Lithium Wars in Nevada + Dead & Company Shines in SF
Is the Thacker Pass lithium mine in line with a Green New Deal or is it Green Colonialism? Plus the Dead & Company deliver a special finale in San Francisco.
My latest environmental justice story is a sequel to a story I reported for EnviroNews in 2021 about the controversial lithium mining project at Thacker Pass in Northern Nevada. Proponents say that Lithium Nevada’s mine is part of a “Green” agenda to procure lithium needed for electric vehicle batteries, to help America transition away from fossil fuels. But conservationists and indigenous land & water protectors argue that there’s nothing green about a massive strip mine that’s going to harm the ecosystem in multiple ways. See:
Lithium Wars Pt. 2: Teepee Camp Raided, Native Woman Arrested, Lawsuits Fly in Battle over Thacker Pass Lithium Mine in Nevada - 8/6/23
What seems revealing about this project is how the federal permit was granted in the final week of the Trump regime’s reign of terror against the environment, yet the Biden administration has also gone along with it.
“The only thing that’s actually green about the Thacker Pass mine is the color of the money the project would make for its wealthy investors,” lamented Kelly Fuller, Energy and Mining Campaign Director for Western Watersheds Project (WWP), when Trump’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved it…
Moving along, the month of July had some great live music highlighted by a special event in San Francisco where Dead & Company wrapped up what was billed as their “Final Tour” with a sensational three-night stand at the San Francisco Giants’ Oracle Park. If the GD50 Fare Thee Well shows in Santa Clara and Chicago in 2015 were like the Conference Championship and Super Bowl of Grateful Dead, these shows were like the World Series. Yours truly was blessed to score press tix for the run and wrote about the whole weekend for PopMatters (also blessed to get permission to use some great pics from band photographer Jay Blakesberg):
DEAD & COMPANY SHINE IN FINALE AT SAN FRANCISCO’S ORACLE PARK
https://www.popmatters.com/dead-company-finale-san-francisco
I was looking for a good quote from Jerry Garcia to try to sum up what’s still so special about Grateful Dead music after all these years and I found what I was looking for in a 1967 television interview, where a news team visited the band at their Haight-Ashbury home in SF during the “Summer of Love”. When asked about “the goals of the hippie movement”, Garcia said, “What we’re thinking about is a peaceful planet” and “moving the whole human race ahead a step.” That to me really sums up how the Grateful Dead scene has already been a step ahead of the rat race all along…
"The Hippie Temptation": Grateful Dead Interview.