Endgame Vol.1

by Jensen, Derrick

  A couple of days after the talk I got an email from someone else weighing in on this whole question: “I didn’t have the wherewithal to speak up at the time, but I’d offer the following counter-question: ‘What would a diabetic or heart patient do if the drugs she needed to stay alive were integral to an economic system that exploited workers, degraded the environment, and increased the suffering of indigenous peoples?’ To answer that she still wanted the drugs would expose the narcissism—the extreme emphasis on the individual, even at the expense of the larger community—that so dominates Western Culture. That’s the root of much of our trouble.”142

  What do we do with this information: Phoenix, Arizona, could sustain a human population of maybe one hundred and fifty. What about the rest of them, living right now on stolen resources? The land under New York City could probably sustain several thousand, or at least it could have if there were still passenger pigeons, bison, salmon, eel, and Eskimo curlews. What happens to the rest? I’m a bit luckier here in Tu’nes. The population might be remotely sustainable at a hunter-gatherer level, if salmon, steelhead, elk, and lamprey were still here in significant numbers.

  To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There’s no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter that these people’s dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I—or does anyone else—have to destroy them?

  At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?

  I’ve been thinking more about rights, and I’ve come to the conclusion that defensive rights always take precedence over offensive rights. To take an example especially close to the heart of many women, given the high regard sexual coercion is evidently given within this culture, one person’s defensive right to bodily integrity always trumps—or rather would always trump, within a workable morality—another’s perceived right to sexual access.

  In my life I’ve been in a couple of romantic relationships I would define as emotionally abusive. The women would call me names, and harangue me for days about this or that characteristic of mine they didn’t like. When I asked (begged, pleaded with) them to stop, they became all the more angry, and of course refused. When I told them to stop, they exploded, and let me know in no uncertain terms that I had no right to censor them. “Don’t you think it’s ironic,” they’d say, “that you, a writer who rails at the emptiness of this culture’s discourse, are trying to limit mine?”

  This clash of my defensive right to not be mistreated with the other’s perceived right to shower displaced rage upon me has never been a problem in normal relationships, where the right to say no—to whatever action, for whatever reason—trumps all others. This doesn’t mean there are no consequences for saying no. To go back to the sexual example, if one person wants to be sexual and another person does not, there is no sex. That cannot be in question. But within the context of a sexual relationship, if one person consistently doesn’t want to be sexual, the two involved may wish to re-examine the form of their relationship. Similarly, I’m certainly not going to force anyone to talk about what’s wrong with civilization and what we’re going to do about it, but a consistent refusal will probably limit our friendship: I’m not going to fight six thousand years of history, the full might of the state, and my friends as well (another way to say this is that I’m not going to revisit Civilization is Destructive 101 every time I open my mouth).

  To hear and respect another’s no is to accept that the other has an existence independent of you. People generally refuse to hear another’s no—and this is certainly true of the entire culture’s refusal to enter into relationship with the natural world—when the possibility of intimate and genuine interactions with the other is too frightening to allow. Or when acculturation and personal history combine to make someone believe the other doesn’t even exist for its own sake.

  Two weeks ago, the Klamath River, just south of here, was full of the biggest runs of salmon and steelhead (ocean-going rainbow trout) in years. “You could have walked across on their backs,” someone said to me. I talked to a Yurok Indian, whose culture is based on the salmon, who said the runs made him imagine what it must have been like to see the real runs before the white men arrived. It made me happy. I was going to go see them.

  But I got another call. The fish were dying, piling up in mounds on the shore or floating bloated and bleeding from their vents. “Don’t come,” the caller said. “You don’t want to see this.”

  Walt Lara, the Requa representative to the Yurok Tribal Council, said in a local newspaper interview, “The whole chinook run will be impacted, probably by 85 to 95 percent. And the fish are dying as we speak. They’re swimming around in circles. They bump up against your legs when you’re standing in the water. These are beautiful, chrome-bright fish that are dying, not fish that are already spawned out.” There are probably, he said, a thousand dead fish per mile of river.143

  Last summer the federal government decided there was no evidence that fish need water, and instead redirected the water to (a few heavily subsidized) farmers in the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon. The water in the Klamath is now too warm for the salmon.

  This is the story of civilization. This culture is killing the planet.

  The defensive right of the salmon community to live, and the defensive right of the river to exist for its own sake, would in any meaningful morality trump the perceived rights of the farmers to take the water, and the perceived right of the government to give it to them.

