Schiller responded by first stating scientists get it all wrong when they say fossil fuels have been underground for millions of years: the Earth, he said, is just ten thousand years old.
How does he know this?
Because the Bible tells him so. Schiller says, “You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible.” The Book of Daniel, he states, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the “End Time” and the return of Christ.211
All of this means that to many fundamentalists, the killing of the planet is not something to be avoided but encouraged, hastening as it does the ultimate victory of God over all things earthly, all things evil. Someone once asked Rick Santorum, this government’s third most powerful Senator, why he consistently implements policies that harm the natural world. He replied that the natural world is inconsequential to God’s plan, then referenced the impending rapture: “Nowhere in the Bible does it say that America will be here one hundred years from now.”212 (Now tell me you still believe the problems we face are tractable through reasonable discussion: tell me you believe these people will stop because we ask nicely, or because we make our cases through even the most impeccable logic.)
It’s important to note that one hundred and seventy-eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives and forty-four members of the U.S. Senate are Christian fundamentalists, or are otherwise allied with the Christian right. The President of the United States and former attorney general are self-described fundamentalists. 213 The President of the United States has stated publicly his reason for bombing and invading Afghanistan and Iraq: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did.”214 And one of his advisors said, “George W. Bush really does seek information. He’s very curious about the downing of a U.S. spy plane by China, and so he asked a lot of questions. He asked some detailed questions. Several times he asked, ‘Do the members of the crew have Bibles?’ ‘Why don’t they have Bibles?’ ‘Can we get them Bibles?’ ‘Would they like Bibles?’”215
It is quite possible, indeed likely, that the man with his “finger on the button” that could turn all of this planet into a radioactive wasteland (faster, rather than the slower way civilization is currently accomplishing this) could be actively and eagerly—rapturously—putting in place policies aimed at bringing an end to our time on earth, and the arrival of a mythical Prince of Peace.
This is why civilization is killing the world.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, PART II
There have been periods of history in which episodes of terrible violence occurred but for which the word violence was never used. . . . Violence is shrouded in justifying myths that lend it moral legitimacy, and these myths for the most part kept people from recognizing the violence for what it was. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed.
Gil Bailie 216
IT’S NOT JUST THOSE IN POWER WHO ARE INSANE. IT’S THE WHOLE culture. A national poll in 1996—and we see this sort of result all the time—showed that more than 40 percent of Americans believe the world in its present form will end at the battle of Armageddon in Israel between Jesus and the anti-Christ. 217 Presumably the evening’s opening bout will be between the Virgin Mary and the Easter Bunny.
We’re fucked. We’re so fucked.
Not in the good sense of the word.
A reasonable definition of insanity is to have lost one’s connections to physical reality, to consider one’s delusions as being more real than the real world.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE EIGHT. Arrogance.
I have before me an advertisement for the University of California Berkeley Extension. It shows a picture of a man leaning back in his chair, arms folded behind his head, feet on his desk. He wears a white shirt and black tie. I can clearly see the soles of his business shoes. To the left of his shoes an artist has rendered four footprints. On the far left is a bird print. Then a small mammal’s. Then a bear’s. Then leading up to his shoes is a bare human footprint. The caption: “Evolution . . . doesn’t have to take a million years.”
The implication is clear: through “a million [sic] years,” through birds, mammals, through all creatures, evolution has been leading toward businessmen, and more broadly toward this culture. We are the apex of all life on earth. We are the point. All of evolution has taken place so that we can wear uncomfortable clothes and sit at desks.
Flattering, isn’t it?
It’s not only Christians who believe the world was made for civilized humans.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE NINE. Each year Shell Oil corporation and the magazine The Economist hold an “international writing competition to encourage future thinking.” The banner headline screams: “YOU WRITE A 2,000 WORD ESSAY. WE WRITE A $20,000 CHEQUE.”
This year’s topic: “Do we need nature?”
Remember the first rule of propaganda: if you can slide your assumptions by people, you’ve got them. Another way to say that—and every good lawyer knows this—is the person who controls the questions controls the answers. How would essays written in response be different if instead The Economist/Shell had asked one of the following: Does nature need us? Does nature need Shell Oil? Do humans need Shell Oil? Does nature need oil extraction? Do humans need oil extraction? Does nature need industrial civilization? Do humans need industrial civilization? Can nature survive industrial civilization? Can humans survive industrial civilization? What can we each do to best serve our landbases? Who is the we in The Economist’s/Shell’s question?
Regarding this essay, here’s probably the most important question of all: if our answers do not jibe with the financial/propaganda interests of Shell Oil and The Economist, do you think they’ll still hand us a cheque for $20,000?
