California | The Sheepeater

Planet Jackson Hole didn’t have room to print my recent short letter to their editor, but they found a few pages to reprint a drought-bound powderhound’s pity party. The timely column “Climate Change Is My Fault” came at the tail end of the fourth consecutive Tahoe winter skinnier and more depressing than watching anorexic egomaniacs stumble around Coachella.

The snow sucked in Wyoming, but at least we got some. California got skunked. By March 10th over 20 west coast resorts had closed for the season due to lack of snow. Some never opened at all.

What act of god or ungodly act of man delivered this devastating blow to small ski areas and to US snow sports? Apparently it was SNOWBOARD Magazine Senior Editor Nate Deschenes.

In Called Out: Climate Change Is My Fault Nate blames himself for climate change and encourages readers to feel a personal sense of responsibility for the lack of snow and wacky weather. Nate says:

[T]he situation with our weather is most likely past the point of any corrective mitigation…

I almost feel guilty for enjoying the outdoors as much as I do. I feel like without a punch card validating your contribution to the environment you should have to stay inside and watch TV or something equally as disturbing…

Like it or not, the situation is at the point where anyone not actively doing something to raise awareness and help provide solutions (myself included), however minuscule or hopeless it may seem, is part of the problem. We may not have asked to bear the burden of previous generations greed and miseducation but it is nonetheless our responsibility to correct their shortsightedness, and unfortunately, this is not up for debate…

What I’m trying to say is that I feel just as responsible for global warming as anyone…

But then again this could simply be an anomalous weather pattern that has set up for the past four seasons. It has happened before, and there’s obviously nothing to it. I’m sure Bill O’Reilly will side with me here.

Ahh, that’s better — good ‘ol red-blooded ignorance — that’ll never run dry.

The column reads like a cry for help.

It sounds like Nate is suffering from a mild case of MC: Metathesiophobia Climatica (fear of a changing climate). Nate is publicly displaying MC’s most common symptoms: feelings of guilt and hopelessness punctuated by occasional moments of climate change denial revealing a sarcastic and self-defeating sense of humor.

Be careful folks: MC is very contagious, none of us are immune, and an epidemic is sweeping the nation. Unlike most diseases, MC does not prey on the poor. In fact it most commonly afflicts successful, privileged, wealthy, worldly, well-informed, and well-meaning white Americans and Europeans.

MC is a cultural disease spread by the mainstream media. We have all been exposed.

All of us have been subjected to mainstream media about climate change and other doomy speculative crap for years, in fact since we first learned to listen, watch, and read.

All of us have been told we should feel guilty about driving a car, flying in a plane, heating our homes, and eating meat while all of those forbidden things have been dangled out and thrust upon us by a consumeristic culture.

We all grew up in a civilization based on competition, domination, greed, wastefulness, pollution, and humiliation. We are forced to compete, encouraged to consumed, expected to pollute, and chastised for wanting what we were told to want and doing what we were told to do.

SNOWBOARD Magazine Senior Editor Nate Deschenes, like the rest of us, was born into a world where we’re only given two real choices: conform and consume or drop out and good luck. Most of us conform.

Some of us retain some of our curiousity and concern, so we go searching for deeper truths. The mainstream tells us the future is hopeless. The search seems pointless. The search gets called off.

We are all told to want some things, to fear some things, and to ridicule some things. Most of us do what we’re told most of the time.

In short, MC is a cultural disease that makes us think, feel, and do stupid, self-destructive shit.

Ask yourself: Do you care about the environment we live in?

Do you enjoy blissfully burning fossil fuels or do you feel bad about it?

Do you experience feelings of hopelessness, guilt, and fears about global issues or the distant future?

Do you feel powerless to change the things that your fear and worry about?

Any suicidal tendencies? Substance abuse? Fingering a flickering screen addiction? Haterism? Chronic frowniness? Got no pep in your step?!

Ask your doctor about the latest wonder drug, FUKITAL and say goodbye to your MC. Side affects may include death.

Metathesiophobia Climatica (fear of a changing climate), aka MC, is a lot like ED but it affects your spiritual ding dong (aka soul schlong), and Viagra doesn’t help. You can’t get hard, stay hard, take life head on, beat your way through the bullshit, or properly love yourself — or that special someone — when you’re worried about what average global temp. will be in the year 2050 and how much worse the world will supposedly be then compared to how it is now.

