On Juristac
A Golden Eagle soaring over the Sargent Hills.
*For background on the recent history of Juristac and the currently-proposed mining activities, see Protect Juristac*
To whom it may concern:
I suppose that's the crux of the issue—to whom is Juristac of concern?
Concern is a frequent word in the discourse of conservation. In the framework of the IUCN, abundant species with apparently-stable populations are of Least Concern. In the State of California, badgers are a species of Special Concern. In these usages, "concern" carries connotations of worry or anxiety; some indication of a problem. The etymological root of "concern" (shared with "discern") means to sift—to separate that which does not merit attention from that which does. What aspects of Juristac are of concern to the State?
By "the State", I don't mean only the political State, but also the network of linked bureaucracies needed to grease the skids for commerce to gain extractive access to this land: County-level government, distressed-asset financiers, and of course the commercial mining entities themselves. I also include the systems of environmental regulation that are our primary avenue for adding friction to this process, but which often amount to little more than a slightly less-slippery brand of grease.
"The State" also includes a set ideological commitments—ideas that motivate and stabilize its representatives' claims to power and legitimacy. Perhaps most important of these ideas is the precedent set by colonists who asserted a de facto claim to California's lands as an ownable substance—a colossal swindle. It's important to remember how recently this sleight-of-thought occurred: Just a handful of human lifetimes ago, the people who dwelt here would have considered the idea non-sensical. But in modern America, ownership of land is such a deep background assumption that it's almost impossible to discern it as a distinct claim. Of course the land cannot be ownerless!
How is it that we have so completely accepted a landscape divvied up into parcels and sold as a commodity? James Scott’s concept of a State’s sense of sight lies at the heart of the issue: The State collapses the complexity of the world simply in order to see it.
The idea of an un-demarcated expanse of rocks, water, and living creatures seems to trigger a kind of agoraphobia in the heart of American civil organization. Reading through Scott’s work, makes clear the inherent structural difficulties bare land. poses to the State. How could a State see land without borders? Worse yet, how could the State ascribe value to land without recourse to metrics? Numbers are the objective rubric for nearly all questions in American life. Actuarial tables inform insurance policies, lawsuits award damages in the form of some number of dollars (perhaps this proxy for justice is the best a materialist culture can do?), and annual rankings of individuals' net worth are definitely of concern. They are the basic unit of the State’s vision. Much of academic environmental theory is also stuck in this paradigm: Organisms provide ecosystem services, and their loss amounts to certain dollar-value costs to human activities. Which is to say, those particular organisms are of concern.
Crucially, that which is not readily quantified lies outside the limited band of wavelengths that the State can see, and thus is at great risk of being excluded from the State's concern. Hence my reluctance to dwell on any particular species' population numbers, statistically-wrangled habitat models, nor on any legal designations within the codex of environmental bureaucracy. My goal is not to reiterate to the State what it can already See. To do so would be to accept a narrowed scope for my condemnation of the proposed Sargent Quarry. We are already at risk of losing physical ground to it; we shouldn't yield the mental terrain as well.
Returning then to the question To whom is Juristac of concern? I also add: What aspects of Juristac might they be unable to see?
Maybe it will come as a surprise when I say that I don't think Juristac is "of concern" to the badgers that live there. But to my mind, that would trivialize it. For them, the land cannot be "sifted out" from some background of things to be concerned with. It is their entire world. The land we call Juristac sustains their existence—it is viscerally and profoundly their home in a way most of us can scarcely imagine, accustomed as we are to the shabby concepts of rental agreements and “real estate”. The badgers can’t come to city council meetings and stand on their hind legs and quibble about the details of the EIR. Juristac is not "of concern" to its Red-legged Frogs. They live bare lives: Un-negotiated, never offered a dotted line to sign, and yet subject to the machinations of the State around them. When, despite the best-laid plans of mines and men, accidental runoff escapes the borrow-pits and clogs the narrow riparian corridor with silt, the Red-legged frogs of Sargent Creek will disappear into memory. This is the tragic grace of non-human life: It will suffer through change until it can’t, and then it will simply blink out.
Thus, cut by pragmatic cut, we will bear witness to further degradation of California's remaining wild lands for the rest of our lives.
I'm not oblivious to the demands of California's growing cities—and it is in this sense that the raw-material resources of Juristac are of concern to the state. But as a society, we shouldn’t make these concessions simply because they are demanded—this leaves us in a perpetual hostage situation. The global scramble for gravel and riverine sand (indispensable as these materials are for the production of concrete) has become increasingly well-known. The problem, and it is a serious problem, is an area of active investigation and critique, and has been publicized across a variety of media. The collateral outcomes of this scramble have been brutal, including large-scale destruction of habitats and the rise of violent organized crime rings, but worst of all, continued access to supply “by any means necessary” is an enormous opportunity cost— it inhibits us from innovating ways to draw down our consumption, and instead accelerates us headlong into deepening crisis.
The ethical way forward is to retreat from our insistence on further extraction. This is also, in a long-term sense, the practical way forward. How can we recycle the concrete that we have already produced? Can we do with less? Do we actually need to build more, or are we mentally trapped in the status quo of expansion? Creative solutions might be at hand, but they will require us to take the risk to reach for them. The Sargent Hills lie within the same county that encompasses Silicon Valley—one of the most remarkable concentrations of human brainpower on the planet. This resource could certainly be turned towards finding generative solutions to these problems if the State effectively incentivized it.
My opinion on this EIR was solicited because I'm ostensibly a biologist. More accurately, I'm a resident local naturalist with an abiding interest in the ecology of the Monterey Bay bioregion. So, if you want my take on the ecological consequences of the Sargent Quarry project, here it is.
