Endgame Vol.1

by Jensen, Derrick

  It seems pretty clear to me also that the rural rich—including, on a global scale, most rural people in the United States—would survive pretty well, too. They’d lose a lot of luxuries, like strawberries in January and shrimp year round. But because, as I’ve said several times, access to land means access to food, clothing, and shelter, these people would probably do well. Their relative wealth in material possessions—owning a gun, for example—would at least somewhat counterbalance their ignorance of how to feed themselves.

  None of this alters the fact that there are too many humans for the land to permanently support. And we haven’t yet begun to talk about cities.

  The urban poor are in a much worse position than the rural poor. They obviously do not have access to land. In the long run, they would of course be far better off without civilization. The problem—and this is obviously a huge one—is that in the short run many of them would be dead: their food is funneled through the very system that immiserates them. Yet we need to remember that the continued existence of civilization and its extractive economies already guarantees the early deaths of many of them: these extractive economies are precisely how they became urban poor in the first place. I say this not to dismiss those deaths but to point out that we—or really, they—are in a double-bind of civilization’s making: if we break down the distribution systems that feed them, many would probably die, yet those distribution systems are parts of a larger megasystem that cannot last, and that is quickly depleting the earth’s capacity to support humans, a megasystem that already does these people great damage. This reveals the stupidity—and evil—of making people dependent on a system that exploits them, cutting off their direct connection to the real support for all life: the landbase.

  But who cares about the poor, right? If they can’t adapt to civilization, fuck ’em, and if they can’t survive without it, fuck ’em twice. We want to know about the only humans who matter. What about the urban rich?

  Well, I’m not too worried about them: they’re the ones who got us in this mess. They can fend for themselves. And if they can’t, fuck ’em.

  There are a number of reasons why my analysis of whether the urban poor could survive without civilization is bullshit. The first is that anytime anyone makes a prediction, that person should expect to be wrong. I can no more predict the outcome of such a complex set of actions as the end of civilization—whatever that means—than I could have predicted the Tampa Bay Devil Rays would lose more than a hundred games in 2002. Well, okay, I might have been able to predict the latter.

  I do not know what will happen when civilization comes down, whether through ecological collapse or the efforts of those humans who resist it. Will the urban poor starve? With the removal of current power structures—which is certainly part of what I’m talking about—along with the cops who keep these power structures in place, will the poor take food from the rich? Will cops become even more violent than they already are? Will cities turn into battle-grounds? Or will the poor form collectives to take care of themselves and their neighbors, and take idle land from the rich to grow their own food? Will the poor be able to keep the food they grow? Will they be able to stay alive until their first crops come in? Will the rich hire (or convince) police to keep the poor from doing this? Will police do this simply on principle? Will police take the food for themselves? What will be the response on the part of the poor? Further, will violence against the natural world get worse? Will it shift its locus from the colonies closer to the heart of empire? I was recently in New England, and someone there commented that local trees had grown back over the last hundred years. He took that as a good sign: the people of the region had finally learned to not deforest their own backyards. I took it more as a sign of the increased reach of civilization: technological and social innovation have enabled these Yankees to deforest the globe—when they want wood fiber, they now come calling to someone else’s backyard. The point is that when global trade collapses—global trade is another part of civilization that needs to go—if these people want fiber, they will once again cut the trees closest to them. But they won’t be able to reach around the world. Will that inability be a good thing? I think so. But the real point is that I don’t know what will happen.

  Here’s what I do know: the global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment. The more this economy can be slowed, the less damage will be caused to the world, and the better the planet will be able to continue to support human (and nonhuman) life.

  I also know that right now none of these urban poor die of starvation. They die of colonialism. As I mentioned before, while three hundred and fifty million people go hungry in India, former granaries in that country export tulips and dog food to Europe. While these same hundreds of millions starve, “their” government attempts to dump sixty million tons of grain into the ocean, because it cannot find export markets for that grain, and because it will not distribute food to those who cannot pay.

  Seventy-eight percent of the countries reporting child malnutrition export food. During the much-publicized famine in Ethiopia during the 1980s, that country exported green beans to Europe. During the infamous potato famine, Ireland exported grain to England (and part of the reason the potato blight took hold in the first place was that the Irish were pushed to the poorest land).

  Sure, there are too many people on the planet. Someday there will be fewer. But right now there is enough food to go around, enough, in fact, to make everyone fat: 4.3 pounds of food per person per day, around the world. This despite the exportation of non-food crops like coffee, tobacco, tulips, opium, and cocaine grown on land used for food production before the (often-forced) entry of the global economy, land that will be used again for local food production once the global economy collapses. This also despite the use of so much land for non-productive ends such as roads and parking lots. Pavement now covers over sixty thousand square miles just in the United States. That’s 2 percent of the surface area, and 10 percent of the arable land.

