Tonight I tried to save a wasp. I failed. I was standing in line on a Jetway. The flight had been delayed. Lots of people were cranky. For whatever reason, I wasn’t.
The wasp was beautiful. She was a small hunting wasp, with delicate translucent wings and a body the color of peaches. I saw her long before I got to her. Each person in front of me in line looked at her. I prayed no one would smash her. No one did. I got there. I wanted to reach up and grab her to carry her to the small space between the Jetway and the airplane wall to release her to the outside. But I hesitated, mainly because I didn’t want to be noticed “doing something odd” in line. I wasn’t sure what to do.
I made up my mind when I heard the woman behind me ask her boyfriend, “Can I borrow your shoe?”
I reached up, cupped the wasp in my hand, closed my fingers gently, brought my hand to my chest. People behind me in line gasped. The wasp got out from between my fingers, flew to the ceiling lights. I reached as high as I could, standing on my toes, and missed her again and again. Each time I almost had her, she flew a few inches away.
Finally I had her. Because she was so high that I could not cup her, I had to hold her gently between my thumb and all four fingers. I brought her to my chest.
She stung me. The stings of hunting wasps barely hurt. The venom is meant instead to paralyze spiders or caterpillars, depending on the species of wasp, so she can lay her eggs inside her intended prey. They only sting in defense when all other options are gone, and when they’re terrified.
The sting startled me, and I accidentally let go my grip. She flew back up to the ceiling. The line moved on. I should have stayed back and tried again, but I didn’t. I got on the plane, and hoped she made it out on her own.
In many ways the story of the wasp highlights a distinction between two forms of violence, one of which I evidently didn’t like, and one of which I evidently didn’t care to think about. The former is direct and by omission. It seemed clear to me that if I didn’t do something, this wasp would die, either by being smashed for no good reason by someone wielding a shoe, or by eventually starving or being poisoned in the sterile airport environment. I knew that if I could help her outside she would at least have the chance to make it somewhere away from the concrete and kerosene fumes of the runways, where she might find whole fields of caterpillars or spiders, and where she might find a male wasp eagerly awaiting her attentions. I did not want to stand by and let her die this unnatural death.
The latter—the type of violence I evidently didn’t care to think about—was that I was getting on a plane. If whenever I drive I smash moths against my windshield, I think it’s safe to presume airplanes do the same to wasps (as well as moths, spiders, birds, and everything else that cannot get out of the way of this big metal bullet pushing through the air at several hundred feet per second). And far greater than this is the habitat damage wreaked by the airline, oil, aluminum, electricity, and other industries all necessary to get this thing in the air. I’m sure many fine fields of fat caterpillars and spiders are systematically sacrificed on the sacred altar of air travel. But it’s perhaps better if we don’t speak of that kind of violence, don’t you think?
I don’t want to take this logic too far, however, and suggest that because I boarded this plane that I’m responsible for all the creatures killed by the airline industry. The truth is that had I not flown, the airplane would still have killed those wasps, and the industry would still have destroyed those fields. Sure, I would have cost the airline money, and United’s gross income for the year would have been $400 less than $38 billion, which I suppose makes me responsible for about 1/95,000,000th of the damage caused by this one airline.
I don’t have a lot of patience for those who blame “all of us consumers” for damage caused by the economic and social system, those who say, “We’re all in this together,”400 and who point out, “If we didn’t buy tickets, the airline industry would go broke.” Well, first, if we didn’t buy airline tickets, the feds would bail them out. All major industries rely on massive subsidies of public moneys to stay afloat. Second, if we’re going to throw out a fantasy about the mass of Americans rising up to not buy airline tickets, why dream so low? Why not dream big and have this same fantastic mass of people start taking out dams? Why don’t we have them storm vivisection labs and factory farms to liberate tormented animals? Why not have them dismantle the entire infrastructure? (Oh, because that might lead to real change, and we don’t even want to dream about that.) The same people who tell me I can make a difference by not buying an airline ticket quite often tell me I shouldn’t try to take out a dam because taking out one lone dam wouldn’t accomplish anything. And not buying one lone airline ticket will?
The point, once again and as always, is leverage.401 Sure, I support individuals and sometimes even industries I believe are headed the right direction through spending my hard-earned dollars in places and ways that are less destructive,402 and similarly, insofar as possible, I don’t support through my spending individuals and industries that are especially destructive, but I also recognize that far more needs to be done than this. I am not merely a consumer, much as those in power would like for me to define myself as such. The tools of consumerism are but one set available to me. The trick is to know when and how to use that set, and when and how to use others. The trick, to put it another way, is to leverage my efforts, to make my own small force have larger effects. The questions: What do I want to move?403 What do I use for levers? Where do I place the fulcrums? How hard and when do I push?
