Juliee de la Terre holds an MS from the Gaylord Nelson Institute for environmental studies at University of Wisconsin Madison. She has been an activist since she was a child helping her mother care for injured wildlife. She owned a chemical free landscaping business for almost two decades which emphasized removing lawns and restoring native plants. As an environmental consultant she assisted the Ho-Chunk Nation in efforts to design and implement an place based ecological immersion project on their land near Black River Falls with the intention of immersing young tribal members in nature while learning their language and culture. Recently, she assisted Ho-Chunk Tribal member William Greendeer in introducing the Rights of Nature into the Ho-Chunk constitution. She maintains her bog called “Sacred Water Sacred Land” about the sacredness of al things and also “Heart of the Ho-Chunk” with William Greendeer about Ho-Chunk culture and the environment. She is a professor of natural science at Viterbo University. ...

Editors Note: this article is written by our good friend Vincent Emanuele, an Iraq-war veteran who testified during the Winter Soldier hearings and has been at the forefront of radical resistance to U.S. imperialism. He brings a powerful, unique perspective on the violence of this culture. We invite you to consider his words. By Vince Emmanuele The Left needs to be resilient and serious, because the future isn’t going to be nonviolent. ...

Buffalo are still absent here in the Hebgen Basin. Patrols are conducting daily recons, searching through the buffalo’s migration corridors, but the gentle giants are keeping themselves out of Montana and, consequently, safe from the killers. Along Yellowstone’s north boundary, in the Gardiner Basin, buffalo haven’t been so lucky. Another eight buffalo have been killed by Confederated Salish & Kootenai (CSKT) hunters who are “harvesting” ecologically extinct wild bison because they have a treaty right to do so. We would suggest that the CSKT and other tribes who hold treaty rights to the Yellowstone region also have a right to healthy, viable populations of wild bison on all federally unoccupied, unclaimed lands. And we would further suggest that the Interagency Bison Management Plan, which is driving the destruction of America’s last continuously wild buffalo herds, is not only violating the lives of wild buffalo, but violating treaty rights as well. ...

Here is an average morning inside of this culture.First, you wake up on top of a foam mattress offgassing toxic VOCs that will not biodegrade in 10,000 years. You sit up and put on your clothes — all with tags reading “Bangladesh” and “Puerto Rico” and “Dominican Republic.” These clothes were made by virtual slaves.You walk downstairs and fill a glass with water from the tap. The water comes from a local river that was dammed 127 years ago. Ever since, native species in the watershed have been in decline. You drink the water.You pour yourself a bowl of cereal. The cereal is made of wheat and corn grown in what was once the tallgrass prairie of the eastern Great Plains. Ninety nine percent of that habitat – millions of acres – was plowed and utterly destroyed to grow those crops. The soil is gone now; your meal is only possible through fossil fuel fertilizers. ...

The Castle Rock Prairie Dogs are Gone: Open Letter from an Exile By Jennifer Murnan, DGR Colorado I wore this shirt, long-sleeved, multi-patterned, funky, well tailored hand-me-down for almost every day I worked on the prairie dog relocation at the “Promenade” site in Castle Rock Colorado. The “Promenade” site was only that in the avaricious life-sucking minds of the capitalist pig developers. The “site” was really a scrap of prairie community, a last survivor already lacerated by monstrous earth movers, surrounded by apartments, highway, box stores, a mall, parking lots—anti-life. ...

Here is a familiar fact to many people across the United States and the world: the Redwoods of Northern California are the tallest trees in the world at nearly 400 feet. This is both true and false. It’s true because right now the redwoods are the tallest trees. But it’s false because not long ago, that wasn’t the case. The tallest known redwood is 379 feet tall. But historical accounts are full of references to Douglas Fir trees 400 feet tall and more. One tree in the lower North Fork of the Nooksack River Valley is thought to have been 465 feet tall, probably the largest known tree ever recorded anywhere on the planet. And it wasn’t alone. ...

Editor’s note: this recent study found that Coho salmon are killed within hours by the runoff from roads in Seattle — and researchers aren’t sure exactly what compound (or mixture) is responsible. One thing is for sure: runoff is a minor problem compared to the main threats to salmon: dams, industrial overfishing, logging, and global warming. These threats — especially dams — are responsible for the major decline from historic salmon numbers in this region, which has cascading effects on the dozens of animal species, hundreds of insect species, and countless plants and other creatures that benefit from the salmon spawning. For the salmon to recover, yes - runoff must be stopped. But most importantly, the dams MUST come down. ...

Over the past 10 years, development and increased population in Seattle has been sparked by a huge influx of high-paid, mostly white, mostly tech-sector employees into the city. Amazon.com is a large driver of this change. Because of this influx (about 14,000 new residents per year), rent has skyrocketed, house availability has declined greatly, and rising property taxes and prices are driving out the poor — and especially people of color — to the outskirts and to other cities. This is having a huge impact on communities like the CD (or Central District). This video explains some of the impact in the CD in the words of local residents: [vimeo 122209635 w=500 h=281] ...

We aren’t that interested in personal purity. Of course we should all try to be good people, but politically it’s more important that we band together and use our power to force political and social change. This can happen in all sorts of different ways, but one of the most time-tested is the strike: workers banding together to fight against the management class. Much labor organizing has been co-opted into a simple struggle for middle-class privilege. But in a city with skyrocketing costs of living, teachers who work their hands to the bone (60 hours a week isn’t uncommon) to try to help the next generation deserve a wage increase. But we’re extra happy to see teachers fighting back against racist standardized testing systems and the school to prison pipeline that disproportionately enforces strong punishments among youth of color in our community. ...

Railroad ties are leeching contaminants and toxins into the environment: Link: http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/bnsf-railway-fined-for-treated-railroad-ties-in-water/ – Lierre Keith, Deep Green Resistance co-founder, recently wrote one of the most powerful articles that we have read in a long, long time. Her piece, titled The Girls and the Grasses, is like poetry. We invite you to read it here: Link: http://dgrnewsservice.org/2015/08/25/lierre-keith-the-girls-and-the-grasses/ – Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International writes about the colonial and racist origins of the “conservation” movement. His organization helps push an alternate perspective. ...