“Do you have a problem if people in cities just buy them?
“Buy resources, or people?” I was thinking of a line by Henry Adams: “We have a single system,” he wrote, and in “that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.”41
She didn’t laugh at my joke. She didn’t think it was funny. Neither did I, but probably for a different reason.
I asked, “Buy them with what?”
“They give us food, we give them culture. Isn’t that the way it works?”
Ah, I thought, she’s following the Mumford line of thought. I asked, “What if the people in the country don’t like opera, or Oprah, for that matter?”
“It’s not just opera. Good food, books, ideas, the whole cultural ferment.”
“And if people in the country like their own food, their own ideas, their own culture?”
“They’re going to need protection.”
“From whom?”
“Roving bands of marauders. Bandits who will steal their food.”
“What if the only marauders are the people from the city?”
She hesitated before saying, “Manufactured goods, then. Because of economies of scale, people in the city can import raw materials from the countryside, work them into things people can use, and sell them back.” Her first degree was in economics.
“What if people in the countryside also don’t want manufactured goods?”
“Modern medicine then.”
“And if they don’t want that? I know plenty of Indians who to this day refuse all Western medicine.”
She laughed and said, “So we go the opposite direction. Everybody wants Big Macs.”
I shook my head, and more or less ignored her joke, as she’d ignored mine, for maybe the same reason. “People only want all this stuff after their own culture has been destroyed.”
“I don’t think it’s necessary to destroy them. Much better to convince them. Modernity is good. Development is good. Technology is good. Consumer choice is good. What do you think advertising is for?”
Maybe both Henry Adams and the Roman satirist Juvenal should have mentioned advertising as well as bread and circuses. And maybe they should have mentioned the importance of dictionary definitions for keeping people in line. I stood my ground. “Intact cultures generally only open their doors wide to consumer goods at gunpoint. Sure, they might pick and choose, but not enough to counterbalance the loss of their resources. Think of what NAFTA and GATT have done to the poor in the Third World, or in the United States. Think of Perry opening Japan, or the Opium Wars, or—”
She cut me off: “I get your point.” She thought a moment. “Instead of manufactured items, give them money. A fair price. No ripping them off. They can buy whatever they want with all their money, or rather our money.”
“And what if they don’t want money? What if they’d rather have their resources? What if they don’t want to sell because they want or need the resources themselves? What if their whole way of life is dependent on these resources, and they’d rather have their way of life—for example, hunting and gathering—than money? Or what if they don’t want to sell because they don’t believe in buying and selling? What if they don’t believe in economic transactions at all? Or even moreso, what if they don’t believe in the whole idea of resources?”
She got a little annoyed. “They don’t believe in trees? They don’t believe fish exist? What do you think they catch when they go fishing? What are you telling me?”
“They believe in trees, and they believe in fish. It’s just that trees and fish aren’t resources.”
“What are they, then?”
“Other beings. You can kill them to eat. That’s part of the relationship. But you can’t sell them.”
She understood. “Like the Indians thought.”
“Still think,” I said. “Many traditional ones. And cities have gotten so large by now—the city mentality has grown to include the whole consumer culture—that people in the country certainly can’t kill enough to feed the city without damaging their own landbase. By definition they never could. Which leads us back to the question: What if they don’t want to sell? Do the people in the city have the right to take the resources anyway?”
“How else will they eat?”
We heard the wind again outside, and rain began to spatter against the windows. The rain often comes horizontally here in Crescent City, or Tu’nes.
She said, “If I were in charge of a city, and my people—my people, what an interesting phrase, as if I own them—are starving, I would take the food by force.”
More wind, more rain. I said, “And what if you need slaves to run your industries? Would you take them, too? And if you need not just food and slaves, but if oil is the lifeblood of your economy, metal its bones? What if you need everything under the sun? Are you going to take it all?”
“If I need them—”
I cut her off: “Or perceive that you need them . . .”
She didn’t seem to mind. “Yes,” she said, thoughtfully. I could tell she was changing her mind. We were silent a moment, before she said, “And there’s the land. Cities damage the land they’re on.”
I thought of pavement and asphalt. Steel. Skyscrapers. I thought of a five-hundred-year-old oak I saw in New York City, on a slope overlooking the Hudson River. I thought of all that tree had experienced. As an acorn it fell in an ancient forest—except that back then there was no reason to call those forests ancient, or anything but home. It germinated in this diverse community, witnessed runs of fish up the Hudson so great they threatened to carry away the nets of those who would catch them, witnessed human communities living in these forests, the humans not depleting the forests, but rather enhancing them by their very presence, by what they gave back to their home. It witnessed the arrival of civilization, the building of a village, a town, a city, a metropolis, and from there, as Mumford put it, the “Parasitopolis turns into Patholopolis, the city of mental, moral, and bodily disorders, and finally terminates in Necropolis, the City of the Dead.”42 Along the way, the tree said good-bye to the wood bison, the passenger pigeon, the Eskimo curlew, the great American chestnuts, the wolverines who paced the shores of the Hudson. It said good-bye (at least for now) to humans living traditional ways. It said good-bye to the neighboring trees, to the forest where its life began. It witnessed the laying down of billions of tons of concrete, the erection of rigid steel structures and brick buildings topped with razor wire.