There are other problems with attempting to spend or boycott our way to sustainability. The first is that it simply won’t work. Spending won’t work because within an industrial economy nearly all economic transactions are destructive. Because the industrial economy—indeed a civilized economy—is systematically, inherently, functionally, and inescapably destructive, even buying “good things” isn’t really doing something good for the planet so much as it is doing something not quite so bad. Let’s say I purchase organic lettuce at the grocery store. That’s a good thing, right? Well, not particularly. The problem is that the mass cultivation of lettuce—organic or not—still destroys soils, and its transportation to market still requires the use of oil. I suppose if I purchased lettuce grown in small-scale permaculture beds from my next door neighbor, I’d be doing something even less bad, but this is rare enough to be the exception that makes the rule crystal clear.404 For an act to be sustainable, it must benefit the landbase, which means the soil, the critters who live in the soil, the plants who live on the soil, the animals who eat the plants, the animals who eat the animals, the insects and others who turn the dead back into soil. Producing, marketing, or purchasing organic lettuce doesn’t do that. Rare indeed within our culture is the economic activity that improves the landbase (and that doesn’t pay taxes, to boot, since more than 50 percent of the discretionary federal budget goes to pay for war). And don’t throw up your hands in despair and give me the old saw about how all human activities damage landbases: noncivilized people have lived on landbases for a very long time without destroying them, in fact enhancing their landbases according to the needs of the landbases.
The problem is not our humanity. The problem is this culture—this entire culture—and slight changes in spending habits won’t significantly stop the destruction.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t enact whatever changes we can to make whatever difference we can—remember, we do need it all—and buying organic lettuce is better than buying pesticide lettuce, on any number of levels. It’s just to say that when I spoke earlier of this culture being a culture of occupation, of the government being a government of occupation, of the economy being an economy of occupation, I wasn’t speaking metaphorically or hyperbolically. I was speaking sincerely, literally, physically, in all seriousness and truth. If we were Russians living under the German occupation in 1943, would we believe we could stop the Nazis by buying products made by German companies we like
a little more and not buying them from I.G. Farben and other companies we don’t like?
The same is true for boycotts. We can’t boycott our way to sustainability any more than we can spend our way to it. The industrial economy, as is true for any economy of occupation (which means any civilized economy), is fundamentally a command economy (defined as “an economy that is planned and controlled by a central administration”). I know, I know, we’ve all been fed the line that “our” economy is based on some mythical thing called the free market, and that whatever it produces is by definition what we want. But I don’t want depleted uranium any more than I want depleted oceans. Do you? So how did we get them? If the economy really were free, why are armed military and police necessary to secure producers’ access to resources? And even if it were a “free market,” that wouldn’t help our landbases, since these markets do not value those parts of our landbases not perceived as productive (in other words, not obviously amenable to exploitation). And as mentioned before, in a global economy, free market or not, any wild thing that is vulnerable to exploitation (in other words, is valuable) will either be domesticated—enslaved—or exploited to extinction. But it’s worse than this. It’s not a free market anyway. Remember the words of Dwayne Andreas: “There’s not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” 405 Economist Brad DeLong puts this another way: “As producers and employees many of us live in an economy that is better thought of as a corporate economy: an economy in which patterns of economic activity are organized by the hands of bosses and managers, rather than one in which the pattern of activity emerges unplanned by any other than the market’s invisible hand.”406 Yet another way to say all this is to note that, as alluded to above, all sectors of the economy, in fact the economy as a whole, would collapse almost immediately without huge subsidies. If every person in the country suddenly decided to somehow boycott, for example, the oil industry—which of course won’t happen, for any number of obvious reasons—the U.S. and other governments would merely increase the subsidies to that sector of the economy, and probably for good measure arrest the boycott organizers on racketeering charges.407
Another reason we can’t spend our way to sustainability is that we will always be outspent by those who are actively destroying the world. Destroying the world is how they make their money. It is always how they have made their money: through production, through the conversion of the living to the dead, through forcing others (the natural world, human communities) to pay the price for their activities. If you don’t produce—that is, destroy—you won’t make money. That still isn’t to say that there aren’t degrees of destructiveness: the damage caused by a permaculture farmer hand-delivering his lettuce leaves to his neighbors would be trivial compared to the damage caused by a full-on industrio-chemical lettuce agricorporation, but, and this is the point, so would his profits. That’s why those who profit from this destructiveness will always have more money than we do, and will always be able to outspend us. An example should make this clear. Let’s say I make a boatload of money writing and selling books. Oops, scratch that, since the manufacture of books—even on recycled paper using soy-based inks—requires lots of water, energy (ghost slaves), and raw materials. In other words, it’s very destructive. Okay, so let’s say instead I make a boatload of money making a boatload of money (in other words, I haul out my trusty printing press, and I just make the damn stuff). Oops, I can’t do that, since the counterfeiting of money requires high-quality papers and lots of presumably toxic inks, lots of energy, and so forth. In