  Here’s another reason my analysis of whether the urban poor would suffer more from civilization’s crash than its continuation is bullshit, and this forms the twelfth premise of this book: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

  But really there are just people. None rich. None poor. Except in our minds.

  And so people starve.

  When I predicted the urban poor might suffer under civilization’s collapse, I may have been falling once again under the spell of the abuser who says we cannot survive without him. When civilization falls, many of those who die—or at least those who starve, which is what we’re talking about right now—will be those who continue to believe what may be the central delusion of this culture, the delusion that there are rich and there are poor, that monetary wealth—and by extension food, and land (which means food)—is held by anything other than social contract and force. If the “poor” do not fall under this spell, and they can convince enough others it’s not immoral to defend themselves from the hired guns of the (formerly) rich, there is a good chance they will survive.

  My statement that ownership is merely based on shared social delusion is not entirely accurate. First, we all know that the civilized notion of ownership is in truth based on force: the acquisition and maintenance of the property of the rich is the central motivating factor impelling nearly all state violence. But there�
��s a deeper point to be made here, having to do with the mixing of one’s body and the soil. When I say that I’m living on Tolowa land, I don’t mean to imply that their ownership of this land is delusional, or even that it is based on social convention. Quite the contrary. They belong to the land, as the land belongs to them. It is still ownership, but not in the way that the civilized mean it. Typically when we the civilized speak of owning something, it means a person has the right to do what he wishes with it, to destroy it if he so pleases. It’s my computer, so if I want to throw it off a cliff, nobody can stop me. But this other type of ownership has to do with responsibilities, and it has to do with the deal we spoke of earlier between predator and prey. If you live on a piece of land—if you own a piece of land—if you consume the flesh that is on that land, you are now responsible for the continuation of that land and its health. You are now responsible for the health of all the various communities who share that land with you. And because members of this community will consume your flesh, too, they will be just as responsible for the continuation and health of your community. At that point you will own the land, and it will own you.

  Just as those who wish to dominate and exploit will use any excuse to maintain and expand their control, those who see themselves as victims will find any excuse to maintain their belief they could not survive without their exploiters. I’ve known many women who stay with men who beat them and their children because they do not know how they would otherwise pay the rent. This logic is insane: it is also all-too-common. I’ve known many people who sell their hours to jobs they hate for the same reason. This logic is just as insane, and, if anything, is even more common. I remained in those abusive relationships I mentioned earlier in part because I thought I could do no better. At the time it seemed to make sense: from the outside I now perceive my own insanity.

  All of these are stupid reasons to stay in intolerable situations, and in all of the cases I know personally—the abused women, people who hate their jobs, my own ill-chosen relationships—the fears went entirely unrealized when the people had the courage to finally make a move.

  How many of us recognize the atrocious nature of civilization, yet hang on because we fear we would not—could not—survive without it?

  Recently a few members of the Derrick Jensen discussion group faced this subject head on. One wrote, “Although I may detest what civilization is doing, I am literally filled with it. I don’t hunt, gather, or grow my own food, but buy it at diners and grocery stores. I clearly see how being civilized is like being in an abusive relationship, but I rely on this relationship for my food. And because civilization has taken over so much of the land and people, trying to live outside of it can be very hard and lonely.”

  Someone responded, “At one point, the civilized would, and often did, run away from civilization to join the indigenous, to become Pequots, or Lakota, or Goths, or Celts. Unfortunately, by now there is nowhere you can run to get away from civilization. When escape is not an option, what can you do if you’re in an abusive relationship? The Burning Bed [a film about a woman who kills her abusive husband by burning him in his sleep] comes to mind.”

  Another person: “Those who think they can live outside of civilization are gravely mistaken. The only reason some who think they’re living outside civ are left alone is they pose no real threat to the system and can easily be ‘dealt with’ if they do. They’re ‘allowed’ to live their ‘alternative’ lifestyles. As Ted Kaczynski stated some time ago, ‘You can have all the freedom you want as long as the authorities consider it unimportant.’ In order for anyone to really have the chance to truly live ‘outside’ civilization anymore, civilization has to go.”

  This is all very true, and just another way of talking about civilization’s monopolization of perception (and the world). But what will happen if we follow the example of The Burning Bed?

  In answer, one person expressed the concern that “we’ve been caged in civilization so long our natural instincts and awareness have been dulled to the point we no longer trust we have the ability—or even the ability to learn how—to survive in a noncivilized environment.”

