A Language older than Words

by Derrick Jensen

  I approached with a plan. I loved working bees, and wanted to borrow enough to become a small-scale commercial beekeeper. That way I could work hard during the season, and use the offseason to read and think and write. She consented.

  My time with bees was in some ways a disaster: they all died— twice. It wasn't my fault either time, but that doesn't lessen the sorrow of seeing so many millions of deaths, nor lessen the sense of failure.

  It did not begin disastrously, only dishonestly. I bought three hundred hives from a man going out of business in Arkansas. At least that's what he initially told me, and presumably what he continued to tell the bank. His luck had been awful: he'd had eight hundred hives when he'd moved down from Oregon several years back, but he lost hundreds by this means and that. He placed several hundred in beautiful drop sites between rivers and irrigated fields of soybeans: no one told him that rivers in the South flood every winter, and when he went to visit his drops early that spring he found nothing but a few empty hive bodies high in the boughs of trees. Later that year he lost hundreds of stored bee boxes when a pile of oil-soaked rags spontaneously combusted, taking with them his honey house. The bank was after him for his remaining 150 hives, or to my extremely vague understanding, the 150 the loan officers knew about. All I know is that I bought 150 from the bank, and the same number from him. Those I bought from him were located in drops down labyrinthine roads I could not have retraced alone.

  I took the bees to California, in many ways the promised land for beekeepers. The winters are warm, and there's nearly always something in bloom. In addition, the density of monocrops means extra money.

  Modesto, California, is beautiful in February, with hills rolling for miles covered in white-blossomed almond trees. Hundreds of thousands of acres bloom in essential simultaneity, and if pollen isn't carried from flower to flower almonds won't form. Although monocropped miles of almond flowers may be beautiful, they're as unnatural as Frankenstein's monster; the staggering number of blossoms to be pollinated in these densely packed orchards grossly overmatches the capacity of such wild pollinators as bumblebees, moths, wasps, beetles, and so on to set fruit, prompting almond ranchers to pay beekeepers up to $40 per hive to bring in bees for the three week bloom.

  Almonds aren't the only crop needing pollination. Apples, cherries, pears, raspberries, cranberries, blueberries, cucumbers, watermelons, muskmelons. Each of these densely packed crops requires similarly densely packed beehives to set fruit. The same is true for the seeds of other crops—onions, cauliflower, lettuce, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, radishes. Without bees, these crops disappear.

  Beekeepers with the right contacts can turn a lot of cash. A few weeks after almonds comes prunes ($15), apples ($12), cherries ($12), and so on.

  Moving bees is the hardest hard work I've ever done. You move them at night because they fly during the day; if you move hives then, you leave behind to die all those bees in the field, which would be a good portion of the hive. I shared work with another beekeeper and his wife, a wondrously generous couple who let me stay in their home for weeks at a time, and refused all offers of rent: they did let me take them out to dinner once in repayment, but insisted it be to Burger King so I wouldn't waste any money.

  About three each afternoon, Glen and I began getting the forklift and flatbeds ready, so we could be out to a drop by dark. Then we'd load the truck—confused bees crawling everywhere— tie the hives down, untie the hives and unload the truck because the additional weight had sunk the truck to its axle in mud, pull the truck out with the forklift, reload the truck—confused bees still crawling everywhere—retie the hives, drive an hour or two to an orchard, get the truck stuck again, pull it free once more with the forklift, unload as many hives as the grower contracted for, drive to another orchard, and repeat the process till we'd unloaded the truck. Then we'd clean off the machinery, get it as ready as we could for the next night, sleep from maybe ten in the morning till two in the afternoon, get up, and start over. We'd do this for a week or ten days at a time.

