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Grousing
About You might think searching for sage grouse droppings wouldn't be a great vacation, but you might want to reconsider, especially if you can search with someone who sees more than you're used to seeing. Three of us recently spent five days walking up and down knolls, ridges, dry stream beds, and baking flats with Katie Fite, a biologist who knows and stands up for sagebrush. Big sagebrush has covered vast areas of western U.S. for 30,000 years, and sage grouse, sage thrashers, sage sparrows, Brewer's sparrows, and pygmy rabbits have all come to wholly depend on it. For the last 150 years, however, we've been industriously plowing, chaining, spraying, burning, and grinding up sagebrush.
Sagebrush communities in the West have shrunk to 10 to 50 percent of their former area, and the big sagebrush communities that remain (usually in hot, dry, thin-soiled areas) aren't safe, either. Most are grazed by livestock, which replace sagebrush-associated native plants with exotic, annual cheatgrass. Cheatgrass catches fire as often as every two to three years instead of the 50 to100 year fire intervals to which big sagebrush is adapted. Ranchers, and the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service often respond by tearing out more sagebrush and planting exotic pasture grasses like crested and intermediate wheatgrass. All in all, Big Sagebrush & Associates is in big trouble. Thus I found myself with Katie, and two friends standing in the midst of a seemingly vast, hot sagebrush sea with no sage grouse in sight. Ah, but imagine our excitement when Katie finds one gray and black miniature Cheeto-like droppings on the ground. We break it open to see pale green, chewed-up sagebrush leaves inside. Sage grouse have been here! I search for half-inch long Cheetos amid rocks, shrubs, grasses, and forbs (non-woody, broad-leaved plants). Partway up a sagebrush ridge, Katie finds a set of a dozen or more droppings: A sage grouse has roosted here for the night. Next we find a caecal dropping, which comes from a second intestine-like organ and looks like an inch of shiny black tar, rounded at one end and pointed at the other. The next morning, as we hike across a ranch to access Forest Service land, we see a few droppings by an open ditch. Katie says this ditch has less shrub cover than sage grouse like, but has the green forbs and insects chicks need while young. Further along the ditch, Katie's concern is confirmed: a pile of sage grouse feathers. A few yards beyond that, the almost-smoking gun: a golden eagle feather. Grouse have to use irrigated meadows like this because so many springs have been destroyed by or fenced for cows or piped for humans. (Grouse can't take flight vertically, often crashing into fences). Two sage grouse flush from nearby juniper trees and sagebrush. Heading up the ridge, Katie finds a "clocker." This dropping is about six little Cheetos in one. A sage hen often drops these after sitting long on a nest. On our way to camp for the night, we search an especially tall, dense patch of sagebrush — the type that pygmy rabbits call home and federal agencies call "decadent." Sure enough, Katie finds pellets that might be a pygmy rabbit's — or a young cottontail's. These droppings are about the size of a BB. In a dried stream bed, we find tiny sage grouse droppings with ant parts inside: Chicks were here. I'm loafing as I walk a short distance on a dusty road, but Katie notices sage grouse tracks crossing the road. Then there's the dropping with one yellow petal, as well as sagebrush leaves, inside — a reminder that adult sage grouse expand their diet during summer to include a variety of plants, while never entirely forsaking sagebrush. We move up in altitude the next day — into the sagebrush-bordered springs, seeps, and wet meadows that grouse must find when forbs, with their insects, have dried up below. Sure enough, we find droppings — and the sudden explosive flight of sage grouse from near our feet, the lifting of pointed tail feathers over our heads. Meanwhile, Brewer's sparrows have been calling, an antelope has squeaked at us like a cheap squeeze toy, a Cooper's hawk has spied us from a tree, and each night we watch the sun go down on red cliffs and sink into the beautiful pale green sagebrush sea. All of this with a cool beer in hand, and dinner cooking on our small stove. A sagebrush vacation. Mary O'Brien of Eugene has worked as a public interest scientist since 1981. She can be reached at mob@efn.org
Our
