They seemed to get it.
I continued, “The first thing to do is recognize in our own hearts and minds that no one has any of these rights, because clearly on some level we do perceive others as having them, or we wouldn’t allow rivers to be toxified, oceans to be vacuumed, and so on. Having become clear ourselves, we then need to let those in power know we’re taking back our permission, that they have no right to wield this power the way they do, because clearly on some level they, too, perceive themselves as having the right to kill the planet, or they wouldn’t do it. Of course they have entire philosophical, theological, and judicial systems in place to buttress their perceptions. As well as, of course, bombs, guns, and prisons. And then, if our clear statement that they have no right fails to convince them—and I wouldn’t hold my breath here—we’ll be faced with a decision: how do we stop them?”
A lot of people seemed to agree. Then after the talk someone asked me, “Aren’t these just different ways of saying the same thing?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
“What’s the difference between saying I have the right to not be raped, and saying to some man, ‘You have no right to rape me’?”
I was stumped. Maybe, I thought, my mind actually had seized up, only so completely that I hadn’t known it. The reason the words had come so quickly is because they were just a recapitulation of the obvious. I have a few male friends who routinely take something someone else says, change a word or two or invert the sentence structure, and then claim it as their own great idea. I’ve been known to do that myself. But then I realized there’s an experiential difference between these two ways of putting it. A big one. Pretend you’re in an abusive relationship. Picture yourself saying to this other person, “I have the right to be treated with respect.” Now, that may developmentally be important for you to say, but there comes a point when it’s no longer appropriate to keep the focus on you—you’re not the problem. Contrast how that former statement feels with how it feels to say: “You have no right to treat me this way.” The former is almost a supplication, the latter almost a command. And its focus is on the perpetrator.
For too long we’ve been supplicants. For too long the focus has been on us. It’s time we simply set out to stop those who are doing wrong.
Before I go any further, I need to be clear that it’s not up to all of us to dismantle the system. Not all of us need to take down dams, factories, electrical infrastructures. Some of us need to file timber sale appeals, some need to file lawsuits. Some need to work on rape crisis hot lines, and some need to work at battered women’s shelters. Some need to help family farmers or work on other sustainable agriculture issues. Some need to work on fair trade, and some need to work on stopping international trade altogether. Some need to work on decreasing birth rates among the industrialized, and some need to give all the love and support they can to children (I’ve heard it said that the most revolutionary thing any of us can do is raise a loving child122).
One of the good things about everything being so fucked up—about the culture being so ubiquitously destructive—is that no matter where you look—no matter what your gifts, no matter where your heart lies—there’s good and desperately important work to be done. Know explosives? Take out a dam. Know how to love and accept children, how to teach them to love themselves, to think and feel for themselves? That’s what you need to do.
If you agree with my premises and arguments, yet find yourself for whatever reason unable or unwilling to take the offensive, your talents are still needed. I think often of the military tactic called Hammer and Anvil, used most famously by Robert E. Lee at the battle of Chancellorsville. Lee kept Anderson’s and McLaws’s divisions in place while sending Stonewall Jackson’s corps around the enemy’s flank to crush that part of the opposing army between Jackson’s hammer and Anderson’s and McLaws’s anvil. Both parts—offense and defense—were, and are, necessary.
At another talk, this one last fall, a man asked a question I’d never heard before: “If ten thousand people lined up ready to do your bidding, what would you say to them?”
My answer was immediate: “I’d tell them sure as hell not to listen to me.”
His was just as fast: “That’s a copout. How many dams could ten thousand people take down? People know how bad things are, but they don’t know what to do. They want to be told. That’s your responsibility. What’s the purpose of writing if you don’t tell us what to do?”
I shot back: “Instead of telling me what hypothetical readers want, tell me what you want.”
“Tell me—”
“Do you want me to tell you—”
“—Yes—”
“—what to do?”
He nodded, then said, “You’ve had more time. . . .”
“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow, go to Barton Springs”—Barton Springs are a set of defining, and critically imperiled, springs in Austin, huge and beautiful, dying before the eyes of those who live there and love them—“and sit.”
“Then what?”
“Wait until the springs tell you what to do.”
“Why won’t you—”
“I just did. Barton Springs know this region much better than I. They know what this region needs, know what sustainability looks and feels like here. The springs are much smarter than I am. They’ll tell you exactly what to do.”
Somebody else asked, “Is it Barton Springs?”
“Yes,” I said, “And no. It’s everywhere. Just listen. Not to me. To yourself. And to the land.”
CARRYING CAPACITY
It is axiomatic that we are in no way protected from the consequences of our actions by remaining confused about the ecological meaning of our humanness, ignorant of ecological processes, and unmindful of the ecological aspects of history.
