My answer: It wasn’t a book. It was the destruction of place after place that I loved. And it was the complete insanity of a culture where so many people work at jobs they hate: What does it mean when the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their waking hours doing things they’d rather not do? The culture itself convinced me something was wrong, by being so extraordinarily destructive of human happiness and, far more importantly, the world itself.
That said, Neil Evernden’s The Natural Alien was the first book I read that let me know I was not insane: that the culture is insane. It was the first book I read that did not take the dominant culture’s utilitarian worldview as a given.
Question two: Which one book would you give to every politician?
Answer: One that explodes.
Before you freak out, let’s change the question and see what you think: Which one book would you give to Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels?
Let’s ask this another way: Would a book have changed Hitler? I don’t think so. Unless it exploded.
And before you freak out at the comparison of modern politicians to Hitler and his gang, try to look at it from the perspective of wild salmon, grizzly bears, bluefin tuna, or any of the (fiscally) poor or indigenous human beings. Those in power now are more destructive than anyone has ever been. And they are for the most part psychologically unreachable. And if someone does reach some politician, that politician will no longer be in power.
I recently shared a stage with Ward Churchill. He said the primary difference between the U.S. and the Nazis is that the U.S. didn’t lose.
I responded with one word: “Yet.”
Question three: What book would you give to every CEO?
Answer: See above.
Question four: What book would you give to every child?
Answer: I wouldn’t give them a book. Books are part of the problem: this strange belief that a tree has nothing to say until it is murdered, its flesh pulped, and then (human) people stain this flesh with words. I would take children outside and put them face to face with chipmunks, dragonflies, tadpoles, hummingbirds, stones, rivers, trees, crawdads.
That said, if you’re going to force me to give them a book, it would be The Wind in the Willows, which I hope would remind them to go outside.
Question five: It’s 2050. The ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising. You’re only allowed one book on the Ark. What is it?
Answer: I wouldn’t take a book, and I wouldn’t get on the ark. I would kill myself (and take a dam out with me). I do not want to live without a living landbase. Without a living landbase I would already be dead. No book would even remotely compensate. Not a million books. Not a million computers. Not a million people would compensate.
NECK DEEP IN DENIAL
We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn344
ANYBODY NOT NECK-DEEP IN DENIAL MUST BY NOW UNDERSTAND that the global economy is utterly incompatible with life. That much is clear. But why is that the case? Understanding that took me years, even though, when you get to the bottom of it, it’s pretty damn obvious. Here it is: A global economy effectively creates infinite demand. There you have it. That’s a problem, because no natural community—not even one so fecund as the salmon used to be, or passenger pigeons, or cod, and so on ad absurdum—can support infinite demand, especially when nothing beneficial is given back. All natural communities survive and thrive on reciprocity and cycles: salmon give to forests who give to salmon who give to oceans who give to salmon. A global economy is extractive. It doesn’t give back, but follows the pattern of the machines that characterize it, converting raw materials to power.345 Combine an extractive (machine) economy with infinite demand, and you’ve got the death of pretty much everything it touches. Duh. I first gained this understanding from an email someone sent me. She lives in Canada and wrote that until a few years previous her valley had been full of grizzly and black bears. She used to see maybe a dozen bears on an average spring, summer, or fall day. Now she was lucky to see one a week, and it was usually the same bear. The difference, she said, was that hunters had discovered the Chinese market for bear gall bladders. The market would consume as many gall bladders as the hunters could take. So they took them all. It was immediately clear to me that the local human community could have killed basically as many bears as they wanted for gall bladders, because I’m sure the market is pretty small there. And besides, if they kill all the bears, how will they get more gall bladders tomorrow? But as soon as you open up the market to the entire world, not only do you lose the face-to-face feedback of seeing your future supplies dwindle on the altar of today’s profits, but the demand for something even as esoteric as gall bladders becomes more or less infinite. No population can support that. That is exactly what happened to great auks, passenger pigeons, Eskimo curlews, cod, salmon, sperm whales, right whales, blue whales, humpback whales, roughy, sharks, white pine, redwood. Everything. No population can support infinite demand. No population can survive a global economy. The problem is inherent, not soluble by any amount of tinkering.346
The same argument reveals, by the way, how it is that within this culture every technological innovation is turned to evil. Let’s say I live in a human-sized community, less than a hundred and fifty people or so.347 I invent something. Within that functioning community—one in which we know we’ll be living on this land we love forever, and so we have to get along not only with each other but with all our nonhuman neighbors—we will then have ways to make decisions how to use (or not use) this technological innovation. I’ve been told, for example, that the Okanagans of what is now British Columbia divide their community for decision-making purposes into four groups by proclivity and expertise. One group is the youth, which doesn’t necessarily mean the young, although they often are. These people have tremendous creative energy, and yearn for change that will bring a better future. They’re creative, and theoretical, and they tend to move and think quickly. The next group are the elders, who are concerned with protecting traditions. They move slowly. They’re interested in the sacred and in deeper awareness. The next group, the fathers, are more action-oriented, and are concerned with security, sustenance, and shelter. Members of the final group, the mothers, the nurturers, want to make sure everyone is taken care of. They process a lot and ask, “How’s everyone going to be affected by this?”348 Members of these four groups will formulate their opinions on the innovation, and facilitators will help the community and its leaders come to an eventual decision. So, let’s say I invent something with both beneficial and harmful uses, depending on who’s using it. We as a community decide whether we want it, whether it will enhance our lives and the lives of our nonhuman neighbors, and how we will use it, if we use it at all.