  It was exhausting. I remember one rainy night, toward the end of a series of moves, when I couldn't run the windshield wipers because they immediately hypnotized me, and another when for the final three hours of the drive the only words that passed through my mind, as taillights left red and blurry traces on the backs of my eyes, were "automobile mesmerization, automobile mesmerization." I remember a night, also, when Glen forgot his protective beesuit. Since it was a small load, and since our judgment was clouded, we decided to proceed anyway. Because they were his bees, we decided he'd wear my suit and do most of the work, while I would just drive. The load was the smoothest we could remember, as was the drive back to the drop, within the city of Modesto. The night was foggy, as February nights so often are there, and the only vehicles we saw were copcars and other beetrucks. It was four in the morning. We reached the drop, and Glen began to unload. I lost concentration, and drove too close underneath a tree. A branch swept the top row of hives off the back. I stopped the truck, and because this was an emergency, I ran out and, suit or no, began scooping frantic bees back into boxes. They crawled everywhere. Piles of them clumped together to comfort each other. Individuals crawled over my shoes and socks, and up my pant legs. I swatted at them, but there were hundreds. I began to curse, and curse louder. Telling Glen I'd be right back, I ran into the street—the only place light enough to see what I was doing—and whipped off my clothes. I put them back on, and, cursing the bees still in my pants and up my shirt, took them back off. I began to jump up and down on my shirt and pants, still cursing. Finally I stepped outside myself enough to realize I was standing in the middle of a four-lane road, wearing shoes, socks, underwear, and long leather beegloves, stomping my feet and shrieking. I began to laugh as I put my clothes back on, and laughed harder as I returned to help. Again the bees crawled up my pant legs, and all I could do, as I scooped handfuls back into their homes, was laugh at myself, and keep on laughing.

  For the first time, my life was my own. Never again, at least that I could foresee, would I have to work for another. I didn't mind working through the night, nor through the next day, because the decision to work was my own. I didn't mind getting stung, because it happened with bees I cared about.

  Each day became an adventure—my adventure—and time was never something to be wished away, but savored. I saw a dozen migrant workers playing baseball, and hopped the fence to join them. I know no Spanish, and the only English they knew was "Have a good one," so for the next three hours we said only that to each other, after each single, double, out, or error. And we smiled.

  Soon after the almond bloom ended I moved the bees to Orosi, south of Fresno, in orange country. Small white blossoms filled the air with their scent. The bloom was so heavy I put all three hundred hives in one drop, and still the bees made honey: light, delicate, sweet.

  Next to the field where I placed the hives lived another wondrously generous couple. They invited me for dinner, and gave me a place to shower. They ran the largest wasp ranch in the Western Hemisphere. Figs are pollinated by wasps. Not just any wasps, but a specific kind who lays her eggs only in a specific kind of nonedible fig. The eggs hatch and the grubs eat away at the fruit, then pupate there. The fruit falls to the ground. The tiny adults emerge, mate, and fly to find new fig blossoms. In laying her eggs, the wasp pollinates the fig. The next generation of both species is well served. This man collected nonedible figs from his ranch, put them in paper bags, and sold them to edible fig growers who placed them about their orchards. The new generation of wasps would emerge, enter the fig flowers, but then, sadly, find no suitable place to lay their eggs. Nonetheless, pollination occurred.

  Because his great-great-grandparents had homesteaded the property, and because all succeeding generations had known better than to mortgage the land, he did not face the agricultural equivalent of the contradiction mentioned earlier as the one that dooms revolutions, a variant of which ultimately dooms efforts within our cu
lture at sustainable agriculture. Economic production, once again, requires that resources be funneled toward producers, while ecosystemic production requires that resources be returned to all members of the natural community, including, especially, the ground. So he ran a loose ship. Like mine, his days seemed savored, and especially shared. He made regular trips to the pound to pick up animals about to be euthanized. I saw a blind horse, one three-legged dog and several who were partially blind, any number of scrawny yet happy (and spayed or neutered) cats, and a passel of peacocks ("Dad lives by himself in the old farmhouse, and if anything happens we can just listen for the peacocks to let us know."). Not even the horse was fenced, but all roamed free among the fig trees.