other words, that’s very destructive too. So okay, darnitall, let’s say instead I just walk to a bank (wearing only used clothing taken from the dumpster behind Goodwill), and I take a boatload of money. I do this at night, because I don’t want to threaten or scare any of the tellers, or perform any other action that might be construed as violent. Even better, I don’t go to a bank, but go at night to Wal-Mart, and sneak in through an open door. I don’t want to break a window, because there are those who would consider this an act of violence. I don’t blow the safe because there are those who would consider this an act of violence. But let’s say the safe is open. I take a boatload of money. Or if the safe isn’t open, I take a bunch of consumer items, fabricate some receipts (okay, so this takes paper, but we’ll just ignore that) and return them over the next days and weeks and months for a boatload of money. Wal-Mart, with its $258.6 billion in revenues, isn’t going to miss it.408 The point is that I somehow find a way to acquire a boatload of money that a) didn’t cause me to “produce”—in other words, destroy—anything, and b) didn’t cause me to pay taxes—in other words, to pay the government so it can destroy things. The question becomes, what am I going to do with this cash? Let’s say I do what I actually would do if I acquired a boatload of cash: I buy some land and set it aside. Let’s ignore the fact that in so doing I’m reinforcing the extremely damaging idea that land can be bought and sold. I buy an entire small creek drainage, and I set to work to improve habitat in that drainage for salmon, Port Orford cedars, mountain lions, Pacific lampreys, red-legged frogs, and so on. I create a sanctuary, a place where salamanders, newts, tree frogs, towhees, phoebes, and spotted owls can thrive and live as they did before the arrival of our awful culture. I’ve done a good and great thing, maybe even as good and great as what Elser tried to do. But now I find I want to protect more land, because these creatures need more habitat. What do I have to do? Because I pulled this land out of production, and thus am not “making any money” off of it, I have to write more books, print more money, make more trips to Wal-Mart, and unless I’ve figured out non-destructive ways to acquire cash—like the nocturnal trips to Wal-Mart—then I’m basically creating sacrifice zones elsewhere that I do not see so that the land I do see can be protected. I have to do this every time I want to protect more land.
Now, let’s contrast that with someone who purchases this entire watershed not to create a sanctuary but to cut the trees. That person will “make money” off the land by harming it, and can use that money to purchase more land, where that person can cut more trees and make more money, and use that money to buy more land, and so on until there’s nothing left. See, for example, Weyerhaeuser, or any other timber (or other) corporation.
Because the civilized economy is extractive, because it rewards those who exploit humans and nonhumans, that is, because it rewards those who do not give back to the landbase what it needs, that is, because it rewards people for disconnecting themselves from the reciprocal relationships that characterize (human or nonhuman) sustainable economies (and relationships), those who value the accumulation of money or power over life will always have more money or power than those who value life over money or power.
After a talk I gave last year in Portland, Oregon, several of us anarchists wanted to grab a bite to eat. One said he knew of a place that served great organic food and paid workers a livable wage.
“Sounds perfect,” I said.
“One problem,” he responded. “None of us can afford to eat there.”
Heck, what does it say about this culture and its economics that people must pay for food? And what does it say about this culture and its economics that a very few very large corporations control a very large majority of the food supply?
Worse yet, if people are going to be forced to pay for food, what does it say about this culture and its economics that we face a two-tier system of paying, where it’s cheaper to buy food that has been raised using poisons than it is to buy food that has been raised without using poisons, which means where the rich have enough money to buy organic, and the poor do not? How strange is it that you have to pay extra to be exposed to fewer poisons? It is for this reason, by the way, that I am opposed to labeling genetically modified foods.409 It’s not good enough for me to simply make it possible for the rich to pay extra to not ingest these artificial mutations. That is morally wrong. And because the g
overnment has not stopped and will not stop those who can make a buck by releasing these organisms (and pesticides) into the world, and into our bodies, it falls upon us to stop them. How are we going to do it?
Sure, it’s a good thing to try to do good with your money. And sure, because this strange and destructive economic system based on ownership and exploitation has pretty much overrun the globe it is extremely difficult to avoid participating in it (which means, among other things, that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much for purchasing the vehicle we need to carry explosives to dams [or kids to soccer practice], nor should we beat ourselves up if we buy some pesticide-laden, genetically modified pseudofoods at the grocery store [smothered in monosodium glutamate they taste so very yummy, don’t you think?]). But we must never forget that if we attempt to economically go head to head with those who are destroying the planet, we will always be at a severe, systematic, inescapable, and functional disadvantage. Not buying an airline ticket won’t do squat. But all is not lost. The question, yet again: Where are the fulcrums? How do we magnify our power?
Here’s the problem. Two people walk through a forest. One considers how extraordinarily beautiful the forest is, and how wonderful it is to be alive. The other notices how much of this forest could be turned into immediate fiscal profit, and thinks about how that could be done. Question: Which of these people will probably make more money off the forest? Question: Within this culture, which of these people is more likely to end up in a position of power, making decisions that affect the human and nonhuman communities in and around the forest? Question: How do those of us who care stop them from destroying the forests?
Endgame Vol.1 Page 46