
By Zibby Jahns
For $5 an acre, you can tap a wooden peg into the ground of Bureau of Land Management property and start extracting resources on public lands for a profit. The law is a holdover from the imperial expansion of “Manifest Destiny”. The cash in your pocket could get you started, which is probably why there’s so many damn claims we’d stumble upon out in the field collecting flowering specimens for Peri Lee Pipkin’s botanical survey of the area. There haven’t been this many mining prospects since the gold rush in the 1800s. The new large-scale machines are so destructive that ecocide can happen quickly when a cliff-face is accidentally chipped off. The laws were written as if mining is one man with a gold pan and not someone beheading a mountain just to check what’s inside.
During the summer of 2023, I worked with my friend and botanist Peri Lee Pipkin in the high desert of Nevada’s Silver Peak Mountain Range collecting rare plants for the California Botanic Garden to create an inventory of the ecosystem there. The survey site covers 450 square miles of a beautiful U-shaped valley ranging between 4600 feet above sea level at its base to 9500 ft in its peaks. The Silver Peaks are described by their plants as a transition zone between the Mojave and Great Basin, filled with springs, antelopes, wild horses and super blooms, but regarded as desolate and uninhabitable by the slew of mining corporations who have put in claims to blow up the painted hills and Pinon pine covered mountains. A rotating crew of botanists, wild food tenders, students and myself hiked from sunup to sundown that summer, eyes to the ground, searching for new specimens on the project Peri Lee has been dedicated to these past couple years.
Driving in for the first time, I pass Basalt Town in Mineral County, Nevada, and pump the breaks as I drive into a cloud of dust spewed from the mine next to the road. The region is home to towns with names like Alkali, Rhyolite, Borax, Garnet, Tungsten and Chert, speaking to the elements and stones contained therein. In the Silver Peak Valley, there’s much more than one precious metal to be found.
One of the resources that companies hope to extract here is lithium, a key talking point in this country’s capitalist future within climate change. What is the point of rechargeable batteries if we kill whole habitats in the process? How many species’ extinctions are enough to inspire a value shift? In this country, we talk about economic growth but rarely environmental growth. What does economic de-growth look like to spur environmental success? How do we advocate for the land in the seemingly undefeatable landscape of capitalism? We are collecting for P. Lee to assemble a floristic inventory of the range, but this collection is admissible in court as evidence, too. Our pressed plants become a part of the battle.
****
Turning off the main route, it’s a six mile dirt road drive past an Open Mountain Energy sign (a name that gets to the core of the geothermal company’s viscerally nefarious re-design of the stunning landscape) to get to base camp, a glorious hot spring next to a cool pond. The hotwell was an accidental discovery a few thousand feet down while one man was searching for oil, and the concrete tub was built and is maintained by a local motorcycle crew. The story goes that someone dumped their dime store goldfish cache into the adjacent pond a couple decades ago while visiting the bath, and now they’ve grown to the size of bass as I’d always heard lore that koi expand to the size of their container. Somehow they’ve survived without the neglect of a family home, and thrive in this desert oasis. The flash of bright orange amongst all the pale green is a stunning shock. Skinny dipping at night, I felt a couple slide alongside me, glistening under the bright moon. While these creatures were introduced, the brilliant array of desert life feels equally miraculous and luminescent. Delicate, colorful avocets stand in the water in broad daylight feet away from where I take a hot soak in the buff. The bullfrogs sound like a snoring roommate, surprisingly soothing as I head to bed at night. Antelope venture down to the marsh from the rocky canyons beyond. This is the Fish Lake Valley, where Fish Lake used to be, one of the many bodies of water dried up due to the various diverted headwaters toward Las Vegas, Los Angeles and alfalfa agriculture on the other side of the mountains, an attempt to yield some crops in one of the most arid landscapes in the country.
The geothermal hotwell is one of the few places we see other people in the whole range. Most visitors to the spring live up in the White Mountains, their towns still snowed in while the heat sears down here. Locals point to their roads up the icy cliffs as if we can see them at this distance. The politics differ severely here, but everyone agrees they adore this place. We sit and soak under the stars at night, and older men with sunned skin and taut beer-pregnant bellies interchangeably tell us lore and history. Hunters discuss their commitment to conservation. A man propping himself up with a walking stick submerged in the hot tub alludes to unbelievable, unidentifiable events he’s witnessed in this desert without ever detailing a single one. Everyone talks shit on the city, with varied personal experience. Most visitors avoid Covid talk at all costs, but the conversation always manages to migrate there in the wee hours. We hear how sailboats used to race in this valley less than a century ago–the water was deep enough then to even support steamships. They tell us how the people on the other side of the Whites banded together to save Mono Lake, and wondered if it could happen here. But one of these lakes is already a lithium pond. There’s time only to prevent another one from being made.
