The stickiness of our beliefs. The need for repetition. The power of propaganda. These 3 short sentences sum up a main reason we activists do what we do — and have our work cut out for us. Just about everything I’ve written in this essay I’ve written before. More like 50 times before. But if …
It’s all the rage these days for just about everyone, every company, every contractor, every consultant, every government agency doing the usual, everyday destruction to the land to claim their actions are actually benefitting Mother Nature. And that if they don’t do that “management” or “restoration” or “treatment” or “stewardship” something, Mother Nature will be …
Question: What could you call a gathering of vegan activists? Meaning, a name for a group of human animal-lovers equivalent to a herd of elephants, a murder of crows, a gaggle of geese? My technophile brother asked ShatGPT. (He also likes Google’s Demon-I. But hey, no judgment; doesn’t every human now turn off their organic …
Even the most outrageous lies that defy your own common sense can infect your thinking, do an end run around your reasoning powers, and ultimately alter your beliefs, if you hear the lies often enough, from multiple sources, for years. This is how propaganda works, just ask any student of WW2 — or arguably any war, …
The filmmakers who brought you the environmental documentary films, “Kiss the Ground” (2020) and “Common Ground” (2023), which tout the legitimate benefits of chemicals-free “farming,” are at it again with their 3rd film, “Groundswell” (June 5, 2026 release date). They do offer some valuable ecological guidance, rightly disparaging our corporate-backed chemical/poisons dependency to grow food …
The Cattle Empire Strikes Back in Point Reyes Again. Again. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into Point Reyes National Seashore, finally, with thousands fewer cows compacting and desiccating the land, damaging all manner of vegetation, and polluting park streams and lagoons with manure and urine, the beef and dairy cattle …
Sky-Jack Podcast #72: 9am (PT) Tuesday, April 7th, 2026 Not really alive, but definitely not dead, the Point Reyes ranchers have risen again, walking the halls of government. And talking to breathe life back into the corpse of their dying “small, historic, multi-generational, organic-certified, polluting, climate-heating, animal-torturing” businesses. Just when you thought it was safe to …
February-March 2026 – For over 60 years, dairy and beef cows have continued to ransack — compact, de-vegetate, desiccate, trample, and pollute with manure — almost 20,000 acres of the Point Reyes National Seashore‘s over 70,000 acres, despite being designated a national park back in 1962. VIDEO: “Restoring” land damaged by cows – with …
I had the privilege of participating in a lively panel discussion with 3 fellow vegan activists — and vegan moderator — the president of the San Francisco Vegan Society — for a chock-full 90 minutes on March 3, 2026. Each of us specializes in working in a different (though overlapping) sector of the vegan and …
I rarely write purely political newsletters or blogposts, but I feel this issue is important enough to justify this diversion, so I’m wading into the murky, lurid waters of Trump and Trumpism and the Trumpstein files too. I can frame this as my being pro-environment, pro planetary health, pro climate crisis mitigation, pro animal rights, …
If you read just one article on the climate emergency and how it intersects with food production and the holy cow, read this August 2nd, 2023 blogpost by George Monbiot: https://www.monbiot.com/2023/08/02/all-hat-and-no-cattle/ Monbiot touches on several interrelated issues which TreeSpirit repeatedly focuses on, because they’re so damned important: the climate crisis (aka, global warming), deforestation, and, …
Rearranging deck chairs on the titanic cattle industry. Today’s modern cattle “range management” techniques like “adaptive” management” and “regenerative ranching” are, cattle industry boosters tell us, are informed by “range science.” And since science is truth and goodness (and it is), then any technique in the cattle or energy or coal industry with the word …
Wild animal slaughter on an unprecedented scale Bluntly put, the public is being misled (aka, lied to) about why 450,000 magnificent, wild, American-born barred owls are now being hunted and killed in the forests of California, Oregon and Washington State. This massive, slaughter, unprecedented in scope, is now ongoing, and will continue for the next 30 …
Senator (above) John Kennedy took to the Senate floor Tues., Oct. 28, 2025 and spent over 23 mins. to colorfully eviscerate $1.3 billion U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service plan to shoot to death 450,000 barred owls. Owl-killing would take place over 30 years, ongoing, across all three western states (CA, OR, WA), and be the …
If you’ve read any of TreeSpirit’s posts in the last few years, you’ve likely noticed a broken record repetition of a few themes. One is that logging — which is deforestation by many of its trendy new (fool-the-public) names like “thinning,” “managing” and “restoring” — always degrades forests. Whenever bureaucracies “apply” their “treatments” to allegedly …
Demonizing the Ancient, Wild Feminine to Justify the Controlling, Destructive Masculinity of Industrial “Man-age-ment” The title above is a mouthful, yet a more accurate title for this essay. But I feared it too abstract and woo-woo for a general audience, despite it being more broadly accurate and pointing to deeper anxieties and psychological maladies of …