Just in case we’ve forgotten who precisely is cutting the cheque, the sponsors provide several questions to lead us on our (or rather their) way. Their first question is: “How much biodiversity is necessary?” This is an insane question, because it does not take physical reality (in this case biodiversity) as a given, but places it secondary to their mental constructs (in this case different people’s opinions of “how much is necessary”). More sane questions, that is, questions more in touch with physical reality, would be “How much oil extraction, if any, is necessary? How many corporations, if any, are necessary? How can we help the landbase, on its own terms?”
The question is also insanely arrogant, because it presumes that we know better than the landbase how much biodiversity it needs. If you want to know how much biodiversity is necessary, don’t ask me or any other human. Ask the land. And then wait a hundred generations, and your descendants will know the answer for that particular place where they have lived all this time.
And of course their question fails to ask, “How much biodiversity is necessary for what?”
Another of their questions: “Sustainable development sounds so natural and desirable that no one could possibly disagree with it. Yet technological advance makes today’s definition of what is sustainable or unsustainable quickly obsolete. How can a concept purporting to look to the long term have any real meaning if technology keeps changing the parameters in the short and medium term?”
Once again, we must watch for insane premises leading to meaningless questions. What is their second sentence actually saying? What are its assumptions? A central assumption is that technological change is primary—the independent variable—and definitions of sustainability are secondary, dependent on technological change. Yet I fail to see how technological changes alter the definition of what is sustainable: an activity is sustainable if it does not damage the capacity of the landbase to support its members. Technology does not affect the “parameters” of sustainability or its definitions in the short,
medium, or long term. Technologies can hinder—or, depending on one’s definition of technology , help218—one’s ability to live in a place over a long time, but they do not affect what the term means. Of course living in place for a long time is not what this contest is about, nor is it what this question is about. It seems very clear to me that the real purpose of the “question” is to guide writers into calling into question the baseline nature of sustainability, which really is the bottom line of survival. Sustainability is and must be the independent variable, and the proper question to ask—if you’re interested in surviving—is how any given technology helps or hinders your way of living’s sustainability, that is, your survivability, that is, your viability, which means how it helps or hinders the health of the landbase to which you belong.
Another question, more of the same: “If man’s [sic] success [sic] as a species, in terms of population growth and knowledge, is a natural phenomenon, how can man [sic] be said to threaten nature? Is the line between artificial and natural itself artificial?”
I’m sure by now you can parse for yourself the (insane) assumptions of these questions, and where they guide us. For example, they use the word men to encompass all humans, ignoring women (which is, says someone with a penis, how things of course should be). They use the word men—implying by the rest of the question civilized men—to encompass all cultures, ignoring the indigenous (which is, says someone born in a city, how things of course should be). They define success not as living in place over time but as conquering all other cultures and conquering the planet (this misdefinition of success is an old one. I believe the formative command was: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth219). They use runaway population growth as an example of success, something that seems grotesque in a conversation ostensibly about sustainability. Their use of the word knowledge in this context is as interesting as their word success. By knowledge, do they mean genetic engineering, or do they mean the thousands of languages being driven to extinction by the dominant culture, and along with them the knowledge of how to live in long-term relationships with the places where those languages were born? (I think it’s safe to say the former, because another one of their questions is: “How do we balance the distrust of genetic modification with the needs of developing country farmers and people?” which implies not only that that genetic modification primarily helps the poor and not transnational chemical and oil corporations, but that resistance to genetic engineering is based on “distrust”—read unsophistication and stupidity—and not on the understanding that genetic engineering is bad for these farmers and for their landbases.) Having defined themselves as all of humanity—a fine use of the classic abuser’s trick of monopolizing perception—their use of the phrase “how can man [sic] be said to threaten nature” becomes not only an attempt to naturalize the atrocious (It’s in our nature to terrorize, rape, exploit, and kill you, then steal your resources. We really had no choice) but worse, an explicit statement that what is happening is not: It is an invitation to write an essay showing that the natural world is not in fact threatened (and don’t give me any shit about that not being the case. If we saw a phrase like this on a high school or college exam, we’d know exactly what we’d need to write if we wanted to get an A. Now just multiply that incentive by $20,000). Sure, the logic goes, sharks may be getting hammered, as are marlins, flounders, salmon, whales, black-tailed prairie dogs, tiger salamanders,220 spotted owls, marbled murrelets, Port Orford cedar, tigers, chimpanzees, mountain gorillas, orangutans, but “if man’s success as a species, in terms of population growth and knowledge, is a natural phenomenon, how can man be said to threaten nature?”
It’s the same old statement posed by the scientist from the National Science Foundation when he denied any link between air guns and beached whales. And to be honest, I want to respond the same way: If my success as a person, in terms of having the ability to purchase a gun and the knowledge on how to find you, is a natural phenomenon, and if death itself is a natural phenomenon, how can I be said to threaten you?