  Every moment that spring was pregnant with meaning, as if I were seeing the world for the first time. I went to the Fresno zoo. I saw there a lone wolf—normally a social creature who lopes for days at fifteen miles per hour—pacing a small concrete pen. A woman stood next to me, and said to her child, "That's the big bad wolf"; I thought, "Another industrialist is born." I saw Colobus monkeys, who normally ascend to the tallest treetops at dawn and dusk, where they sit quietly facing the sun. These sat rocking in a small cage with no trees, and no view of the horizon.

  I spent most of my time those days living in the front of my Toyota pickup, sharing space with my clothes, tools, notebook, baseball mitt, pillow, and two cocker spaniels. We slept together most nights in the front, or sometimes they slept in the front while I threw my sleeping bag on the ground. One of the dogs, a female, was going blind, and the other, a male, was nearly deaf. The male, especially, never seemed to slow down. He ran this way and that, ears flying and tongue flapping. He was an eternal child on an everlasting Christmas morning, wearing PJs and running from gift to gift saying, "Oh, Mom. A basketball! I've always wanted a basketb——Ah, man! You got me a book! I love books!" Had I told him to sit in a corner, and had he heard me, I'm sure he would have run to the spot, tail wagging as if to say, "Oh, man. I've always wanted to sit in this corner. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." That's not to say he didn't have a mind of his own. Even when he heard me, he still disobeyed more often than not—one of his mottoes seemed to be "Rules are meant to be acknowledged and then ignored." Even, or especially, in ignoring my wishes he acted as he always did, exuberantly, joyously, with an abundance of life.

  I can't imagine a better teacher.

  Interconnection

  "Our goal should be not the emulation of the ancients and their ways, but to experience for ourselves the aspects of human existence out of which arose those ancient forms which when we see them elicit such a feeling of . . . longing. Otherwise the modern will remain forever superficial while the real will remain ancient, far away, and therefore, outside of ourselves." Mr. Aoki

  A FEW YEARS AGO I had the opportunity to ask Grey Reynolds, second-in-command of the Forest Service, "If we discover that industrial forestry is incompatible with biodiversity, what then?" The question was of course absurd: I mentioned it that day to a high school jumper I was coaching, who said: "What a stupid question! Everyone knows they're incompatible." Reynolds' non-answer that evening unintentionally validated the teen's response: "What do you want us to do, live in mud huts?"

  Pointing out that the needs of mass production are counter to the requirements of a good culture and incompatible with long-term survival doesn't mean I don't like hot showers, baseball, good books, or Beethoven. I wish that the items we produce—the good ones, at least—were separable from the larger processes: I wish we could have hot showers without building dams and nuclear power plants.

  On some level of course that is possible. It wouldn't take long to rig up a system to heat water on my woodstove, then pour it into a reservoir that releases water over my head when I pull a cord. But where do I get the metal and glass for the woodstove? Where do I get the cord, or the reservoir? Where do I get the wood? We seem to have painted ourselves into a corner.

  As Lewis Mumford observed, our choices have been grossly limited: "On the terms imposed by technocratic society, there is no hope for mankind except by going with its plans for accelerated technological progress, even though man's vital organs will all be cannibalized in order to prolong the megamachine's meaningless existence." All is not lost, though, as he also remarked: "But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out."

  I think he's a bit optimistic. Although it's as possible as it is imperative to throw off the myth of the machine, it's not quite so simple to throw off the machine itself. The modern economy is a complicated web, sticky in every thread, and to disentangle oneself personally is difficult, requiring knowledge (much of it long lost), forethought, effort, vigilance, and access to land. For an entire community to disentangle itself from that web may be well-nigh impossible, given the modern economy's interconnected nature as well as the overpopulation, resource depletion, and environmental degradation that comes with civilization.

  Food exemplifies the difficulty of withdrawing from the modern economy, because you can't live without it and because not many people produce all of their own. And if it's uncommon for a modern person to be food self-reliant, it is almost unheard of for a community to supply all of its own food. That is only recently the case; merely one hundred and fifty years ago here in Spokane, the natives lived self-reliantly and sustainably. One of their staples, for example, was salmon. During the massive runs, people placed boxes under falls over which salmon leapt on their way to spawn and die. Some of the salmon fell into the boxes; these the people who lived here ate, or dried, to eat later. Salmon and human communities coexisted, and could presumably have done so indefinitely. Now, even had the salmon not been killed by the dams that destroyed the Columbia as a free river, there are too many people here in Spokane—300,000 in the county—for the salmon to have supported all of us over the long-term. Nor can the community take other food from the river; signs near the Spokane River warn that its fish—native and introduced trout— are contaminated with PCBs.

