Harm None

Control and Domination of the Wild

Transmission

Where does it end?

This endless cycle of violence against Mother?

Why are we constantly destroying what gives us life?

What has happened to us that we find Nature something that must be dominated? Was not the domination of other humans not enough? Is it still not enough?

I am watching my feeds for daily and sometimes hourly updates of the Bureau of Land (Mis)management’s ignorance and determination to eliminate wild horses from public lands in America. Summer is always the worst season. It is when most of these inhumane helicopter roundups occur and so for days on end, I literally am overcome with sadness while I try to push where I can, advocate where I can and create awareness where I can.

It is so hard to stay positive.

As a child, I was overjoyed when in 1971 the federal government declared wild horses a protected species. I didn’t know then that it would mean nothing.

Much like the Utu Utu Gwaitu Paiute Tribe that tried to block the roundup and removal of 694 horses, stallions, mares and foals this past week, I believe these wild beings are a part of us and as we continue to harm them, we continue to harm ourselves.

But what does that mean?

It means we come from a web, not above it, and that means whenever something in the web is harmed, we feel it. We feel the rip and the tear of extermination, slaughter, destruction, extraction and exploitation. We feel it in our blood and bones, and in our heart and soul.

The problem is, there is no scientific proof that we, humans, are physically, mentally and emotionally traumatized by the destruction and extraction of our wild places and wild beings, and because of that … we don’t stop doing what we are doing.

It isn’t enough to show that what we call animals, have emotions and feelings. We know animals grieve. We know animals form strong bonds, but for some reason we can only love the ones we’ve domesticated such as cats and dogs in ways that will protect them. Others we term feral or beasts.

This is of course deliberate.

If we taught people the immense value of reconnecting to Nature, not as some trendy, guru-led, influencer speak, but something every single one of us is capable of, we would be less controllable by those who need power.

Nature is uncontrolled. She will never bow down or be tamed by human hands or means.

And maybe that’s the rub in a patriarchal culture.

Illumination

Women from the beginning of time felt the connection to the First Mother. And while it has faded in many, deliberately suppressed to make women malleable and more acquiescing to men, we have the song of earth in our bones. We once danced naked beneath the full moon, not to tempt men, but simply to return to Mother as we first came to be.

Nakedness was never something to be ashamed of. It was something pure, no barrier between skin, moonlight, and Her. Sacred bodies moving together with reverence and respect for Her.

This was never witchcraft and hexing. That was the stuff created by old white men afraid that young women would no longer submit to them. The stuff of letches and pedophiles who see nothing of raping a young girl. Those men are still here today hiding among the wealthiest of us all.

The very idea that a woman could love her body, and love the wild, made her a danger to the patriarchy. And so, it sought to create shame and fear, and rigid structure for what women could and could not do. Men sought to tame women because they could not tame the wild.

Even now, in 2026, small men with big bank accounts are trying desperately to control Her. They rip into Her daily, plunder Her riches, rape and pillage. This planet does not belong to any one of us. It belongs to All and by that, I mean All species. The idea that we, humans, have the right to destroy for our own gain and amusement is so far away from what our ancestors thought and believed.

The people who came before knew how to honor and respect our First Mother. They knew that She alone was the provider of life here and to work with her rather than against her made the most sense. It still does for those with minds that have been opened to something other than domestication.

Slowly, ever so slowly, systems have evolved to exert more control than ever over enormous populations of people. Once, we each had a hand in the food we grew, now very few of us do, and even less understand how food is grown, where it comes from and what it actually contains. I point to the whole rather freakish idea of processed food which in effect starts as just a gelatinous goo that gets molded into something we think we recognize as real food. Take away the ability to grow food individually and you acquire control.

Once, we dwelled in shelters to stay safe, and warm, but spent most of our waking hours under the sun, receiving its rays, allowing its lux to reach deep into us and keep our circadian rhythms in check regardless of the season. Now, most of us spend our time indoors, working beneath artificial lights, with recirculated air, and we’ve been told the sun is bad for us. We wonder why so many people have difficulty sleeping and pharmacies are stocked with drugs that claim to help you get sleep. The sun is still shining. We just created a way for us to avoid it which then creates real consequences to our bodies.

We aren’t outside nearly enough. Imagine if we spent more time outside and less inside. What might that do to our bodies and our minds.

We used to live in areas surrounded by unspoiled land. Land without roads, buildings, fences, cellphone towers, and all the other trappings of what we call a modern society. We used to be able to roam, unfettered, through the countryside, collecting the bounty of what Mother Nature/Earth offered every season. Now, whatever Nature does still exist any where near suburban and urban areas ends up being a preserve or park that we most often see out the window of a vehicle that whizzes by like the minutes of our lives.