It’s all insane. It’s precisely the sort of nonsense the CIA extolled in their torture handbook—sorry, human resource exploitation manual. If you babble long enough, you can break people, get them to go along with almost any program.
But we still have one more part of this question: “Is the line between artificial and natural itself artificial?” We’ve all heard this argument before, usually put forward by those who wish to further exploitation: humans are natural, therefore everything they create is natural. Chainsaws, nuclear bombs, capitalism, sex slavery, asphalt, cars, polluted streams, a devastated world, devastated psyches, all these are natural.
I have two responses to this. The first I explored already in The Culture of Make Believe, where I said, “This is, of course, nonsense. We are embedded in the natural world. We evolved as social creatures in this natural world. We require clean water to drink, or we die. We require clean air to breathe, or we die. We require food, or we die. We require love, affection, social contact in order to become our full selves. It is part of our evolutionary legacy as social creatures. Anything that helps us to understand all of this is natural: any ritual, artifact, process, action is natural to the degree that it reinforces our understanding of our embeddedness in the natural world, and any ritual, artifact, process, action is unnatural to the degree that it does not.”221
My second response to their question is: Who cares? I want to live in a world that has wild salmon and tiger salamanders and tigers and healthy forests and vibrant human communities where mothers don’t have dioxin in their breastmilk. If you really want to argue that oil tankers, global warming, DDT, the designated hitter rule, and the rest of the massive deathcamp we call civilization is natural, well, you can just go off in a corner with your $20,000 cheque and your utilitarian-philosopher buddies and play your bullshit linguistic games while the rest of us try to do something about the very real problems caused by civilization. If you want to seriously propose these waste-of-time questions,222 I’ve got nothing to say to you. I’ve got work to do. I’ve got a world to help save, from people exactly like you. I’ve got a civilization to help bring down before it does any more damage.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TEN. It’s 2003 and I read in the newspaper that “Industrial fishing practices have decimated every one of the world’s biggest and most economically important species of fish. . . . Fully 90 percent of each of the world’s large ocean species, including cod, halibut, tuna, swordfish, and marlin, have disappeared from the world’s oceans in recent decades. . . . [F]ishing has become so efficient that it typically takes just 15 years to remove 80 percent or more of any species unlucky enough to become the focus of a fleet’s attention.”223 Although these three sentences by themselves starkly reveal how and why civilization is killing the world, neatly tying together economics, technology, and planetary murder, there are other things about the article and others like it that reveal even more about what we are up against.
The first is the placement of the article, on page A13 (and taking up about one-fourth of the page, with the rest devoted to an ad for the new PCS Vision™ Picture Phone with BUILT-IN Camera). This is a point I’ve made before: if the murder of the oceans doesn’t deserve to rank as front page news, I don’t know what does.
The next is that, somewhat contradicting the first, I’m not sure this is really news at all. I told several activist friends about the article, and most responded, “I thought we already knew this.”
They’re right. Anybody who doesn’t understand that industrial fishing is killing the oceans is either an industry stooge, a politician, or a bureaucrat. Or maybe a moron. But I repeat myself.
Time and again scientists put out studies showing how the natural world is being killed, and time and again the culture keeps killing the planet. I can guaran
tee that in three or four years another study will come out saying that the oceans are being killed. This study will make a big splash on page A13 of many papers. Ho hum. Wanna hand me the sports section?
For example, about thirty seconds of searching the internet revealed articles from 1996 and 1999 detailing how industrial fishing—in each case the technique of long-line fishing where lines thirty or more miles long holding thousands of hooks are strung behind boats—are killing the oceans (including seabirds such as albatross, who are getting absolutely hammered). 1996, 1999, 2003. Let’s wait for 2006.
The world is not being destroyed because of a lack of information: it’s being destroyed because we don’t stop those doing the destroying.
The third is the entirely predictable yet still horrifying response by industry representatives. Linda Candler, speaking for the trade group International Coalition of Fisheries Associations, revealed that my conflation of industry stooges and morons was not in fact a slur by saying, “Research shows fisheries are more productive when fished.” She noted that “fish populations respond by reproducing more” when a new predator, in this case the exact same long-line techniques decried in 1996 and 1999, doesn’t overdo it.224
She’s right, of course. Think of your own body. When you bleed, you obviously produce more blood to replace that which is lost. Using her logic, the more you bleed, the more you produce: QED, bleeding is actually good for you. Putting her logic in context, if someone were to drain 90 percent of Ms. Candler’s blood, making sure, of course, to not overdo it, her body would presumably go into hyperproduction, and she would be even healthier than before.
Defending the indefensible makes anyone who tries it absurd.
Endgame Vol.1 Page 27