This year is special though. Before I drove out West, the region had already received 300% more precipitation than the highest in recorded history, and three out of my four weeks there it rained a stint each day, sometimes flooding, sometimes hailing–and it wasn’t even the rainy season. We got to witness a glimpse of what this beautiful place may have looked like in recent memory when the water table was naturally high.
*****
Each day that I worked with P. Lee, we discovered a new species of plant. Every day our collections were historic. Every day we hiked into places that there are no records of botanists collecting or observing from. And every day we stumbled upon rare plants and more rare plants. Places that seem barren–windswept sandstone, a mound of shale—all are home to some of the most rare species, fascinating plants, stunning reptiles, ravines of mica–like everything has been dusted with a fine, bright silver, a classy glitter. Just as all these mineral deposits create the perfect conditions for crystals of all colors, heavy metals and a whole periodic table of extractive resources, they also make up the ideal environment for tiny wildflowers who thrive only in this region, then give life to the many pollinators and amphibians who have been experiencing a major worldwide species die off of their own. Walking in the desert sun spotting blooms taught me so much about edaphic restrictions, plants with high needs that are met by specific geologic and soil compositions alongside these substrate changes. I have always loved rocks as dramatic sculpture in the landscape, as a story of time– but I also admire discovering what can bloom on diverse desert structures. Unique elements and resources contained within these mountains provide the exact sedimentary composition required to sustain very unique plants that sometimes cannot live any other place on earth, not even a mile away. They can only live within the boundary of the specific edaphic restriction. The diversity of the rocks ensures the diversity of the plant life, which ensures the diversity of the animals, too.
Admittedly I like showy plants, a flower’s flower. I like a bloom that makes you feel in heat–fertile, dripping, soft. I saw many of these: the pastel palette of cactus blooms signaling to the bees when they’ve passed their prime; fluttering white desert poppies; explosions of 4 o’clock varietals; penstemons tall as myself; dusty pink swirls of thorny budsage; the sweet, delicate sway of primroses, opening at all times of the day and night. But this trip to the desert was such a beautiful meditation for me on reconsidering scale. Rare super blooms of monkey flowers that are mostly invisible until they flower–still a fraction of the size of my pinky nail. We took turns crouching down on the ground, our eyeballs nearly pressed to the plant, where we could see all the gorgeous details of its petals and sepals in the tubular bloom. There are cacti that only poke through the earth’s surface in flower, preferring loose gravel light enough to push aside with their petals–a sedimentary occurrence hard to find. What does it mean to protect the tiny beauties out of sight? Why are we so fascinated by the Big, the gigantic creatures that once roamed the earth? Why can’t we appreciate the small things, just out of view? All of these rarities though, even when submitted for protection, are still lost in the hopeless, endless paper-pushing of bureaucracy that inevitably tramples us all. 60% of species go extinct waiting for petitioning. Getting a federal stamp of approval is akin to a death row pardon. The little guys go undetected and unprotected longer than the photo-op fields do.
Midday, when the sun was especially hot, we naturally gravitated towards the shade, which only sprouts up from the ground where there’s at least a thin stream of water. This is of course where all people historically head in the summer heat, especially when the trickles were naturally occurring waterfalls for generations past.
Therefore it should have been no surprise that we found myriad tabletops of ancestral indigenous gardens–plateaus of food presumably planted by the Shoshone and Paiute less than a hundred years ago–but each one took our breath away. We continually encountered these historically tended gardens of wild edible bulb and root foods, presumably cultivated for centuries before the various tribes between the Paiute and Shoshone were forced to relocate in the 1930s after the water disappeared. Digging up fritillaries actually aids them–the action supports repopulation. No wonder humans have evolved alongside this plant. Mariposa lily flowers popped up for the first time this summer, never before recorded by a botanist in this whole state. Perhaps these calochortus bulbs were originally traded along the salt trail in its heyday and were propagated way up here. Have all these perennial bulb and starchy root plants just been laying dormant waiting for this precipitation, the clouds rich with snow melt? More indication that this land doesn’t belong to the miners or us flower-lovers but to the people who’ve been witness to this valley once rich in water for countless generations. I try to imagine the fact I heard mentioned the night before about the sailboats gliding across the surface of Clayton County Lake a hundred years ago. Instead I watch a tornado form from the dust at the edge of the lithium pond that sits in the lake’s place.