We have not time to be in Nature, to heal, to breathe fully, to experience Her experiencing us. No time in Nature means, less independent thought.

We build concrete and steel structures high up into the sky and fail to provide any green spaces. We create subdivisions with tiny lawns filled with toxic chemicals and call it Nature. We don’t even have parks in some places. For many the only green they will see are the plants bold enough to push through the cracks in the sidewalk, or the vacant lot on the corner filled with old tires and broken glass.

Heaven forbid people should come to love Nature again. Then they might leave the capitalized and commercialized way of life. They would stop being commodity. They might, in their communing with Nature discover they are far more valuable as something other than ‘human capital’ and they would become uncontrollable.

We know fresh water keeps us alive and yet we allow the dumping of poisons, agricultural run-off filled with pesticides and hormones, and all kinds of other waste from corporations that are neither truthful nor have your best life in mind. And there is only so much a wastewater treatment plant can screen for, the rest ends up inside of us, or the other beings that require water to life. PFAs anyone?

Humans used to be hardy and resilient in their survival. It’s not wrong to want an easier life, but to what end?

You can’t even say we’ve gotten better toward each other due to the ease of our lives now compared to eons ago. We haven’t. In fact, we’ve gotten worse. We can’t even create societies where people with physical differences are thought of in planning and design. Whole parts of this human world are suffering right in front of us, and we think we are better than we were when we considered how our actions would affect the All instead of just some.

It used to be that we lived in communities and those communities helped sustain us and we them. Now, many people have no idea who their neighbors are. Most people stare into a tiny screen and let it beam all kinds of useless information into them instead of ever taking notice of the world already here. Those who live their lives as zombies of sorts, are easier to manipulate by the systems.

We want wild places but only if we can drive through those wild places and take selfies with the fuzzy cows. We want to save the grizzlies but only if we can post a picture on social media when we see one trying to cross a congested street. We want horses to ride and to be of service to us, but we don’t care so much for the wild ones, because… they don’t want anything from us except to be left alone and how fun is that for us?

We have to be in control.

And the funny thing is we are never in control.

We’ve learned to control the masses through fear, anger and corrosive beliefs, but we will never control Nature.

She is wild and untamable. She calls the shots. We pretend otherwise, and then She heartlessly reminds us.

We have lost respect for Her and what She represents of the feminine among us.

Women are not here to amuse men. That’s not the way of it at all.

I don’t know how we got it all twisted up, but I do know organized religion has not helped straighten it out.

We want to believe that an omnipotent and omniscient being created everything around us and just forgot to make a female for Adam. Never mind that same being created two of every other species. Forgive me if I pass on that.

The genius of how this entire planet is designed is beyond our full comprehension. Things we’ve proudly declared we know, have had to be modified and changed because we keep learning. She is unknowable, but in our infantile and egoic way, we won’t stop trying.

I use the word She specifically when speaking about Mother Nature in an effort to showcase how blind we’ve become to Her story. When we seek to deprive women of their right to self-sovereignty, we are denying the power that is woven into All things.

Nature does not place anything above anything else. Everything is dependent, cleverly intentionally layered so that it all matters.

Transformation

We are still trying to force the will of men onto an entire planet that lives and breathes through the female lineage. When we speak of a Matriarchy, we do not imply that it is merely women ruling men. What it means is women are able to rule alongside or in some cases instead of men, but men are not discounted as women are in the Patriarchy. A Patriarchy is dominance. A Matriarchy is co-existence.

In order to offer life in all forms, co-existence is required. This makes it entirely too obvious which ‘archy’ is the one we need to move toward.

Reverence and respect for All is the only way we get out of this mess we find ourselves in. Co-existence is the way.

Not unchecked consumption. Not the fallacy of green energy which is still using the electrical grid while destroying unblemished land. It means if we declare other populations as overpopulated, then we need to start looking at how we as billions are impacting the rest of the living world.

Many can feel their hearts break when they read about the non-stop destruction the current administration is hell bent on doing to environmental laws meant to keep us safe, and our lands public. But it didn’t start with them. We’ve given politicians from this two-party system plenty of time to get it together and they simply are unable to in this current point in our forward evolution. We’ve tainted elections with special interest money and worse so many lies one can’t ever be sure of what the truth is.

All of this has a massive negative impact on the world around us, from fast fashion to fast food, to e-bikes and cellphones, we are marketed to round the clock because we’ve built a world that needs someone to buy something every second of the day, every day of the year.

It’s simply not sustainable.

The worker bees are burning out. As they well should after years of servitude and never questioning why they are still paying for things like healthcare. We spend the best years of our lives working for others and healthcare in the U.S. can’t be funded through our taxes? It’s crazy.