  But, you could ask, what about the right of the farmers to continue their traditional (and in this case, taxpayer- and environmentally subsidized) lifestyle?

  This brings us to the eighth premise of this book: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of any economic system. This seems so self-evident I’m embarrassed to have to defend it, but it is a notion that entirely escapes our public (and private) discourse. Just yesterday I saw a tiny article on page seven of the San Francisco Chronicle stating that every single stream—every single stream—in the United States is contaminated with toxic chemicals (the completeness of this toxification should surprise me less than it does: surely if every mother’s breast milk is contaminated with toxic chemicals, why should we expect streams to be any more immune?), and that one-fifth of all animals and one-sixth of all plants are at risk for extinction within the next thirty years. Page one carried a huge article about Elvis memorabilia, and another that began, “Congress took its first tentative step Wednesday toward mandating that all television sets by 2006 include technology to foil piracy of digitized movies and television shows.”144 Don’t forget, once again, the entire sections of the paper devoted to sports, business, and comics/gossip.

  Think about it for a second: what is the real source of our life? Of our food, our air, our water? Is it the economic system? Of course not: it is our landbase.

  Just last week I learned that the air in Los Angeles is so toxic that children born there inhale more carcinogenic pollutants in the first two weeks of their lives than the EPA (which routinely understates risks so as not to impede economic production) considers safe for a lifetime. In San Francisco it takes about three weeks.145 We’re poisoning ourselves. Or rather, we are being poisoned. Another way to put the eighth premise is: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and really stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

  If someone put a plastic bag over your head, or over the head of someone you love, and said he would give you money if you leave it there, would you take the money?

  And if you said no, what would you do if he insisted, even to the point o
f a gun?

  Would you take the money?

  Or would you fight back?

  When they don’t have anything better to do—which frankly seems like most of the time—anti-environmentalists are fond of pointing out the hypocrisy of environmentalists. You live in a house, don’t you? You wipe your ass with toilet paper. Your books are made of paper. Every one of these activities is environmentally destructive. You are not pure. Therefore what you say is meaningless.

  It’s an interesting argument on several levels. The first is that it reveals the weakness of their own position: they cannot rebut the substance of our message, so they simply attack the messenger. It’s one of the most overused rhetorical tricks going. But there’s something even more interesting about their arguments—fundamentally stupid as they are—which is that they’re right, and in being right they make one of my central points better than I do. Building houses is destructive. Manufacturing toilet paper is destructive. Printing books is destructive. But there’s no reason to stop there. The industrial economy itself is inherently destructive, and every act that contributes to the industrial economy is inherently destructive. This includes buying my books. This includes buying something from Global Exchange. If we care about the planet, we then have a couple of options. The first—and this one is often suggested by anti-environmentalists—is that we simply off ourselves. I prefer the second one, which is that we dismantle the industrial economy.

  I want to be clear. When people tell me population is the number one environmental problem we face today, I always respond that population is by no means primary. It’s not even secondary or tertiary. First, there’s the question of resource consumption I mentioned earlier. Second is the failure to accept limits, of which overpopulation and overconsumption are merely two linked symptoms. Beneath that is our belief we’re not animals, that we’re separate from the rest of the world, that we’re exempt from the negative consequences of our actions, and that we’re exempt from death. Beneath these beliefs is a fear and loathing of the body, of the wild and uncontrollable nature of existence itself, and ultimately of death. These fears cause us to convince ourselves not only of the possibility but the desirability of not being animals, of separating ourselves from the world. These fears drive us crazy, and lead us to create and implement insane and destructive economic and social systems.

  All of this is a roundabout way of getting to my ninth premise, which is: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population may occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some will be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear Armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by a crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default of our culture. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence—required and caused by the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich—and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps long-term shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament, and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

  PREDATOR AND PREY

  Kill every buffalo you can, for every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.

  Colonel R.I. Dodge, Fort McPherson, 1867 146

  I’VE LONG UNDERSTOOD THAT CIVILIZATION REQUIRES LAND OWNERSHIP to be concentrated in the hands of the rulers, by force when necessary and tradition when possible. More basically, it requires that people be inculcated to believe land can be bought and sold. Ultimately, of course, it requires that people be inculcated to believe everything can be bought and sold, and requires also that ownership of everything be concentrated as completely as possible in the hands of the rulers.

