You probably know Brett Netson from his work with Built To Spill and Caustic Resin. Now he’s back with the excellent Scavenger Cult EP, credited to Brett Netson & Snakes. Netson will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
Netson: Out here in the West, there is a lot of open space, and we may have fucked up in bringing cattle out here from Europe or wherever all we immigrants came from. For 100 years or so, we’ve been tearing this whole area apart. Cattle are not supposed to be here. They need too much water and eat the shit out of every piece of native grass in their path. Buffalo, however, are way more suited to the ecology of this continent. They eat less, drink less and don’t like to stay in one place for very long. This is indeed the home where the buffalo roam. There were millions and millions of them for thousands of years and were decimated to eradicate the Native American population and make room for big business.
I’m not a vegetarian, and I love the fuck out of hamburgers and butter, but we had maybe want to chill the fuck out on the 99-cent hamburgers for sale in every square inch of this place. You see, the cattle industry wants the bison dead and gone. This is all about the control of grass and public lands. It’s just easier for big-biz agriculture to be rid of all that unpredictable, wild-animal bullshit. Forcing the land to suit the needs of a non-native species (cattle) has taken its toll and there may be large areas that will never come back. This is a grass war and the myth of the “cowboy” as “steward of the land” is total bullshit. It’s all about money (grass), and it’s the means to an end. The end being super weeds and super disease in the scorched and barren plains. I tell ya folks, when wilderness and public land go away, it often doesn’t come back. They can raise whatever they want on private property, but stay off public land. This land is your land, this land is my land.
There are two kinds of people in this world, and I’m one of them. I think we ought to prioritize wilderness for the sake of our survival. Public land is not a quaint notion that gets used in still photography for a cellphone commercial. It is where all life and beauty and food are from. I will fight for public land and wildlife. That is, when I’m done listening to this Byrds record and making big statements on the Internet. In the meantime, there are people doing the work of protecting us from destroying ourselves.
Buffalo Field Campaign‘s mission is to stop the slaughter of Yellowstone’s wild buffalo herd, protect the natural habitat of wild free-roaming buffalo and native wildlife, and to work with people of all nations to honor the sacredness of the wild buffalo.
Western Watersheds Project is a nonprofit environmental conservation group founded in 1993. It has more than 1,500 members and field offices in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Arizona, California and Oregon. WWP works to influence and improve public lands management throughout the West with a primary focus on the negative impacts of livestock grazing on 250 million acres of western public lands, including harm to ecological, biological, cultural, historic, archeological, scenic resources, wilderness values, roadless areas, wilderness study areas and designated Wilderness.
Video after the jump.