William R. Catton, Jr. 123
I’VE BEEN THINKING A LOT LATELY ABOUT CARRYING CAPACITY, AND WHAT that will mean for life through the crash. The best book I’ve read about carrying capacity—what it is and what it means—is Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, by William R. Catton, Jr. Any environment’s carrying capacity, he states, is the number of creatures living a certain way who can be supported permanently on a certain piece of land, for example how many deer could live on a certain island without overgrazing and damaging the capacity of that island to grow food for them. Permanently is the key word here, because it’s possible to overshoot carrying capacity—to temporarily have more creatures than the land can support—but doing so damages the land, and permanently lowers future carrying capacity. This is true when we talk about nonhumans, and it’s just as true when we talk about humans.
Consider the land where you live. How many people could it have permanently supported before the arrival of our extractive culture? How many people did it support? What did these people eat? What materials did those who came before use to make their homes?
And now? What will those who come after eat? If you were to rely only on local foods harvested sustainably—by which I mean entirely without the assistance of civilization or its technologies (e.g., no fossil fuels or mining)—what would you eat? Do the plants and animals eaten there before still call this their home? How many people could live in your place forever? How many people will live there after the crash?
There are a few ways one can temporarily exceed a place’s carrying capacity (I first wrote, “There are a few ways one can temporarily exceed the carrying capacity of one’s home” but realized that the sentence is absurd: given the obvious consequences, no sane and intelligent group of people would ever intentionally exceed the carrying capacity of their home). One is by degrading the landscape; for example, eating all of the local fish this year instead of eating few enough that the fish remain fecund as always. Another example would be killing off species you don’t eat—salamanders, owls, bees, grasshoppers, and others—and in doing so almost undoubtedly impeding the eventual viability of your food sources.
Once you’ve undercu
t the carrying capacity where you live, you can continue to exceed your carrying capacity by degrading someplace else, for example, by eating all of that place’s fish. This is just another way of saying that cities must import resources, a process also known as conquest, colonialism, and these days, the global economy. As we’ve seen, when the resources of that other place get depleted—when its carrying capacity has more or less been permanently reduced—those who are importing resources will attempt to find another place to exploit. Because the power of those at the center of empires always depends on this importation/exploitation, the powerful have become quite adept at it. It is, at this point, nearly ubiquitous. As long ago as 1965, more than half of Great Britain’s foods were coming from what Catton and others call “ghost acreage,” that is, from sources invisible to those at the center. Catton writes, “If food could not be obtained from the sea (6.5%) or from other nations (48%), more than half of Britain would have faced starvation, or all British people would have been less than half nourished. Likewise, if Japan could not have drawn upon fisheries all around the globe and upon trade with other nations, two-thirds of her people would have been starving, or every Japanese citizen would have been two-thirds undernourished.”124 This importation not only makes the lifestyles (and lives) of those who import dependent on the military and economic violence I’ve been talking about so far in this book, but also makes them strangely dependent on those from whom they steal.
The United States economy is dependent on oil from the Middle East, South America, and around the world. American lives are dependent on it: the agricultural infrastructure—from gasoline to pesticides—rests on the foundation of oil and natural gas. It’s not too much to say that we eat refined and transformed oil. It’s like Catton wrote, “Everything human beings do requires energy. At the barest minimum, animals human in form but with no technology would have been converting in their own bodies about 2,000 to 3,000 kilocalories of chemical energy (from food) into heat in the course of a day’s activities.”125 That changed with domestication—more properly called enslavement—as some humans were able to harvest the energy—work—of those they enslaved, whether it was an ox pulling a plow or a bunch of humans pulling big blocks of stone to make mausoleums for the rich.
And it changed again with oil.
James Watt is one of the most important names in the history of enslavement, a first vote inductee into the Enslavers Hall of Fame, which is quartered neither in Cooperstown nor Cleveland, but in every city on the planet, and increasingly, in every head. He ranks up there with the first of the domesticators, who not only enslaved plants, animals, and land to agriculturalists but all of us to the process of agriculture. He ranks with those who first created a god in the sky, in so doing denying the divinity present in every rock, plant, animal, river, and raindrop, as well as every moment of every being’s life, and in so doing also created a heaven beyond the earth where the wretched could receive a reward perhaps (they hope) commensurate with their enslavement here. He ranks with the founders of the first cities, whose kingship, we learn from the ancient King List of Sumer, “was lowered down from heaven,”126 showing, if little else, that from the beginning, all writers have been propagandists, and mainly for the wrong side. He ranks with those who first used force to steal another’s resources. He ranks with those who discovered—after agriculture had enslaved us all—that, as Lewis Mumford put it, “He who controlled the agricultural surplus exercised the powers of life and death over his neighbors. That artificial creation of scarcity in the midst of increasing natural abundance was one of the first characteristic triumphs of civilized exploitation: an economy profoundly contrary to the mores of the village.”127 Others in the Hall of Fame would include those who discovered, as Mumford also wrote, that any “crude system of control had inherent limitations. Mere physical power, even if backed by systematic terrorism, does not produce a smoothly flowing movement of goods to a collecting point, still less a maximum communal devotion to productive enterprise. Sooner or later, every totalitarian state, from Imperial Rome to Soviet Russia, finds this out. To achieve willing compliance without undue waste in constant police supervision, the governing body must create an appearance of beneficence and helpfulness, sufficient to awaken some degree of affection and trust and loyalty.”128 Entire histories could be filled with those who are in the Enslavers Hall of Fame (indeed, this is precisely what history consists of): the Benedictine Monks who developed clocks in order to regiment work, enslaving themselves and those who followed to time itself, and enslaving each moment also to this artificial creation, the clock, the second; Columbus, Cortés, Frobiscer, Cartier (and the kings and queens [and bankers] they served), who sought out new peoples and new lands to enslave; today’s mineralogical and biological prospectors (and the CEOs they serve) who seek to enslave ever more of the planet; the engineers, scientists, and technicians from the earliest cities till now who conceptualize ever-more-efficient ways to bring everything we see (and things we do not see) under their control; and many many more.