  Those in charge have always understood—and have often been explicit about it—that it’s difficult to control people who have access to land. Depriving them of this access puts them at your mercy. Without access to land there can be no self-sufficiency: land provides food, shelter, clothing. Without access to land people obviously have no place to stay. If you can force people to pay just so they can be alive on this earth—nowadays these payments are usually called rent or mortgage —you’ve forced them into the wage economy. The same holds true for forcing them to pay for materials the earth gives freely: the salmon, bison, huckleberries, willows, and so on that are central to the lives, cultures, and communities not only of indigenous peoples but to all of us, even if we make believe this isn’t the case. To force people to pay for things they need to survive is an atrocity: a community- and nature-destroying atrocity. To convince us to pay willingly is a scam. It also, as we see around us—or would see had we not been so thoroughly convinced—causes us to forget that communities are even possible.

  Those in power have rarely hidden their intentions. Indeed, as I’ve written elsewhere, the need to separate the majority of people from their food supplies—thus separating them also from their freedom—was central to the design of civilization’s early cities.147 I’ve written, too, how slave owners described the land-ownership conditions under which chattel slavery was the optimal means to control a workforce, and described also the conditions under which not chattel but wage slavery was the owners’/capitalists’ best option. If there’s a lot of land and not many people, you’ll need to use force in order to convert free human beings into laborers. If, on the other hand, there’s a lot of people and not much land, or if those in power otherwise control access to land, those who do not own the land have no choice but to work for those in power. Under these conditions there’s no reason for owners to go to the expense of buying or enslaving people, then paying for their slaves’ food, clothing, and shelter: it’s much cheaper to simply hire them.148 As one pro-slavery philosopher put it: “In all countries where the denseness of the population has reduced it to a matter of perfect certainty, that labor can be obtained, whenever wanted, and that the laborer can be forced, by sheer necessity, to hire for the smallest pittance that will keep soul and body together, and rags upon his back while in actual employment—dependent at all other times on alms or poor rates—in all such countries it is found cheaper to pay this pittance, than to clothe, feed, nurse, support through childhood, and pension in old age, a race of slaves.”149

  Today, of course, we have so internalized the ideology of centralized control, of civilization, that most of us do not consider it absurd that people have to pay someone simply so they may exist on the planet, except perhaps to grumble that without rent or mortgage (or second mortgage) payments we wouldn’t have to work so hard at jobs we don’t like, and could spend more time with people we love, doing things we enjoy.

  Although I have understood all of the above for a long time, it was only last week that I realized—and my indigenous friends are wondering where I’ve been these last six thousand years—that just as those in power must control access to land, the same logic dictates they must destroy all stocks of wild foodstuffs. Wild salmon, for example, cannot be allowed to live. Why would I go to Safeway if I could catch coho in the stream outside my door? I wouldn’t. So how do those in power make certain I lack food self-sufficiency? Simple. Eliminate free food sources. Eliminate wild nature. For the same is true, obviously
, for everything that is wild and free, for everything else that can meet our needs without us having to pay those in power. The push to privatize the world’s water helps make sense of official apathy surrounding the pollution of (free) water sources. You just watch: air will soon be privatized: I don’t know how they’ll do it, but they’ll certainly find a way.

  This destruction of wild foodstuffs has sometimes been accomplished explicitly to enslave a people, as when great herds of buffalo were destroyed to bring the Lakota and other Plains Indians to terms, or as when one stated reason for building dams on the Columbia River was that dams kill salmon. The hope was that this extirpation would break the cultural backs of the region’s Indians. But the destruction of wild foodstocks doesn’t require some fiendishly clever plot on the part of those in power. Far worse, it merely requires the reward and logic systems of civilization to remain in place. Eliminating wild foodstocks is just one of many ways those in power increase control. And so long as the rest of us continue to buy into the system that values the centralization of control over life, that values the production of things over life, that values cities and all they represent over life, that values civilization over life, so long will the world that is our real and only home continue to be destroyed, and so long will the noose that is civilization continue to tighten around our throats.

  Once again I had dinner with my friend who used to date the philosopher. We sat down. She jumped right in. “What is the relationship between drinkable quantities of clean water being good, and rape being bad?” In the days after our dinner conversation, her enthusiasm had run up against the clear leap of logic—her ex-boyfriend would have said faith—in my argument.