We found one edible garden, then another, then another. Fields and fields of medicinal and delicious lomatium, nearly always sprouting next to wild onion, a meal at our feet. We were collecting a single plant for the flora, its root pulling our arms a couple feet underground and we still couldn’t find the end when it broke off. I kept rooting my fingers down, looking for the rest, and found another six inches or so that didn’t even lead me to the root’s end. I hulled the skin for my first time, and that night we cooked up those remaining broken inches in the skillet. The nutritive biscuit root tastes like a bready parsnip–when it’s salted and cooked on higher heat it tastes like a delicious french fry. The health properties of lomatium are vast, even in allopathic western medicine, but the hardy roots are tough to cultivate. These gardens deserve to exist, to sustain, to be tended. These species have evolved to be harvested in small, well-intentioned quantities. Informed disturbance is crucial to encouraging abundance–but this must be within balance. The only people who truly understand what a population can withstand are the ones who have observed the ebb and flow over droughts and monsoons, across seasons, year after year, for generations. I’m sure the Paiute and Shoshone people, who have moved towards water closer to the White Mountains or into town when it all was diverted from here, have been grieving these ecosystems for nearly two hundred years, when the first rocks were earmarked for demolition by the Western expansion of the United States. Can we use a botanical survey to squash any contested theories of indigenous ancestral heritage of this land (because somehow the manifold flint-knapped spearheads flickering across the desert floor and even the ample anthropological evidence accumulated systematically by white newcomers is still not enough)? But also, who are we as white outsiders and “scientists” to presume our work does something for people who didn’t ask us? Is there a botanical savior complex? How does the act of privileging plants over indigenous people for an institutionalized collection–as opposed to recognizing the systemic effects of white supremacy and colonialism as ultimately denying agency to plants and indigenous people in the effort of cementing racial hierarchy and access to resources–serve the powers that be instead of holding them accountable? Does getting lost in questions for fear of making mistakes impede our ability to make sustainable and lasting change?
These questions continually pop up in my mind as I scour the ground for familiar flowers under the scorching midday sun. Can we as a society care about plants we don’t use? Do we have to quantify them? Do they need to be beautiful? What about tiny ones that are hard to notice? What about the plants that grow in community with wild foods, herbs and fibers? What are the plants and minerals that sustain their life?
While I think it’s unfair and egocentric to anthropomorphize or apply social sciences to nature, I am interested in thinking about these “useless” places (the language used to classify the desert in order to justify extraction) in the ways I consider disability justice, anti-capitalism and decolonization. We don’t want to demand resources of vulnerable populations of people, why would we do that to rare plant communities?
Most often on our collecting excursions, unfortunately, we see carpets of halogetan—a so-called “invasive” plant, or “bad neighbors” that get stuck in the treads of mining company’s trucks, earning the common name “miners’ footprints”, aptly called as they have been brought by capitalism to destroy mountaintops and all the animals living off it, strangling out the species of plant that have been thriving here for so long.
Even with all this violent intrusion over the years, we’re lucky to see another car for days in this valley anywhere that’s not the hot well. The trucks we do see on the dirt and rock roads might be working out here, or else someone is coming down from the Whites or the Sierras to four wheel around on a 3-day weekend—but even that is rare, maybe once a week, and usually it’s someone we’ve already met. All parties wave to each other this far from civilization.
The most evident inhabitants of the range leave piles of shit strewn about, mostly along the edges of the spring-fed trickles, tarnishing my hopes for a sip or a bath. That’s because ranchers can release their herds on the BLM land and the hot cattle flock to these rare opportunities for shade and hydration, muddying up the possibility for anyone else to enjoy them. The cattle likely proliferate the Halogetan and mow down whatever is edible in these stretches of prickly and thorny desert acreage.
While it’s incredible to be alone in such an expanse for so long, it seems like the answer to protecting this place is actually to encourage more people to fall in love with The Silver Peaks. It mystifies me that this place could ever be regarded as empty. There are grasshoppers bounding about that look like monarch butterflies; multicolor zebra-tailed lizards that curl their tails to mimic scorpions (the stripes apeing articulations of the segmented metasoma) then perform rituals of push ups and slanted walks to ward off attack. Did you know that 65% of the nation’s wild horses and burros live in Nevada? It becomes clear day after day as we hear their hooves in the distance and watch them ferry foals across rocky passes. Their wild nature is fascinating to watch; their pack antics are so different from the corralled horses I’ve known in my lifetime. When they notice surveillance, they move into a line to make the herd appear as a lone stallion or they hold individual action poses completely still for inordinately long to camouflage into the landscape. It’s surreal to behold but it happened again and again. I believe my observations could be considered a study in ethology.