The western Sargent Hills
Over a decade, I've spent spring mornings, summer evenings, and drizzly winter afternoons in and around the alkaline grassland of Soda Lake—just a short walk west of the Sargent Hills, and a contiguous part of the habitat corridor that is at stake. I have seen the swales of native barley and the alkali mallow there, I have heard the otherworldly songs of flocks of Tricolored Blackbirds, and I have marveled at the Golden Eagles for whom these prairies are still rich enough to feed from all winter.
But I have also seen the immediately-adjacent patch of land: Surrounded by a high berm, piled with tailings from the already-existing Granite Rock quarry. This quarry, by the way, is a sight so dismal that a row of redwoods was planted along the bordering highway to screen it from the view of travelers. But the boughs of those sacrificial trees have thinned over years of drought, gradually revealing the scene of despoliation they were meant to conceal. Nature is not content to let us hide from our own mess. I have seen the long-term trajectory of these tailings: An expanse of impoverished dirt interrupted by huge clumps of invasive pampas grass and a sorry handful of weeds. The contrast with the native grasslands and hills nearby is stark.
Thus, I find the plans for restoration of Sargent Quarry after 30 years of heavy-machinery operations to be a convenient fantasy. In the biological consulting industry, it is a dirty but open secret that the majority of mitigation and restoration schemes are pathetically under-monitored in any long-term sense and many prove to be abject failures even in the short run.
This should all come as no surprise. Habitats are the emergent result of millennia of interactions between species and geologic processes. The intense disturbance of extraction combined with the modern pressures of climate change and invasive species make it a certainty that nothing like the Juristac of today will return in the footprint of a decades-long mining operation.
Intimations of all this can be found in the Sargent Quarry Environmental Impact Report, and in more scientific terms: The report is replete with numbers. But numbers, even when they paint a dire picture, are a reassurance to the State and the financiers because numbers can be seen. Formalizations of value, risk, and mitigation are legible and digestible to the State's mechanisms. Numbers chart a clear course for action: Summon the attorneys. Assemble the biological consultants. Together they will do arcane math to neutralize harm and quiet all objections. As the CA Chaparral Institute phrases it: “Environmental Assessments and Environmental Impact Statements are written to create legally defensible documents to allow agencies to log and clear the habitat in the manner they want, not to objectively determine if a project should be rejected because it causes excessive environmental harm.”
Despite my role as a biologist, someone who might be most preoccupied with species-level impacts, what concerns me most about Juristac are the things that the State cannot see—the things that the economy must not see if it is to forge ahead with an air of pretend-legitimacy.
The Amah Mutsun are not “federally recognized”. The State, as such, literally does not see them. But it is the voices of the Amah Mutsun that remind us what we could be sensitive to if we chose to be. We could deem it of concern that we risk disfiguring a place of great power and beauty, a particular and sacred wrinkle on the face of God.
For those who are uncomfortable with this quaint notion of divinity or transcendence, I hope at least that some sense of humanism and ethical obligation might remain. It is almost too on-the-nose that it is the Debt Acquisition Company of America applying for a mining permit at Juristac. Can the State pretend that it is not already the inheritor of a desperate moral debt to attend to?
The year is 2022, and the history of violent subjugation and dispossession of California's indigenous peoples by church and State is brutally clear to anyone not willfully shielding that mess from their sight. The consequence of this understanding is equally clear:
Juristac is an opportunity for the State to refuse to do violence to Amah Mutsun culture.
This is a matter of justness and righteousness. How could I ever substantiate this claim in a way that the State could see? Is there any figure I could provide that would provoke the State into right relation with these people and this land? Is it possible for the State to act on an unquantified conscience? Or is it too old-fashioned to think that people can heed the voice in the back of their head that whispers: We shouldn't be doing this.
Science has done its work. It has shown, in its own admittedly powerful way, that the hour is late. The data have been gathered and analyzed ad nauseum, and we have been warned of the urgency with which we must begin to repair the damage we have done to the natural world. But science alone cannot help us anymore: Its framework of reduction and quantification allows developers to be agnostic to any particulars of land that are invisible to its senses—a conclusion greatly appreciated by the State. This has led to the great falsehood that underpins the logic of mitigation: That any two pieces of land might ever be interchangeable.
The modality of science has proven susceptible to capture by our culture's modus operandi of action, of endless doing: If we do harm, we can balance it by "doing" an equal restoration. Can the State come to realize that justice also comes in the form of non-action? That what it should do is to leave Juristac alone? Or, if it must be framed in terms of action, that it should act to protect Juristac from extraction and return it to its ancestral stewards? By doing so, it would not only tip the scales (however modestly) in favor of figuring out new ways to meet societal needs without succumbing to the abusive demand for new extraction, but simultaneously (and even more modestly) begin to atone for its inherited legacy of cultural erasure.
This guidance to do the right thing is being offered to us by a people who still remember how to live among the energetic flows that emerge from the land and which permeate their bodies and culture. They are pleading for the State to see.
When you, to whom it may concern, sit in that inevitable meeting and weigh the numbers (there will be lots of them), you will be asked to make a decision. The facts you are presented will be focused through your particular moral lens. I hope that what I have written helps you to understand that you are free to consider things that cannot be quantified; that remain unseen to the State.
You can decide to let Juristac be a sheltering place for the Amah Mutsun, a place to rekindle some of their ceremonies and their lifeways. You can decide to let the land and the people find each other again. You can let them rest, let them recover, let them be.
Christian Schwarz
Santa Cruz
September 2022
References:
Scott, James C. Seeing like a State. Yale University Press, 2020.