Indigenous tribes seek to preserve sacred places on lands that were theirs for 700 generations, and to live their yearly ceremonial practices in the solitude they deserve, until we appeared 8 or 10 generations ago. Tribes inhale sharply, and wait, poised to act. Ancient, fragile archeological monuments and inscriptions are hidden, shaded under cliffs, or undiscovered to date, remaining for ceremony.
Mining’s hideous legacies that remain as testimonies to callous indifference corporate profiteers hold to the health and welfare of human populations down-aquifer, up-airshed, and to anyone foolish enough not to bring a geiger counter.
Wildlife among stumps where forests once stood; hikers seeking solitude, confronted by roaring 4-wheelers on newly scraped off-road recreational dust bowls; placid lakes reflect moon’s image only in grandfather’s memories. Bison, caribou and muskox seek in vain for alternative routes to seasonal forage below glaciated peaks, permafrost melting. Fish in warming trickles swim in circles in muddy discharge from culverts and diversion dams that block the way to the spawning brooks of their evolutionary ancestors. Haul trucks hammer roadbed on hundred-foot-wide road, transporting copper ore 211 miles across 3,000 rivers and rivulets, over and over, until the Place is dead. That’s what Trump wants: Oblivion. Only rubble. East Wing gold only for exclusive mobs, they too oblivious to poisons that await them by design in their medieval citadels.

These and a thousand other scenarios are the inevitable consequences of privatization of Public Lands across the country, from Florida to Alaska, from California to the Great Lakes states and on to New England.

Engineers learn early on to suppress ecological compassion, in favor of the will and wages of far away mega-corporations, who seek in turn only the extractive commodities of the day, heaping wastes in acidifying piles, discarding the 99 percent they do not want, confident that public oversight cannot access scientific monitoring data adequate to prove claims of meaningful inadequacies, much less outright violations, with sufficient agility to hold them accountable. Worker communities live echoes of slavery, subjugated by AI in Toxi-Lago, succumbing to cancers and neurological ills years, decades and, likely, for centuries after corporations are gone, after government oversight agencies have been iteratively defunded, dissolved, reinstated, voted in, then out, forgotten by our culture of contamination, through cycle after cycle of neglect.

Milankovitch cycles pass. Glaciers and deserts come and go, parching pathetic humans into the extinctions they have earned. Democracy? There, several gray shale bands down in red sandstone strata from 20,000 years ago, are scattered fragments of plastic components that failed to help us sound alarms so we could hear. PFAS-saturated drinking water treatment plants, drill rig skeletons and carbon fuels slag, freeway concrete and gravel fill, herbicides and pesticides for food cultivation to fend off out-of-balance insect populations we were too lazy to understand, much less seek in harmony; nuclear neighborhood power generation components — all these and much, much more are revealed, weathering out from cliffsides never to be forgiven, pain never to be approached by such an ignorant creature, this most invasive of invasive species ever to walk this Earth, or at the last, to crawl, to wallow, to cry out, to moan.

Now, Live Recovers.

Thanks, Aaron Weiss!

Ivan Weber, Principal/Owner (retired for community advocacy)
Weber Sustainability Consulting
953 E. 1st Avenue
Salt Lake City, UT 84103
801-651-8841
ivan@webersustain.com