In the exciting final scene of the environmentalist version, a scuffle breaks out between Leia, Luke, Han, and Chewbacca on one side, and the pacifists on the other. At last the pacifists chase those four from the room and from the film. They’re never seen again, which isn’t really important since in this version they’re minor characters anyway. The Death Star looms closer and closer. Audience members chew their fingernails as they wait to see whether the letters and petitions and lawsuits will work their magic. Viewers see lasers inside the Death Star warming up to destroy the planet. The lasers glow a hellish red. The camera switches to cover the endangered planet. Suddenly a cheer will rise up from the audience as they see a small bright speck emerge from the planet’s surface and speed into space. “Yes!” they will roar, as they learn that all of the intrepid environmentalist protesters were able to get off the planet moments before it got blown up!
Coda: The final shot of the movie, revealing what a complete triumph this was for the rebels, will be a still showing an article on the lower-left of page forty-three of the New Empire Times devoting a full three sentences to the destruction of the planet. Yes! The protesters got some press!473
During the Q & A of a talk I gave last week, someone asked, “How many environmentalists does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“I’ll bite,” I said, “How many?”
“None,” he replied. “They just sit in the dark and whine about fossil fuel emissions.”
I didn’t get it. Evidently, neither did anyone else in the audience. Nobody laughed. I, as well as the rest of the audience, ended up more or less scratching our heads.
Later that night, an answer came to me: Ten. One to write the lightbulb a letter requesting that it change. Four to circulate online petitions. One to file a lawsuit demanding it change. One to send the lightbulb lovingkindness™, knowing that this is the only way real change occurs. One to accept the lightbulb precisely the way it is, clear in the knowledge that to not accept another is to do great harm to oneself. One to write a book about how and why the lightbulb needs to change. And finally, one to smash the fucking lightbulb, because we all know it’s never going to change.
Acknowledgments
AS ALWAYS, MY FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT DEBT OF GRATITUDE is to the land where I live, which sustains and supports me. Equal to this is my debt to the muse, who gives me these words, and without whom I cannot imagine my life. Thanks also to the source of my dreams.
My thanks to the redwoods, red and Port Orford cedars, alders, and cascara; the Del Norte, Olympic, slender, and Pacific giant salamanders; the Pacific tree and northern red-legged frogs; the rough-skinned newts; the spotted and barred owls, the phoebes, pileated woodpeckers, hummingbirds, herons, mergansers, and so many others; the coho and chinook salmon, the steelhead; the banana slugs, the flying ants, and the solitary bees. Thank you to the reeds, rushes, sedges, grasses, and ferns, the huckleberries, thimbleberries, salal, and salmonberries. The chanterelles, turkey tails, amanitas, and so many others. My thanks to the gray foxes, the black bears, Douglas squirrels, the moles, the shrews, the bats, the woodrats, the mice, the porcupines, and the shy aplodontia. My thanks to all the others who graciously allow me to share their home, and who teach me how to be human.
There are others who have helped with this book. They include, among others: Melanie Adcock, Roianne Ahn, Anthony Arnove, Tammis Bennett, Gabrielle Benton, Werner Brandt, Karen Breslin, Julie Burke, Leha Carpenter, George Draffan, Bill and Mary Gresham, Felicia Gustin, Alex Guillotte, Nita Halstead, Tad Hargraves, Phoebe Hwang, Mary Jensen, Lierre Keith, Casey Maddox, Marna Marteeny, Mayana, Aric McBay, Dale Morris, Theresa Noll, John Osborn, Sam Patton, Peter Piltingsrud, Karen Rath, Remedy, Tiiu Ruben, Terry Shistar and Karl Birns, Dan Simon, Julianne SkaiArbor, Shahma Smithson, Jeff and Milaka Strand, Becky Tarbotton, Luke Warner, Bob Welsh, Belinda, Rob, Brian, Dean, my military friends, John D., Narcissus, Amaru, Yeti, Persephone, Shiva, Emmett.
All these acknowledgments are in a sense premature. It is customary after finishing a book for authors to acknowledge in print all those who helped bring the book to fruition. But this book isn’t yet finished. If it is to be more than mere words, this book will only be complete when this culture of death no longer imperils life on earth. At that point the acknowledgments and gratitude will flow like rivers rushing through canyons once blocked by now-crushed dams.
Notes
1. Bonhoeffer, 298.
Apocalypse
2. This is of course premise four of this book. We can say the same thing for police or the military killing regular people versus those people fighting back.
3. Eckert, 176.
Five Stories
4. McIntosh, 46.
5. Combs, 2. I’m sorry about the masculine-pronoun use here.
6. San Francisco Chronicle, September 13, 2001, 1.
7. “Media March to War.”
8. Ibid.
9. Z Magazine, 62. Even here, however, Cohen was being disingenuous; because of corporate welfare programs “we” generally provide the investment as well.