Schools: Cogs in the Machine Nothing better illustrates America's Long War and its non peace-loving policies and priorities than the consistent wealth of funding provided to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) relative to the poorly funded and withering Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Education. And there is no greater hypocrisy than using our institutions of higher education to feed the war machine. Conveniently, the war on terror serves to justify increased outsourcing of defense projects to our schools, reducing budget obstacles faced by the Pentagon. War provides longevity for those adept at projecting fear and power. War or even one attack prevents poll numbers from slipping too low, and keeps weapons deals on the table when buyers such as India, Pakistan, or Indonesia display reluctance. War keeps America running, but only because war was adopted as our way of life. That can and must change — and with a united sense of urgency. At the heart of the Pentagon's strategy for the next 30 years is something called reachback, or killing by remote control. A good example of reachback appeared in a front-page article in The Register-Guard ("Online Killing," 4/21), which described an online-hunting website. Like the Panopticon — a prison of brightly lit cells surrounding a dark central guardhouse (read Pentagon), designed with good intentions by Jeremy Bentham in 1790 — reachback is also the ability to project power and fear by forcing subjects to assume they are being watched, or by compelling subjects to conform to perceived standards. Reachback turns good-natured people into cogs in a war machine whether they know it or not. Reachback is a paycheck mentality that makes workers feel proud to accept promotions from manufacturing ordinary radio tubes to ones that knock out electrical grids of entire cities. Reachback keeps otherwise progressive-minded professors so occupied with one discipline that they fail to interact with the transdisciplinary nature of the human dilemma. Reachback is the war machine on autopilot.
But the best examples of reachback are the battlefields of tomorrow unfolding in our school laboratories today. More than 300 universities are developing weapons for the Pentagon's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, many involving nanotechnology. MIT received an entire installation on campus, the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and USC boasts the Institute for Creative Technologies. Both are among the leaders in developing the FCS Objective Force Warrior. DoD literature speaks glowingly of the program's accomplishments: "Arnold Schwarzennegger as The Terminator has nothing over the Objective Force Warrior." It promises to "develop a high-tech soldier with 20 times the capability of today's warrior by about 2010," by integrating 18 systems into human soldiers. These systems include: graphic displays equaling "two 17-inch computer monitors in front of the soldier's eyes"; thermal sensors; day-night video cameras; chemical and biological warning sensors; auditory enhancement; stealth and self-healing-wound technology; super sneakers that allow soldiers to jump over walls and buildings (Nike incorporated nanotechnology into its shoes in 2001); and microclimate conditioning. Nearly all of these systems already exist. The next and most gruesome "advances" in the FCS program are the ones in development on our campuses: offshoots of DARPA's Persistence in Combat (deep-wound disregard), Continuous Assisted Performance (seven-day stimulant), and Brain Machine Interface (remote-controlled human soldiers) projects. With reachback, not only will soldiers fire their weapons in nearly any direction and have the ammunition guided to their target (perhaps by someone with a joystick in the basement of the White House), but the soldiers themselves will be remote controlled, and not by mere suggestion. Google "brain interface" to see hundreds of pages spun from DARPA's pilot project that was outsourced to the UO and other schools. Google as many subjects in this essay as time permits. (This is your country, and these are your tax dollars at work. DARPA created the Internet, so use it.) And while you're online, type in bme.jhu.edu/labs/nthakor/hongbo/main.htm for a graphic study of "wetware" — in this case controlling rats via brain "hardpacks" (i.e. torture) at Johns Hopkins University, where Paul Wolfowitz is dean of the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. (Assembling the jigsaw pieces of America's permanent war policy is not rocket science; the connections are clear.) Also type in oga.uoregon.edu to see UO's "Federal Priorities" and how closely they fit with our national priority. Note page 12 (Brain Biology and Machine Initiative, Defense Applications), where this document — signed by President Frohnmayer and esteemed subordinates — solicits funds for "optimizing the training and performance of military personnel, such as their ability to function in stressful and complex environments and to improve the integration of human and machine. Examples include developing the ability to 'lock out' undesirable battle responses, or to assess a soldier's suitability to particular military tasks involving aspects such as attention, decision making, emotion, memory, and communication." And I am sincere in saying "esteemed." These highly educated executives are paid to deceive the public with phrases like Green Science. They, like us, are merely cogs in the machine. We are all familiar with oxymoronic programs like Clear Skies and No Child Left Behind. Green Science slaps yet another happy mask on the face of deadly profiteering. As a general UO policy, classified research is not allowed at campus facilities. However, weapons projects are allowed, and any that are classified (secret) can be conveniently shuttled across the street to the Riverfront Research Park. This is reachback. This is America, warrior nation. This is not a peace-loving country, and this is not an enlightened, promising, hopeful use of our schools.
