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 …
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, …
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 …
Modern foresters insist they are “tending the forest” just like Native Americans did — but with chainsaws, masticating machines and herbicides. First things first: the so-called ‘foresters’ of the so-called ‘forestry’ industry should more accurately be called ‘de-foresters’ in a ‘de-forestry.’ This isn’t meant to be snide so much as it is factual. Despite the …
You probably don’t know it, but there is a war going on, right now, right here, in lovely, peaceful, sylvan, wild animal-friendly, environmentally-minded California. But it’s being sold to you, the public, with so many Orwellian euphemisms, you aren’t aware of it. It is mankind’s War on Mother Nature herself. To focus on just one …
What’s worse than a 1,000-acre industrial deforestation project billed as a “forest health initiative?” Even as environmental activists and wild animal advocates are working to educate the public about an existing project consisting of hacking into and poisoning (with herbicides) 1,000 acres of Tomales Bay State Park in Marin County, CA, the agencies entrusted with …
While advocating for the irreplaceable value of trees and wild, unmanaged forests, and while advocating for wild lands free of the ravaging impact of domesticated cattle (i.e., dairy and beef cows grazed for profit), a common theme emerges. Cow farmers and so-called foresters, it turns out, have much in common. When the massive environmental damage …
Forest “management” effort @ Tomales Bay State Park panned by environmentalists This article in a local Marin County newspaper, The Marin Independent Journal, is already two years old, but still relevant today. This deforestation project is still in process, and work may begin as early as autumn of this year (2025). The details of the …
Time to turn off the TV news and re-read 1984. Or Brave New World (order). I don’t know about you, but I’m still in shock and grief is still only on the horizon in the distance of January 2025. Fear will come, too, but no rush – – there are over a thousand days …
The essay below, by Rick Halsey, Director of the California Chaparral Institute of San Diego County, CA is an excerpt of a letter to the California Coastal Commission, reprinted with permission from the author. Bolding added by TreeSpirit Project. The forest destruction project @ Tomales Bay State Park: GUEST ESSAY by: Rick Halsey, Director The …
Orwell’s forest PHOTO: The lush, dense, wild forest at Tomales Bay State Park, Marin County, CA. Word choice matters. Getting others to use words of your choosing is a powerful method of influencing not only their speech — but their thinking. George Orwell wrote: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” With this …
Question: How do logging companies justify increasing logging operations in our climate crisis (which is created by logging)? Answer: Yell, “WILDFIRE DANGER!” and break out the chainsaws. Right now, when we need more trees more than ever, the timber industry is expanding its logging operations — by exploiting the public’s very real (and understandable) fear of wildfire. Lobbying …