10. Edwards, Burning All Illusions, 141.
11. There is a fifth version I did not include, which is that the bombings on 9/11 were at the very least committed with the foreknowledge (if not connivance) of those in power, and have served as a pretext to ratchet up repression and state and personal power, à la the Reichstag Fire. The last half of this equation—that the bombings have served as pretext—is undeniable, while the first half is quite possible.
12. Jefferson, 345.
13. George Draffan, Endgame Research Services: A Project of the Public Information Network, http://www.endgame.org (accessed July 10, 2004).
14. Of course it is manifestly true that the corporate managers, stock brokers, financial analysts, FBI and CIA employees, and so on (I am explicitly excluding the janitors, food service workers, temp workers, undocumented employees, firemen, and so on) who worked in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did extraordinary harm—far more than mere frontline soldiers—to most of the humans and nonhumans in the world. As I wrote in The Culture of Make Believe, “It is possible to kill a million people without personally shedding a drop of blood. It is possible to destroy a culture without being aware of its existence. It is possible to commit genocide or ecocide from the comfort of one’s drawing room. Presumably, the people who profit from the manufacture of ozone-depleting substances are fine and upstanding men and women. Presumably, the people who profit from the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction are well respected within their communities. Most of the horrors we are forced to live with have been caused by respectable—even great—men who themselves most often have clean hands. Warren Anderson, responsible for so many deaths in Bhopal, killed not a single Indian. The owners of Carbide who ordered the expansion of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel killed not a single black man. Thomas Jefferson killed no Indians (the same cannot be said for Andrew Jackson). If you are a god you can kill from afar, and if you kill from afar you can maintain in your own mind the objectivity to believe that those you are killing are objects, or better, you can think of them not at all.” And I also wrote, “The oftentimes physical and psychic distance between financier and the activities which are financed in no way lessens their mutually reinforcing relationship. This must be understood if one is to fully apprehend the inhumanity of our culture. Most people do not cut down forests, pollute rivers, force indigenous peoples off their land and commit genocide, or exploit workers out of a conscious sense of hatefulness (conscious perhaps being the operant word); they do it for money. Money fuels economic activities, and at the same time is the reward for participation in a culturally valued enterprise, causally linking financier to activity; without venture capital there can be no capitalist venture, and without monetary reward no venture capital will be provided. Another way to say this is that slavery would not have been viable without loans from bankers like Junius Morgan, and while Junius never once wielded the whip he undeniably, and from a
distance, benefited from the lashings. It’s very simple: our culture allows, even encourages (demands would probably be the best word) someone to profit—to gain power, material possessions, or prestige—at the expense of another’s misery” (Jensen, Culture, 408, 410).
15. See, for example, Lewis Mumford, Farley Mowat, R. D. Laing, and Derrick Jensen.
Civilization
16. Diamond, 1.
17. Webster’s New Twentieth-Century Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed., s.v. “civilization.”
18. Oxford English Dictionary, compact ed., s.v. “civilization.”
19. Stannard, 4.
20. Ibid.
21. Mies, 98.
22. Mumford, Technics, 186.
23. Diamond, 1.
24. Mumford, Technics, 186. There is awkwardness in the original, even though Mumford is normally an exquisite stylist.
25. Diamond, 4.
26. Turner, 182.
27. Faust, 293.
Clean Water
28. Personal communication, December 11, 1998.
29. George W. Bush and others stated in response to the World Trade Center attack that it was our patriotic duty to go out and shop: “Take your family,” Bush also said, “down to Disneyworld.”
30. Most women I know consider those numbers to be low, with actual numbers approaching unity. Many women tell me they know of no women who have not been sexually assaulted.
31. Caputi, Age of Sex Crime, 91.
32. Ibid., 160.
33. I’m speaking theoretically on this one: I love doing research, but my love does know bounds.
34. Mullan and Marvin, 157.
35. The work of Charlene Spretnak was important to my understanding here.
Catastrophe
36. Paz, 212.
37. Mowat, Stannard, Drinnon, and Turner, for example.
38. Laing, 58.
39. For example, that the damn New York Yankees go to the World Series every year; oh, scratch that: the Yankees in the Series is about as inevitable as you can get.
40. Previous paragraphs cobbled together from Scheffer, et al.; “Gradual Change”; and “Accumulated Change.”
41. Cited in Vidal, 19.
42. Mumford, Pentagon, plate 24.
Violence
43. Peter, 115.
44. Mies, 99.
45. Grassroots ESA Coalition, http://nwi.org/GrassrootsESA.html (accessed January 16, 2002).
46. “Fast Facts about Wildlife Conservation Funding Needs,” http://www.nwf.org/naturefunding/wildlifeconservationneeds.html (accessed January 16, 2002).
47. “States Get $16 Million.”
48. Center for Defense Information, http://www.cdi.org/ (accessed January 16, 2002). It’s very hard to find old budgets on their website, but the numbers are just as startling, if not more so, in more recent budgets.