Beyond the human-to-human issues we face, we are facing alarms from Mother on an ever-increasing scale. We need to wake up. We need to pay attention. We need education systems to not simply train our younger generation to take our place on the manufacturing line, but to reconnect to the Web of Life.

Teach children to respect Nature and they will honor Her for all the days of their lives. Teach them to respect money and they will spend their lifetime destroying Her.

This is where we are by our design. We are destroying Her because we cannot comprehend that She will never submit.

The question isn’t will we destroy Mother Earth and therefore destroy ourselves. The question is how much longer we have before we destroy ourselves. Make no mistake She is mightier than all of us and She will go on in some form or fashion long after we are gone.

But we, because we are connected to All, will experience great grief, loss, sadness, and a whole host of other feelings each time we decimate something. It’s taking its toll on us. We are feeling the consequences of our actions even now, to be sure. For every species we push to the brink, or over the brink, we add something caustic to our own way of being.

Even those with absolutely no affinity for Nature, they will still feel the effects of our inability to respect Her.

I thought of the ground that will no longer feel the pulse of the horses’ hooves as they run free. It was never about saving the plant life, or the other wildlife as the Forest Service claimed for the Mono Lake herd, and it certainly isn’t that for the Callahan roundup – the largest single roundup in the history of roundups. It’s about unstoppable greed and what happens when we allow that greed to run rampant through systems and government that is supposed to be protecting us and the wild horses.

What happens when one of Mother’s children is harmed? Is there perhaps a Butterfly Effect? Somewhere in the world, does that negative energy, or the grief of Mother manifest as something dark? How do we know? Why would we even want to test that theory?

The point is we cannot keep on keeping on. We must wake the F up. No one made us king of all things, and it is ridiculous to claim otherwise. The life support system that is Mother Earth keeps getting torn up and ripped apart because the richest men of this world are angry they cannot be in control of Her. They fight amongst themselves constantly as they try to prove they have the most money. Instead of using their wealth to assist All, they continue to create wreckage with everything they touch which should prove greed is an actual disease.

The horses of Mono Lake were not saved. There is now reported to be a mass grave in which all the beautiful horses that were injured or not deemed worthy to be saved during this roundup, are buried after being shot. This has all taken place through taxpayer funds and despite people with the best reasons ever wanting it stopped. We are all complicit. The tribes whose history was so beautifully entwined with the wild horses, the ones who filed suit to stop it, said this unnecessary loss of part of their cultural identity is a painful reminder of how America does not respect its elders. The eldest being Mother Earth.

Another roundup is going on in Nevada. There, thousands of animals are being rounded up – not ‘gathered’ which is such a tender term for the traumatic event this really is. Again, the same lies are told as to why horses need to be removed, even though there are much more humane ways to handle populations. Again, the same loss will be felt, perhaps not with tribal members this time, but within all of us.

I am at a loss. In over fifty years the U.S. government has failed to provide protection and appropriate humane ways to manage populations for a federally protected species. After this summer, with more roundups ahead, far more horses will be in captivity, long-term holding, on private lands for the rest of their lives penned on small spaces living in fear and completely dependent on the private contractors for food and water and medical care, than there will be wild. And with that comes the very real chance of many of them simply being shipped to slaughter because after all the BLM doesn’t do any sort of checks once a horse is ‘adopted’.

The wild horses are only one of many species that are sounding alarms and have been for years. They are not expendable, nor are the others. We simply must find a way to co-exist. We must stop bowing down to a ruling class that uses money as power. Or we will end up in the same place as all the wild horses. In systems of extraction and exploitation where there is no escape.

When people ask me what it is they should do beyond the advocacy and awareness of the wild horse issues, I say to start cutting back on consumption. Start there by making your footprint smaller. We must stop making the rich people richer because the rich people don’t give three foxes about us.

Whatever is going to be the way forward, it’s not about parties. Both have sold us out. Both do not present an effective way forward which is clear simply by looking at the case of the wild horses and the over fifty years they have not received protection after being declared federally protected. This is about excess. About those who have obscene wealth buying systems of power to prevent others from achieving the same thing or creating scarcity by their actions. Manipulation of systems to imply there isn’t enough equal control. Turning on your neighbor, allowing divisiveness to create space between us, this limits our abilities to shift the narrative so that it serves All.

Mother Nature is not going to stand our disrespectful behavior toward her much longer. We are at a tipping point in who we want to become. Can we choose to support our life-support system?

For information on how you can create awareness and provide public comments for the BLM’s scoping plans please see American Wild Horse Conservation at www.americanwildhorse.org

or Wild Horse Education at wildhorseeducation.org

There are many more people involved in trying to stop the heinous roundups, including many here on Substack.