Dear readers: I bet that for years now you’ve been telling yourself, ‘Crikey, I wish I could support this Ketcham dude’s journalism with tax-deductible donations so that he can continue to make trouble for exploiters, polluters, loggers, grazers, miners, mass rapers of mother earth, torturers of animals, trophy hunters, lovers of machines, technofascists, control fanatics, greedhead oligarchs, capitalist scum, and the profit system in general.’
Well, here’s your chance!
With the backing of my nonprofit sponsor Wildlands Defense, a 501(c)3 in Boise, Idaho, I’ve set up Denatured, a nonprofit association whose purpose is to fund me to plant investigative bombs in the right places. All donations to Denatured are 100 percent tax deductible. If you wish to contribute, please contact me at christopher.ketcham99@gmail.com, go to my Paypal, or send a check to Denatured at Box 646 Pine Hill, NY 12465.
Some of the stories that donors have made possible as of the winter of 2023-24:
* a report for the Intercept on the continuing persecution of wild horses in the American West, and how it’s a deeply bipartisan affair, pursued by Trump and Biden alike.
* an investigation, for Sierra Magazine, of the rewilding of Western public lands that can happen only with mass removal of livestock and widespread reintroduction of wolves and beavers; the piece is news-pegged to a major study by a group of ecologists who report on the ecological restoration that would occur following these wildlife reintroductions — which themselves will succeed only with the lifting of the cattle curse from the West.
* my exposé of the oligarch-funded Nature Conservancy (TNC), wealthiest enviro nonprofit in the US. The piece, which appeared at Grist.org, examined the green cover TNC provides for the pillage of forests in poor communities of color in the coastal plains of the Southeast. Turns out that the Nature Conservancy conserves nature only for rich people!
* a profile for the Intercept investigating the respected Yale economist William Nordhaus, titled When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics, the idiots in this case being the entire field of mainstream economics.
* an exposé of neocolonialism in Nevada, as I camped with Native Americans who take a stand against green-tech lithium extraction in the high desert.
* a reported essay on the delusions of “green growth.” Advocates of green growth promise a painless transition to a post-carbon future…but what if the limits of renewable energy require sacrificing consumption as a way of life?
* my continuing series about the limits to the growth of the human enterprise and the unsustainable technoindustrial order – limits to economic and population growth, and limits to tech innovation that has facilitated growth. My inspiration for these articles is ecologist Kenneth Boulding, who famously remarked that “anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman – or an economist.” (Growthist economists dominate the mainstream of discussion about “sustainable” economic systems.)
Remember that to write these pieces takes a lot more time and effort than I usually get remunerated for under “market” conditions for the freelance writer. Which is to say, this kind of environmental journalism is truly not profitable. Thus the nonprofit model I’m here embracing.