The roadsides are lined in bushes of flowers so aromatic I’m transported to another world when we drive by. Oh, the smell of all the sages after it rains. The jack rabbits here may be as fast as cheetahs–I’ve watched them outrun everyone else. A cute kangaroo rat scurries by an old mine. A rosy boa slithers under a bush. A rattlesnake curls up in the shade of a rocky overhang. A hummingbird sits in her nest, spun from pollen, spider webs and resin. Her eggs are the size of Tic-Tacs. When we ride in the work truck to a new spot it feels like a trail ride, climbing up rocks and groaning but making it every time even if it’s a struggle to straighten its legs. What magic it would be to do this on actual horseback.
Hillsides gleam with the black glass of obsidian; wind carves sandstone into cavernous walls; floods turn rubble into pillars; mountains take on the colors of the flowers in bloom; volcanic rock appears to be velvet at a distance. The roadside geology book of Nevada has only two pages dedicated to the silver peak range, which is absurd when you consider there are rock formations here that I’ve only spotted in Arizona or Utah or South Dakota or Wyoming—places people visit to see this sort of thing. It’s not just that the tourists forgot about this place, any geologists not working for an extraction agency seemed to too, and the botanists on top of that. There’s so little natural record of this state outside of extraction material, that P. Lee relies on flora from neighboring states to identify species, and often those don’t do the trick.
We spot a tiny rare cactus, then hear a bomb go off.
Whose dynamite was it? What did they find? What did they destroy?
That night at the hot well, we met a turquoise miner. I brought him a pile of rocks I’d collected that I couldn’t identify. He explained their creation stories with ease, and I kept returning to him with more pebbles of interesting shape and color to decipher. He’s got over a dozen DIY mines, and it’s barely lucrative for him. He lives in the area, performs a simple dig, lugging in his own water, using a little excavator in a rubble pile, talks regularly with local geologists, and is visibly enthusiastic about the ecosystem here. But he wants a bigger excavator, more dynamite. He’s got the itch: he’s found the veins and the pockets. My heart sinks when I think about him hollowing caverns of crystals from the places they’ve been forming for millions of years. At least turquoise extraction has been a part of the history of this place before settlers showed up. And what he’s doing is really small potatoes in the scheme of things. The lithium mine, on the other hand, wants to remove a whole mountain, and leave a hole 20 football fields long and as deep as the Eiffel Tower, plus build a power plant to operate it, and dispose of all its nasty byproduct in a massive tailings pile next to it. That thing isn’t tidy, but it’s a serious money maker. The only thing standing in its way right now is one small federally protected species of buckwheat with a growing parameter limited to 10 acres. Thiem’s buckwheat is a perfect example of a plant with edaphic restrictions: the sedimentary substrate of this one hill that looks bleached-white, supposedly laden with lithium, is so acutely rare that it evolutionarily manufactured its own adorable species of plant. If this cute little pom-pom flower weren’t there, that stunning vista would already be gone. But if the lithium mine wins–and they have the money to win–it sets a legal precedent that renders federal protection obsolete.
This whole zone has already been shaken by the dismal, dreadful job of resource extraction since the first white people showed up in the range. The headstones in Tonopah demonstrate what mining town life was like–short, bleak, violent. Many of the hundred year old crosses there are stamped with “Life Became a Burden” or the details of horrific mining events and accidents that have been posthumously listed on corresponding gravesites by the local historical society. The people in the town of Silver Peak explained to us what the existing, contemporary lithium mine has already given them–no money and no work as had been promised. The people who have been employed in the mine don’t spend any of their cash in town before they drive back across the desert to wherever they sleep.
One site in the survey area meets the qualifications of a protected wilderness area but hasn’t passed the review process yet. The 1965 Wilderness Act is worded in such a manner to protect land that essentially negates the history of indigenous people, or that human tending has been essential to the maintenance of wild areas, by specifying that a protected area is “untrammeled by man.” At this point, there are so few spots in this country that have no roads (dirt roads are roads) that someone would have to hike into. Even meeting these requirements, the fifty mile “Silver Peak Wilderness Study Area” may be locked into its bureaucratic loop long after the new lithium mine gets to work.
*****
On September 19th, 2024, the Bureau of Land Management made its final assessment of the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine. The BLM press release reads, “The proposed project represents another step by the Biden-Harris administration to support a responsible domestic supply of critical minerals to power the clean energy economy. If approved, the mine would employ up to 500 workers during construction and up to 350 workers during operations, generating an estimated $125 million in wages annually during the life of the mine.” How does this plan demonstrate any difference from the other Lithium mine in the valley?