You can’t penetrate the mainstream media lies, stick it to the man, or impregnate anyone with hopefulness when addicted to corporate climate doom porn, sandpapering your palms with qualms about your own CO2 emissions, and prematurely ejaculating about the apocalypse.

CO2 is not the problem. Population is not the problem. You are not the problem, and dwelling on global worst case scenarios is a great way to fuck up your life. Trust me on this one.

**Self-flagellation: whipping your own ass.**

I speak so knowledgeably about MC — a totally made up but very real disease — because a few years ago I had a near fatal bout with the motherfucker. Maybe it was more of an addiction.

Maybe you’d like to hear about it?

It all started innocently enough back when I was prepubescent. I enjoyed the occasional flip through an old National Geographic searching for boobs, getting lost in photographs, and reading the frequent articles on global warming, overpopulation, and other dire and seemingly hopeless environmental issues. The pessimism I consumed found fertile soil and grew within me.

Fast forward to college and see me holed up in my house hoarding the classics and digesting a steady stream of mainstream environmental and economic doom porn on top of my formal education in science and social studies. My major’s recommended reading material left me feeling the world was fucked. The mainstream media confirmed it.

I felt powerless to do anything to solve any of the problems presented me, so I moved from Collegeville, MN to Jackson, WY and popped a FUKITOL. Getting high, getting laid, distracting myself, exhausting myself, scaring myself, and skiing powder offered sweet escape from deep depression brought on by anxiety over global media spectacles like catastrophic climate change, terrorism, societal collapse, and blah blah blah.

The hopelessness was bad, but the guilt was worse. I had been told and I believed that our predicament was partially my fault. I needed to do more, but saw no way to do that. Marinating in this awareness for years almost killed me.

After a few years of studious ski bumming I was utterly convinced that climate change and peak oil would collapse the economy, that civil unrest would ensue, and that subsequent environmental catastrophes like nuclear meltdowns and legitimate disease epidemics would make the northern hemisphere unfit for healthy outdoor living.

Driven almost entirely by that fear I bought a small sailboat in Portland, loaded up all my gear, and tried sailling to South America so I could get lost in the fjords of Chile, ski my face off, and survive the impending apocalypse. Patagonia was making the flim 180* South at the same time, but I didn’t fly anywhere, sworn only to having oil free fun and raising awareness about climate change on my old blog OFF: Oil Free Fun.

Accompanied by various folks I met along the voyage, WE made it as far as Cabo Corrientes, Colombia before turning around due to dangerous conditions: mar brava, piratas, no plata, corrientes rapidamentes, libertinaje, vida salvaje! TRANSLATION: dirty, dangerous, penniless, glorious, merciless freedom.

I had so much fear and uncertainty in my everyday life that I forgot to be fearful of the speculative spectacles regurgitated ad nauseum by mainstream doom pornographers.

Broke as a joke, living hand to mouth I sailed around Central America surfing my worries away and following the oceans’ lead. Great people stepped in and helped me back on my emotional and spiritual feet.

I got happy again when I stopped worrying about things I couldn’t fully overstand or change in any way.

After nineteen months of giving my loving mother conniptions I was finally ready to return home. I moved back to the same old shed in Jackson, and substituted backcountry skiing for surfing. Outdoor. Adventure. Therapy.

Thinking nothing of it, I started reading the mainstream news again. My fear of a changing climate and global instability came back. It grew. My MC relapsed. It was brutal.

This time — not quite as conquered by fear as before — I went in search of the whole truth instead of running from it.

The search brought me to the most terrifying and disgusting city I never wanted to live in: LA. In a smoky old van filled with freeze dried food, surfboards, and firearms I showed up on the doorstep of my new boss and mentor: Michael C. Ruppert (RIP).

Mike showed me the ropes, made me keep it reputable and logical, and challenged me to confront my demons and fears. He helped me, but it was a walk through the furnace.

Twice a day the “news links” would come in from Mike’s tireless team of sources. Every day we would receive and read dozens of the most hard-hitting, depressing, and downright doomy stories from reputable mainstream news sites all over the world. If something really bad got reported anywhere in the world we knew about it: war, terrorism, disasters, Fukushima, corruption, etc.

We marinated ourselves in it.