  I recently had dinner with George. We did not eat fish. Instead we ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. I had lemon-grass chicken with chili, and George had stir-fried vegetables. Both meals were excellent, and both consisted of foods originating far from Spokane. Although we didn't ask the cook where the chicken and other foodstuffs came from, it isn't difficult to construct an entirely plausible scenario. Here it is: the chicken was raised on a factory farm in Arkansas. The factory is owned by Tyson Foods, which supplies one-quarter of this nation's chickens and sends them as far away as Japan. The chicken was fed corn from Nebraska and grain from Kansas. One of seventeen million chickens processed by Tyson that week, this bird was frozen and put onto a truck made by paccar. The truck was made from plastics manufactured in Texas, steel milled in Japan from ore mined in Australia and chromium from South Africa, and aluminum processed in the United States from bauxite mined in Jamaica. The parts were assembled in Mexico. As this truck, with its cargo of frozen chickens, made its way toward Spokane, it burned fuel refined in Texas, Oklahoma, California, and Washington from oil originating beneath Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Texas, and Alaska. All this, and I have chickens outside my door.

  The making of the vegetarian dish was no less complex. The broccoli in George's stir-fried vegetables was grown in Mexico. The field was fertilized with, among other things, ammonium nitrate from the United States, phosphorous mined and processed by Freeport McMoRan from deposits in Florida, and potassium from potash deposits in Sasketchewan. This potash was processed by any one of the multinational mining, oil, and chemical companies: Texasgulf, Swift, PPG Industries, RTZ, or Noranda. The pesticides we ingested are equally cosmopolitan.

  Another company associated with nearly every facet of our meal was AKZO, which has 350 facilities in 50 countries. The meal utilized many of their 10,000 chemical products: chick
en vaccines that enable Tyson to keep their operations relatively disease-free; automobile coatings; chemicals used in many steps of the agricultural and manufacturing processes, and so on.

  This was truly an international meal, and not merely because we ate at a Vietnamese restaurant. The simple pleasure of eating a fine meal is tied to processes involving literally thousands of people working for many companies in numerous countries, manifesting the intricate and interconnected nature of the global economy, which runs like a well-oiled machine.

  The processes behind the meal manifest not only the complexity of the modern economy's web but also its destructiveness. Our meal was tied inescapably to pernicious activities across the globe: Tyson Food's monopoly and "virulently antiunion" attitudes, the unspeakable cruelty and debasement of factory farming, and water pollution in Arkansas; loss of topsoil and the depletion of the Oglala aquifer in Nebraska and Kansas; the indescribable immiseration and debasement of labor exploitation in Mexico; air pollution in Japan; toxic mining wastes in Australia, South Africa, and Jamaica; chemical pollution from refineries in four states, and degradation from oil exploration and extraction in four countries; soil toxification, the poisoning of groundwater, more labor exploitation, and the poisoning of agricultural workers in Mexico; air, water, and ground pollution in the United States and Canada, and so on. The food, the cruelty, the pollution, the exploitation, the debasement—all are tied together in this convoluted web that is the modern economy.

  The point is not to confess George's and my own particular hypocrisy, nor to explicitly condemn Tyson, PACCAR, or Freeport McMoRan, although Freeport McMoRan is the single most polluting company in the United States, but instead to point out the interconnectedness of the modern economy and the ubiquity of the destruction it causes. The same exercise could be performed for the clothes we wear (sweat shops in Burma's military dictatorship, cotton pesticides, polypropylene petrochemicals), the houses we live in (formaldehyde in plywood, deforestation, extinction of fish and wildlife), other consumer products (40,000 American workers killed on the job each year), or any other activity that vibrates the strings of the web.