Now, let’s say I invent this thing, and let’s say it does have serious harmful uses, and let’s say the community tells me not to use it. Let’s say I ignore them. This would be exceedingly strange in the first place. Picture a healthy family that has decided as a unit that they do not want any of their members (or anyone else) to put poisons on their food, nor to toxify the water they drink, nor to toxify the air they breathe. What reasonable member of this family community would be so horrid as to proceed anyway? But let’s say I do. I don’t know why I do. Maybe I’m a capitalist. Or maybe I’m a sociopath. Maybe the former is a subcategory of the latter. Within a healthy functioning community I would be dissuaded from acting such, or if that didn’t work I would be disallowed, or if that didn’t work I would be exiled or killed. I would not be allowed to harm the community in this way.
But, and here’s the point, when your invention moves beyond the local community, when, as Mumford stated approvingly as a purpose of civilization, you “make available to all men [sic] the discoveries and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values and purposes that any single group has discovered,”349 you
move beyond face-to-face accountability, which means there are no longer those immediate and vital checks on harmful uses. Further, and even worse, let’s say I invent something we in our community perceive as having only beneficial uses. Our community says it’s great to go. But just as if you have a big enough economy someone is going to come up with a way to make money off bear gall bladders, thus guaranteeing the bears’ demise half a world away, if you have a big enough pool of people with access to the original invention, someone is going to figure out a way to use for ill almost anything you make. Remove accountability, create mass communication, and voila! Suddenly everyone’s harmfully using this previously beneficial invention. And if everyone else is doing it, wouldn’t I be a damn fool to do otherwise?350
Okay, so maybe I’m wrong. Not about civilization killing the planet. That’s obvious. But about the whole Earth Mother/Benevolent God/Santa Claus/Easter Bunny thing. Maybe the Great Spirit is watching over us, and is going to help us out of this mess.
The last few days I’ve been thinking about a parable I heard when I was young. A Christian is walking down a road in India. Suddenly a throng of people comes running the opposite direction. When they get close enough, he hears them cry that an elephant has gone crazy (or maybe sane, depending on your perspective), and is trampling people up ahead. The Christian says, “I am not worried. God will take care of me.”
He keeps walking.
Another crowd rushes by delivering the same message. He responds, “I am not worried. God will take care of me.”
He keeps walking.
Yet another crowd. Same message. Same response: “I am not worried. God will take care of me.”
He keeps walking.
He sees the elephant.
He’s a little worried.
But God will take care of him.
The elephant sees him. The elephant rushes him. The elephant stomps him flat.
As he is dying, he turns against God, curses, and moans, “God, why didn’t you take care of me?”
Then he hears the voice of God, clear and strong, “You idiot! Why do you think I sent all those people to warn you?”
I have no doubt that when the people who are relying on the Great Mother to clean up their toxic messes die, the Great Mother will say to them something similar: “You idiot! Why do you think I sent all of those catastrophes to warn you? What do you think was the message behind global warming, behind little girls getting pubic hair, behind mass extinctions, behind the epidemic of cancer?”
A series of dreams. In the first, I’m in a canyon. Like the Grand Canyon, it’s huge. Also like the Grand Canyon, it’s on the Colorado River. But it’s near the ocean. I can hear the waves. Like the Colorado, the river no longer reaches the sea, but dies in sand and dirt, its water—its blood—sucked away by cities, by the civilized, held back by dams no one in this dream dreams of removing. In this dream, hydrologists and geologists and environmentalists and all sorts of other -ists dig little trenches in the sand where they place little fishes one by one in the hopes that water will magically rise up from the soil to keep the fishes alive. The ocean roars in the distance, the fish flop and die on the dry and sandy soil, the -ists stroke their chins in consternation, standing in the shadow of the dams, and do what pathetically little is available to them to save the river that they themselves are helping to kill by their stupidity and blindness.
This is what we do.
Later that night, I dreamt I was fighting a lich: a user of magic who had been not living, not dead for several thousand years. In this dream I had magic, too, but of a different sort, and each time he tried to freeze me in place, or suck away my life—as he had done to so many others, and as he must do if he is to continue to not-live, not-die—I struck him back twice as hard as he tried to strike me. He began to fear me, and then he began to weaken. Soon it became clear he was going to die. He kept fighting—because that was what he had done for so long—but suddenly I understood that not only was it my task to not let him kill me, and not only was it my task to kill him, but even more it was my task to release him from his undead state, to grant him the release that all undead351 secretly (even to themselves) desire. It was my task to teach him a lesson known to every tadpole, every raindrop, every sea anemone, every mountain, every elephant, every uncivilized human being: how to die. It was my task to finally and completely kill him.