Botanist Naomi Fraga wrote a year ago that,
“the proposed mine would relegate the species to a tiny sliver of land, an island really, with nearly half of the habitat critical to its survival destroyed. It is unfortunate that Ioneer [Rhyolite Ridge] continues to propose scheme after greenwashing scheme in an effort to cast doubt that their proposed mine would bring existential harm to Tiehm’s buckwheat. The company’s claims that the proposed project can “coexist” with the buckwheat fails the scientific litmus test each time. Their first plan proposed to move the plants away from the mine, but their translocation study resulted in 100% failure. In fact, a study they funded demonstrated that Tiehm’s buckwheat is uniquely adapted to the mineral rich soil in which it grows, providing scientific evidence that attempts to move the plant would be counter to its long-term conservation.”
I’m typing this between a cell phone and a laptop, each with a lithium battery. These cell phones and laptops will eventually make their way to a landfill, degrading poisonously, a little blip in the overwhelming heaps across our land and oceans, toppling with the tonnes of commercial waste necessitated by an ever-evolving technological economy.
What are the harm reduction measures for extraction that isn’t going to cease? Where are the dry lake beds without rare plants? Does mining Lithium in another country simply quell our unease because it’s out of sight, even though the conditions are probably far worse? What does de-growth from unsustainable capitalism look and feel like? What is the extent of technology that one society needs? Do we really need rechargeable batteries for robot dog cops? Call me crazy, but I’d rather imagine a world without robot dog cops altogether. I’d prefer to go back in time fifteen, twenty years to when I made solid plans and wrote all my thoughts in a notebook. But that is not the time we live in. It is crucial to recognize that even in assembling this flora, we heavily relied on both gasoline and lithium, among other precious resources; even though we were collecting, pressing and labeling each plant by hand, access to these tools made our work substantially easier, safer and faster. Each person who is a part of this project is actively scheming on how this work could be done with a smaller footprint, but that planning takes time, connection and money. This form of divestment cannot happen on a massive scale overnight, regardless of my interest in society doing so. In the meantime, would we rather exploit people in other countries instead of destroying our own backyard? Would we prefer to sacrifice the ecosystems in China, Chile or Mali while also subjecting workers to unprotected labor laws so that we can drive to a unique hiking spot on our home turf? What are the limits of our conscience? Is there such a thing as ethical mining? Is the solution conservationist legislation? Is there even such a thing as an ethical, feasible solution at this point?
Peri Lee invited me to accompany them last summer due to my continued passion to identify, research and speak to public architectures of loss and their effects on community. I am not a botanist nor a journalist, but an artist. I’ve spent many years focusing my artistic practice on the process of grief in late-capitalism, and how to create spaces and situations where people can collectively reconcile their mourning. This practice often extends into research and action beyond my creative outlet. It is impossible for me to ignore the correlation between our social infrastructural failures and the destruction of our ecosystems. It felt critical for me to consider the public grief practices we must conceive to speak to what has already been eroded on this planet, and the excruciating extinctions we are watching in real time. I am certain that the people indigenous to this valley have already grieved this land; the Shoshone and Paiute have already performed rites and rituals here. Why would they share one more sacred thing with an outsider, only to have it taken, too? Is it our responsibility as settlers to create our own customs of grief under late-capitalism or to create space for others to grieve the land that is rightfully theirs? Is the act of returning to this place year after year– as it is destroyed, demolished, defaced by capitalism, or as it surprises us in the way nature transforms continually– is the act of returning the mourning ritual? That ultimately feels the most authentic to me. To return is to stay with the pain, to provide love and support until its last breaths, until the next incarnation of this gorgeous landscape.
Through the work I did this summer supporting Pipkin and our continued communication about this project, I have already forged connections to this place whose loss I do not want to mourn–I would prefer to celebrate its protection with a greater number of admirers. The collection P. Lee has spearheaded these past years is itself a monument of mourning–a way to remember in the wake of climate change, water crises, and resource extraction. I’m not sure what the future of this valley is, but it has been a gift to spend hours each day actively noticing every tiny treasure I saw on its surface or flying overhead. If these hand-pressed flowers are all that remain of this place in a hundred years, we should all be heartbroken. But at least we have documented some memory. All living creatures deserve a loving witness. How can we trouble the narratives of progress by noticing? How can we interrupt the myth of technological futurity by allowing a return to stewardship and ensuring an indigenous land-back futurity? Is our collective grief enough to puncture the mechanisms of power, capital, extraction? In the despair of sitting with our geopolitical realities, I implore myself and the reader to consider how we may hospice a beautiful world that has nurtured life for everything around it.