49. Stark and Stark.
50. The CIA’s World Factbook, s.v. “Afghanistan,” http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/af.html (accessed November 19, 2001).
51. Ibid.
52. “MK84,” FAS Military Analysis Network, http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/mk84.htm (accessed November 19, 2001).
53. Walker and Stambler, 23.
54. Ibid., 24.
55. Matus.
56. Edward Herman, 24.
57. Matus; Walker and Stambler; and “BLU-82B,” FAS Military Analysis Network, http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/blu-82.htm (accessed November 19, 2001).
58. Anderson.
59. Tomlinson.
60. Cockburn, “Left,” 1.
61. “CNN Says Focus.”
62. “Fox: Civilian Casualties.”
63. Ibid.
64. “Victims.”
65. Oxborrow.
66. Watson.
67. “Information on Depleted Uranium,” Sheffield-Iraq Campaign, http://www.synergynet.co.uk/sheffield-iraq/articles/du.htm (accessed January 23, 2002).
68. I first accidentally typed hell, but this couldn’t have been a Freudian slip, could it?
69. “Biased Process” and “Coming Your Way.”
70. Cobbled together from Andreas Schuld, “Dangers Associated with Fluoride,” EcoMall: A Place to Save the Earth, http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/fluoride2.htm (accessed January 21, 2002); Citizens for Safe Drinking Water, http://www.nofluoride.com/ (accessed January 21, 2002); and “Facing Up to Fluoride.”
71. “Fluoride Conspiracy,” Northstarzone, http://www.geocities.com/northstarzone/FLUORIDE.html (accessed January 21, 2002), and many others.
72. “What Is Depleted Uranium?” http://www.web-light.nl/VISIE/depleted_uranium1.html (accessed January 23, 2002).
73. Ibid.
74. “Information on Depleted Uranium.”
75. “Cancers and Deformities,” one part of the extraordinary Fire This Time site, http://www.wakefieldcam.freeserve.co.uk/cancersanddeformitites.htm. (accessed January 26, 2002).
76. “Information on Depleted Uranium.”
77. Kershaw.
78. “Extreme Deformities,” Fire This Time, http://www.wakefieldcam.freeserve.co.uk/extremedeformitites.htm (accessed January 26, 2002). See also “Cancer and Deformities” on the same site.
79. Davidson.
80. San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 2002, 1-3.
81. Mowat, 27.
Irredeemable
82. Root, 7.
83. Judith Herman, 33.
84. Ibid., 34.
85. Ibid., 35.
86. Ibid., chap. 2.
87. Ibid., 121.
88. Bright and Ryle.
89. And who have bought into the notion that “resources” are in fact resources at all.
90. Cottin.
91. Chomsky, 33.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., 48.
94. Flounders, 5.
95. See, for example, Garamone.
Counterviolence
96. Jeff Sluka, “National Liberation Movements in Global Context,” Tamil Nation, http://www.tamilnation.org/selfdetermination/fourthworld/jeffsluka.htm (accessed October 10, 2004).
97. I’m not saying, of course, that all spirituality is abstract, but merely that for some people, and indeed for some entire traditions, spirituality can certainly be a way to transcend, i.e., avoid, embodied responses.
98. ACME Collective.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid.
102. Ibid.
103. “Socially Responsible Shopping Guide,” Global Exchange, http://www.globalexchange.org/economy/corporations/sweatshops/ftguide.html (accessed March 16, 2002).
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. “Fair Trade: Economic Justice in the Marketplace,” Global Exchange, http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/stores/fairtrade.html (accessed March 16, 2002).
107. “Global Exchange Reality Tours,” Global Exchange, http://www.globalexchange.org/tours/, and follow links from there for the other information (accessed March 16, 2002).
108. “Sweating for Nothing,” Global Exchange, http://www.globalexchange.org/economy/corporations/ (accessed March 16, 2002).
109. “Report to the Seattle City Council,” 7, n. 5.
110. “Frequently Asked Questions about Anarchists at the ‘Battle for Seattle’ and N30,” Infoshop, http://www.infoshop.org/octo/a_faq.html (accessed March 16, 2002).
111. “Anarchists and Corporate Media.” The Global Exchange activist denies saying this to the New York Times reporter.
112. Loïc Wacquant, “Ghetto, Banlieue, Favela: Tools for Rethinking Urban Marginality,” http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/wacquant/condpref.pdf (accessed March 16, 2002).
113. “Frequently Asked Questions.”
114. Ibid.
115. “NMFS Refuses to Protect Habitat for World’s Most Imperiled Whale: Despite Six Years of Continuous Sightings in SE Bering Sea, NMFS Claims It Can’t Determine Critical Habitat for Right Whale,” Center for Biological Diversity
, http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/swcbd/press/right2-20-02.html (accessed March 20, 2002).
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