This is what we must do.
But the dreams did not end there. Still later in the night, I was given a box of puppies, which I carried through a city. Although all of the puppies were from the same litter, many were tiny, smaller than the smallest runts I’ve ever seen. I had to hurry to return them to their mother. I searched and searched for a way out of the city, and at last reached a forest. There, their mother waited for them. I gave her back her children. Some, I knew, would live. And I knew that some would die.
This, I knew in the dream, is true as well for all of us—human and nonhuman alike—who are boxed up and separated from our source of sustenance, who are being killed by the fumes and emptiness of everything our cities represent and are. Some will live, and some will die. And I knew in the dream also that this is just as true for those of us who fight the system, those of us who fight the lich, those of us who do not merely dig tiny trenches in the barren sand below the big dams that need to be taken down: some of us will live and some of us will die.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
Every individual who wants to save his humanity—and, indeed his skin—had better begin thinking dangerous thoughts about sabotage, resistance, rebellion, and the fraternity of all men [and women] everywhere. The mental attitude known as “negativism” is a good start.
Dwight MacDonald352
Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience.
U.S. et al v. Goering et al353
Anyone with knowledge of illegal activity and an opportunity to do something about it is a potential criminal under international law unless the person takes affirmative measures to prevent the commission of crimes.
Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal 354
AT THIS REMOVE, WHO ARE THE REAL HEROES OF THE THIRD REICH? Hitler, Bormann, Himmler, Goering? I think not: I don’t imagine many parents gift their male children with the first name Adolf anymore. You may as well call your kid Caligula. Those who ran the Third Reich are rightly reviled. So are their lieutenants, people like Frank, Eichmann, and Kaltenbrunner, people who were deservedly hanged for carrying out the evil (if the word evil is to mean anything at all, it must apply here) plans of their leaders. The same is true for the loyal generals, like Keitel and Jodl, both of whom were hanged for planning and waging aggressive war (U.S. generals would be well-served to read Justice at Nuremberg and other texts describing their own fate should justice ever befall them—that is, if they can stand how itchy this reading might make their own necks). And the same is true for their propagandists, like Goebbels and Streicher (to save capitalist journalists from actually having to venture into the unknown territory of performing independent research, I’ll just say right out that Goebbels killed himself, and Streicher was hanged for the effect his lies had on the furthering of atrocity).
No, the real heroes of the Third Reich are not the now-dead equivalents of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and company. Nor are they the also-dead equivalents of Gates, Hurwitz, Trump, and others whom we’re taught to admire and emulate. Nor are they the equivalents of Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, and others who lie to us, distract us, while the world is murdered.
The real heroes of the Third Reich are those like Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche and Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, those who took it upon themselves to try through any means necessary to stop the evil in which they found themselves immersed. It is Count Claus Von Stauffenberg (killed by the Nazis July 20, 1944), who had lost an eye and an arm fighting for Germany, and still managed to plot and plan for years, and to plant the bomb that on July 20, 1944, nearly succeede
d in killing Hitler. It is Ludwig Beck (killed by the Nazis July 20, 1944), who in 1938 resigned as Chief of the German General Staff rather than lead his country into war, after that becoming the spiritual leader of the native resistance. It is Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (tortured,355 then killed by the Nazis April 9, 1945), leader of German military intelligence (the Abwehr), who made sure his organization passed on full information to the Allies, and who did everything he could to take down the Nazis. It is the brilliant general (and field marshal) Erwin Rommell (forced by the Nazis to commit suicide October 14, 1944) who used his position of privilege to the advantage of the resistance. It is Hans Von Donhanyi (tortured, then killed by the Nazis April 9, 1945), an Abwehr agent who successfully led a group of Jews disguised as Abwehr agents to Switzerland. It is Hans Oster (tortured, then killed by the Nazis April 9, 1945), who used his position to provide explosives to the resistance. It is Jesuit Priest Alfred Delp (tortured, then killed by the Nazis February 2, 1945), who recognized the role the Christian church played in Hitler’s popular support,356 and did everything he could to counter that, including advocating Hitler’s assassination. It is General Henning von Treskow, who had long worked toward the assassination of Hitler, and who blew himself up with a hand grenade after the failure of the July 20, 1944 plot, leaving us his final words, which we may wish to modernize and take to heart: “Now the whole world will attack us and abuse us. But I am still absolutely convinced that we have acted rightly. I believe Hitler to be not only the arch-enemy of Germany, but also the arch-enemy of the world. When in a few hours’ time I appear before the judgement seat of God to give an account of my deeds and omissions, I believe I shall be able to answer with a good conscience for what I have done in the struggle against Hitler. Just as God once promised Abraham that he would spare Sodom, if only ten just men could be found in it, so I hope God will not destroy Germany because of us. None of us can complain about his death. Whoever joined us, put on the shirt of Nessus. A man’s moral worth begins only when he is ready to give his life for his convictions.”357
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