THE SUBTLE NATURAL BEAUTY AND RICH BIODIVERSITY OF THACKER PASS, NEVADA
A misguided environmental movement values electric cars more than the ecosystems that support living species like the pronghorn antelope, cougars, bobcats, golden eagles and the pacific tree frog.
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From a conversation with Max Wilbert of “Protect Thacker Pass” and co-author of Bright Green Lies. For the entire conversation, please click on the link to the YouTube video.
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HART HAGAN: You have been working to protect the place called Thacker Pass. Tell us what's going on at Thacker Pass in Nevada.
MAX WILBERT: Thacker Pass is this incredibly beautiful sagebrush steppe area in the northern Great Basin. It's called the Great Basin because all the water drains inward and then evaporates. There are no rivers that lead to the ocean. It's a basin, like a bathtub.
The whole area used to be a large inland sea tens of thousands of years ago. The Great Basin is now dry lake beds. There's a lot of rain that flows into these dry lake beds. It's a pretty dry place. It's not technically a desert. It's actually a steppe which is similar to the Mongolian steppe or the Asian steppe in parts of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
It's a very bio diverse region. It's not something that a lot of people recognize as ecologically important because if you just drive through on the freeway at 80 miles an hour, you might not see the wildlife.
You might not recognize what's actually happening there. But there are hundreds and hundreds of species who live in Thacker Pass, including the greater sage-grouse, this iconic bird species who are incredibly beautiful and are preparing to do their spring mating dances pretty soon, here in early April. They are 98% gone since the colonization of North America began.
You have the pronghorn antelope, the fastest land animal in North America. They are the second fastest on the planet after the cheetah. They are incredibly beautiful animals who migrated through Thacker Pass regularly.
You have mule deer, cougars, bobcats and spotted skunks. You have golden eagles. You have sage thrashers, ferruginous hawks and prairie falcons. You have a horned lizards and pacific tree frogs. It’s shocking that you'll find tree frogs out in this dry region. But they're there.
You have a snail species called the King’s River pyrg, which is an endemic species, meaning it only lives in Thacker Pass.
You have sagebrush that grows to be hundreds of years old. It's really an old growth forest, that rarely gets taller than your hip.
What a lot of people don't recognize about this area is that life is happening in a different scale, in a different way, in a different manner than in a place like the Amazon rainforest, or the Redwoods, where the beauty and the biodiversity and the cycles of life are in your face and impossible to ignore.
Life is a little more subtle at Thacker Pass, but it's incredibly beautiful. It's also very culturally significant to the tribes. It's a watershed that's very significant for the farmers and all the people who live in the area who rely on the drinking water from the snow that gathers in Thacker Pass.
It's a place that I fell in love with after visiting it. So learning that it was going to become an open pit mine, because of the capture of the environmental movement, because of the corporate co-opting of the climate movement into supporting things like lithium mining because lithium goes into electric vehicle batteries.
I felt like nobody else--or at least very few people--were going to fight for this place unless I stood up and did something about it. So my heart called me to start fighting for Thacker Pass, and that's what we've been doing for more than two years now.