James Watt invented an effective means to enslave the dead. The bodies of the dead are burned in a confined space, heating the air around them and causing it to expand. Because the space is confined, pressure goes up, pushing out a piston which is attached to, and turns, a crankshaft. This enslavement device is called the steam engine, and has evolved now into the internal combustion engine.
At first the burned dead were trees, and later the longer dead, in the form of coal and oil. The energy released in this burning originally struck the earth when these plants and animals were alive, and had been stored in their bodies. Of course using energy stored in the bodies of others is old news: everybody’s been doing that since they learned how to metabolize. And everybody who has ever used fire to keep themselves warm has used energy stored in trees, or coal, for that matter. The big change was in the conversion of these dead into mechanical energy, into what Catton and others call “ghost slaves.”129
A ghost slave would be the equivalent to how much energy one human would spend in one day (that 2,000 to 3,000 kilocalories Catton mentioned). Yesterday, for example, I went to a traditional Yurok (Indian) brush dance pit, where they hold their annual brush dances. The pit is perhaps four feet deep, and about ten by ten. A narrow ramp leads into it. The walls are lined with weathered wooden planks, and a pole stands one per side. There is effectively no roof. I was told that the design is similar to that of a traditional Yurok home, except, of course, that the houses have roofs. The point as it relates to ghost slaves is this: this home could be constructed by hand by a few people in a day with materials close by. I pictured how the Yurok traditionally lived, there on the banks of the Klamath River. Fishing for salmon. Hunting for elk and deer. Gathering greens and berries. Performing rituals. Building their homes. Playing. Sustainably. Using their own energy, energy gained from eating, metabolizing.
No more.
We have come to base our way of living on these ghost slaves, and our use of them has turned us into slavers on a degree unimaginable to the most megalomaniacal of our forebears. More energy was used in a few minutes to propel a Saturn V rocket toward the moon—and perhaps to an even less life-serving purpose—than was used by two decades of Egyptians stacking 2.3 million blocks of stone (each stone weighing 2.5 tons) to form the Great Pyramid of Cheops.130 A little closer to the experience of most of us is the truth that, as Catton points out, “Within two eventful centuries of the time when James Watt started us substituting fossil energy for muscle power, per capita energy use in the United States reached a level equivalent to eighty or so ghost slaves for each citizen. The ratio remained much lower than that in many other parts of the world. But, dividing the energy content of total annual world fuel consumption by the annual rate of food-energy consumption in an active adult human body, the world average still worked out to the equivalent of about ten ghost slaves per person. . . . More than nine-tenths of the energy used by Homo sapiens was now derived from sources other t
han each year’s crop of vegetation.”131
Because the amount of energy that struck the earth a very long time ago and ended up stored in coal, oil, natural gas, and so on is merely tremendous, and not infinite, its use is not sustainable. To base one’s way of life on this energy is to live unsustainably. “To become completely free from dependence on prehistoric energy (without reducing population or per capita energy consumption),” wrote Catton, and remember this was more than twenty years ago, meaning that things have become far more extreme, “modern man would require an increase in contemporary carrying capacity equivalent to ten earths—each of whose surfaces was forested, tilled, fished, and harvested to the current extent of our planet. Without ten new earths, it followed that man’s exuberant way of life would be cut back drastically sometime in the future, or else that there would someday be many fewer people.”132 Or maybe both.
I’m not the only one to speak of civilization as being based on slavery. Even those who defend civilization often acknowledge this. In The Culture of Make Believe I quoted philosopher William Harper’s 1837 defense of slavery: “President Dew [another speaker at the conference where he first delivered this message] has shown that the institution of Slavery is a principal cause of civilization. Perhaps nothing can be more evident than that it is the sole cause. If any thing can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labor beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence. Labour is pain to those who are unaccustomed to it, and the nature of man is averse to pain. Even with all the training, the helps and motives of civilization, we find that this aversion cannot be overcome in many individuals of the most cultivated societies. The coercion of Slavery alone is adequate to form man to habits of labour. Without it, there can be no accumulation of property, no providence for the future, no taste for comforts or elegancies, which are the characteristics and essentials of civilization. He who has obtained the command of another’s labour, first begins to accumulate and provide for the future, and the foundations of civilization are laid. . . . Since the existence of man upon the earth, with no exception whatever, either of ancient or modern times, every society which has attained civilization has advanced to it through this process.”133
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