  Someone disagreed: “Perhaps I’m not seeing this clearly. I grew up in the country, and by the age of eight knew how to feed and shelter myself. If I could do it at eight, with no one teaching me, how much better could we all learn if we were being taught?”

  The previous person responded: “I didn’t mean to imply we’ve individually lost the ability to learn the skills needed to survive outside civilization. I should have emphasized our lack of deep-seated faith in our abilities, based on a lack of intimacy with the places we live (and, I would add, six thousand years of propaganda telling us nature is dangerous and civilization benign). For example, I’ve chosen to devote my energies primarily to learning, practicing, and perpetuating primitive survival and hunting skills, with the hope that when civilization collapses, such valuable knowledge will make it through to those trying to re-form more humane cultures. But here’s my caveat: at one time I thought I’d become a competent survivalist. Then I had the opportunity to hunt with a half-Cherokee half-hillbilly who’d grown up in the backwoods of Appalachia, a man who could move with speed and stealth through thick underbrush, who could see and hear things in the forest I could not, who had a seemingly instinctual ability to know where to find animals based on the weather, season, time of day, and so on. This was a man possessing a deep-seated faith in his ability to survive in the wild. So while I think I have better survival skills and potential than most people, I have to admit I just don’t have the deep-seated faith that can only come through spending the vast majority of your time in direct contact with the natural world, as my friend did in his youth.

  “There’s a broader problem, though, beyond individual survival, which is that of whole communities being able to learn to exist without the infrastructure of civilization. Again, I don’t mean to imply we can’t learn the needed skills. I just don’t think in the near future we’ll be able to master these skills with the grace evident in indigenous communities.”

  Someone else put in what became the final words: “I agree, but think that grace will come if (and when) we stick with it long enough. And I need to add something for people to think about as civilization comes down: don’t leave out insects. They’re abundant, self-cleaning (not much disease), tasty, and contain lots of protein and good fats. Bon Appetit!”

  After occupying Afghanistan, the United States invaded yet another country, Iraq.

  The first night of the invasion I stood in the checkout line at Safeway, taking in the cover of a magazine—a picture of a fish with a human face—and pondering a question asked on another—whether after all this time Demi Moore will reconcile with Bruce Willis—when a man in his early twenties turned to me and said, deadpan, “So, we’re at war.”

  I tried unsuccessfully to read his unshaven face beneath his baseball cap. I wanted to say, “We’re not at war. I’m not at war. It’s not my government. They’re not my troops.” But that would have required too much explanation. So I said, “Yes, the U.S. government is yet again bombing the shit out of poor brown people.”

  He nodded, and said, “Yes, it is. It certainly is.” He turned away, and so did I.

  As civilization falls, we all—rich and poor alike—have far more to fear than starvation, even more than the dioxin that permeates our bodies. Those in power time and again show no hesitation at killing to gain and maintain access to resources or to otherwise increase their power. Indeed, as is being shown right now in Iraq, and has been shown repeatedly the world over, they show an absolute eagerness to do so (I was going to suggest those who think the U.S. invasion has nothing to do with oil should put the book down, but realized they’ve probably already tired of the big words).

  But their eagerness to use violence to gain power is nothing compared to what awaits anyone within range when their power is threatened. Anybody who has ever been in a violent relationship knows that to lea
ve is extremely dangerous, as abusers often kill their victims rather than let them escape (showing they’d rather kill than give up their control, and, as my mom said, give up their identities). They sometimes kill themselves as well, showing they’d rather die, too, than give up their control and identity.

  This happens not only on a personal level. When Hitler finally realized his war was lost, he tried to take down all of Germany with him. Disobedience on the part of his lieutenants prevented Hitler from succeeding. Had the Nazis possessed a nuclear arsenal comparable to what is now wielded by the United States, Hitler would certainly have attempted to use it to destroy the world. If an abuser cannot control a thing, it shall not be allowed to exist. This is the quintessence of abuse.

  Lately at talks I’ve begun commenting that if those who run the U.S. government were to find their power seriously threatened, whether through internal rebellion or ecological collapse, there’s a good chance they wouldn’t scruple at nuking L.A. or any other seat of resistance. Heck, they’ve nuked Nevada for decades without any threat to their power at all.

  People nod when I say this. There are no gasps of shock or disbelief. People easily accept the very real possibility of “their” leaders using nuclear weapons on the people and landbase they purport to serve. People are often far ahead of me in their analysis and understanding that those in power will do anything to maintain that power, and will destroy everything under their control before they see it let free.