In addition to the intended deadly consequences of defense research, some campus research involves unintended hazards. Nanotechnology, an industry with no standard for safeguards, is called the deadliest industry ever created. Traditional laws of physics cease to apply with particles less than 50 nanometers in size (a human hair is 200,000 nanometers thick): metals become transparent, normally hard substances dissolve, colors change (rachel.org/bulletin/index.cfm?issue_ID=2498). A study released in June 2005 concludes that chemicals long considered safe, such as the widely used wine industry fungicide Vinclozolin (and Methoxychlor, which replaced DDT), when ingested cause severe damage to all four generations down the line. You may never show symptoms, but bad luck for the grandkids (rachel.org/bulletin/index.cfm?St=3). These same chemicals when manufactured using nanotechnology kill on contact. Such "breakthroughs" have opened up fascinating new battlefield possibilities for DARPA, which (with taxpayer dollars) has successfully fashioned small bombs containing billions of flesh-and-bone eating "nanobots" that can target specific human genotypes — a "politically useful tool," according to the Project for the New American Century's 2000 report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century," most of whose 27 signatories, including Paul Wolfowitz, now hold top posts in the Bush administration or at major universities around the country. Unintended consequences of technology are always a problem, but when a nation's prime motive is world domination and profits through military superiority, all life is at risk, and our national motive never sleeps (this is a race against time). As long as the engine of our nation runs on conflict and our top industry is weaponry, we will devote more time and money to killing — and helping other nations to kill — than to the enhancement of life on this planet, and otherwise intelligent people will continue to justify doing so with phrases like Green Science. But the real tragedy of Lincoln's fears coming true is the disempowerment of the people ("and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people"). Look at us flailing to keep head above water, drowning in symptoms like school funding, campaign finance reform, military recruitment on campuses, election reform, the environment, religious extremism, corporate personhood, stagnant education programs, economically challenged people in battle, unjust veteran's benefits, inadequate soldier protection, defense contractor overruns, media manipulation (add your chosen "cause" here, but remember it's a symptom), and on and on — all of them indicative of a war-for-profit society, all of them demanding our time and distracting us from the root cause. Deceptions such as the Cold War, the war on drugs, and the war on terror do not make our communities safer. Their aim is to facilitate war profiteering. Since the 1950 adoption of a permanent war policy, NCS68, without the people's consent, we have been building a military-first, people-last America—and this theft of our country should outrage and unite Americans. Under today's corporate-owned federal government, America controls the world and its own people through fear. It is up to us to reject the power of fear and give birth to a superpower of public opinion. Only by asserting our constitutionally mandated power around the central issue — think about, write about, shout about our permanent war policy — will peace and justice prevail. All it takes is an organized commitment; not only to a wealth of symptoms, but to the root cause. Brian Bogart worked in the defense industry for 15 years. He is now in his fourth year as UO's first graduate student in Peace Studies, and is planning free talks on these topics at 4 pm Aug. 12, 19, 26 and Sept. 2, 9 at 128 Chiles Hall across from the UO Bookstore. To help fund and complete his project, IntelligentFuture.org, contact him at bbogart@uoregon.edu
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