It was torture. It was self-inflicted. I found myself more hopeless than ever before, but standing watch alongside Mike and learning a lot gave me a purpose. My understanding grew. As the Rastas say, my “overstanding” grew. I learned how to work through my fear, to take breaks from it, to laugh at it, to overcome it, and to let it go.

I learned how to care a whole lot while simultaneously not giving a fuck.

I learned when to trust my gut and when to follow expert opinion instead.

I also learned that carbon emissions are not the primary human factor influencing our climate: long-term overt and covert weather modification programs are. Evidence of these programs is being documented every day by concerned citizens all over the world.

You all know what I’m talking about. We may have different beliefs about the lines in the sky, but we all know that they exist.

You don’t need a degree in politics to know that politicians lie, you don’t need a degree in journalism to know that the mainstream media lies, and you don’t need a degree in meteorology to realize that cloud seeding and other weather modification technologies are being used to drastically impact our weather and climate.

California is in an awful drought. The technology exists to steer storms. The technology exists to shift high pressure systems. The technology exists to make clouds produce precipitation. Why isn’t severe drought a thing of the past?

Instead, it looks like these technologies are being used to PROLONG the drought in California. Hear me out.

There’s no snow in California due to the ridiculously resilient ridge of high pressure off the Pacific coast of North America, and every day more evidence indicates that the military-industrial complex is using advanced technology to keep the drought in California going. NASA satellite imagery reveals a situation similar to this in the skies over the Pacific, California and the Western US almost every day.

That is a raw image straight from NASA documenting the skies over central California on March 21st 2015. All those lines of clouds were created by airplanes. The trails fan out and from high cirrus clouds which let most of the sunlight through but trap a lot of the heat that would radiate back into space on a clear day.

Here is a short video shot in Reno last Sunday April 12th.

You all know what I’m talking about. Some of you are just waking up to it. Welcome to the real world.

None of it is your fault, especially the stuff that hasn’t happened yet. Some very bad things are being done to our planet right now. Do something about it.

***

PS At the end of Called Out: Climate Change Is My Fault readers are directed to the self-proclaimed climate crusaders at Protect Our Winters (POW) so they can join the fight to save winter from carbon dioxide. POW’s message is simple:

1) Feel guilty for being born into a civilization that burns fossil fuels.

2) Be afraid of the future: a warming world where poor people must die, poor countries must limit development, and — even worse — the snow at your favorite resort will totally suck.

3) Limit your personal consumption of fossil fuels even though it makes absolutely no difference in the grand scheme of global environmental issues including covert weather control.

and 4) lobby the same crooked political system that got us into this spectacular mess in hopes that they will get us out of it.

All truth told, Protect Our Winters (POW) is part of the problem for overlooking the obvious lines in the sky and for propagandizing one side of the mainstream’s controlled debate on climate.

In the dog and pony show we’re continually fed by corporate media the dogs are “conservatives” claiming that humans aren’t changing the climate. The ponies are “progressives” that claim our greenhouse gas emissions as the only factor of importance affecting climate. The ponies want us full of fear and feeling guilty so we’ll go along with whatever solutions are proposed to the climate problem.

Ironically, POW’s proposed solution to climate change involves shutting down the economies of snow sports communities in an ill-conceived effort to save them. After all, embracing a personal commitment to reduced greenhouse gas emissions means avoiding needless drives to ski towns, cancelling frivolous flights to remote resorts, and shutting down all those energy-wasting, CO2 spewing chairlifts, chalets, condos, hotels, and mountain town McMansions.

Without gas-guzzling tourists, electricity-gobbling infrastructure, dirt pimps, over-developing developers, and conspicuous consumption the snow sports industry would go tits up overnight. I don’t want that to happen, so lets take appropriate action against those ruining our winters.

Perhaps we could harness technologies that can increase snowstorms, snowpacks, and the skiing experience.

Perhaps the snowboard industry is shrinking (30% over 10 years) so much faster than the ski industry (10% over 10 years) because riders like Jeremy Jones are guilt-tripping snowboarders into staying home and fretting about the distant future instead of hopping into a Palmeresque gas-guzzler and heading for the hills to shred.

Perhaps snowboarding is shrinking because snowboarders don’t like being reminded that the snow sucks and will continue to suck in what the snowboard industry assures us is a warming world. Perhaps snowboarding’s coverage of the climate issue has become too mainstream, too corporate, and too political to appeal to teens too smart to buy into the BS flowing from DC by way of POW.