Unfortunately, it did not live long enough to witness all of this come back down. The tree, I learned last year, is no more. It was cut down by a landowner worried that its branches would fall on his roof. Environmentalists—doing what we seem to do best—gathered to say prayers over its stump.
I told her this story.
“Fuck,” she said. “I get it.” She shook her head. Pale brown hair fell to cover one eye. She pouted, as she often does when she thinks. Finally she said, “Damn it.” Then she smiled just slightly, although I could tell from her eyes she was tired. Suddenly she said, “You know, if we’re going to do this much damage, the least we can do is tell the truth.”
VIOLENCE
A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
Herbert V. Prochnow 43
THE SECOND PREMISE OF THIS BOOK IS THAT, FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities. This can be accomplished more or less physically, such as through the murder of the peoples and the land on which they depend, or more or less spiritually or psychologically, through the destruction of sacred sites, through aggress
ive and/or forceful proselytization, by forcefully addicting them to the aggressor’s products, by kidnapping their children (most often legally), and through many other means all-too-familiar to those who attend to the relations between the civilized and noncivilized.
Resources for the civilized have always been more important than the lives of those in the colonies. A German colonial officer in South West Africa was more honest than many: “A right of the natives, which could only be realized at the expense of the development of the white race, does not exist. The idea is absurd that Bantus, Sudan-negroes, and Hottentots in Africa have the right to live and die as they please, even when by this uncounted people among the civilized peoples of Europe were forced to remain tied to a miserable proletarian existence instead of being able, by the full use of the productive capacities of our colonial possessions to rise to a richer level of existence themselves and also to help construct the whole body of human and national welfare.”44
Following quickly on the heels of the second premise is the third, that this way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread exploitation and degradation. This includes exploitation and degradation of the natural world—for what is unsustainability except a fancy word for exploitation and degradation of natural communities?—and it includes exploitation and degradation of those who do not want us to take their resources (or, to another way of thinking, to kill and sell their nonhuman neighbors). It also includes harming those humans and nonhumans who will come later, and who will inherit a pauperized world.
A few months ago I received an email from an activist who wrote, “I’ve been inspired by Bucky Fuller’s vision for years. He says that we have enough of everything to give everyone on the planet a standard of living no one has known so far. But it will require taking all of our resources and technology off of weaponry and fully devoting them to ‘livingry.’ In other words, we can make it happen, but there’s no room for greed in the equation. His whole thing was ‘a world that works for everyone with no one left out.’”
Leaving aside the standard conceit that the civilized have higher standards of living than traditional hunter-gatherers (if you measure by some standards, such as the number of automobiles, yes; if you measure by others, such as leisure time, sustainability, social equality, and food security—meaning no one goes hungry—hunter-gatherers win hands down), Fuller’s is a powerful—and powerfully dangerous—fantasy, and an odd statement coming from someone living on land taken by violence from its original inhabitants, and using the sorts of technologies—for example, industrial forestry, mining, smelting—that violently shape the world to industrial ends. Just because Fuller designed groovy structures like geodesic domes (the one at Expo ’67 in Montreal was way cool!) did not mean that violence was not done to the land—and to people—both there and elsewhere. Where, precisely, did Fuller believe these resources came from, and how did he believe he would get them without using force against both the “resources” themselves and against the humans who live in close proximity to them?
I enjoy railing against the absurdity of the U.S. military budget as much as the next sane person. I often marvel at the extraordinary amounts of money that are spent seemingly for no other purpose than to kill people, and dream of what good could be accomplished if those who serve life had the same easy access to cash as those who serve death. Corporate Senators and Representatives are fond of complaining, for example, that it’s too expensive to save species driven to the brink of extinction by the actions of the industrial economy, and that the corporations these men (and token women) represent must be allowed to continue their actions unimpeded. An industry front group calling itself the “Grassroots ESA Coalition” (a subgroup of the similarly deceivingly named industry front group “National Wilderness Institute”) has stated that total costs for “the ten species covered by the most expensive endangered species recovery plans are: Atlantic Green Turtle $88,236,000; Loggerhead Turtle $85,947,000; Blunt-Nosed Leopard Lizard $70,252,000; Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle $63,600,000; Colorado Squawfish $57,770,000; Humpback Chub $57,770,000; Bonytail Chub $57,770,000; Razorback Sucker $57,770,000; Black-Capped Vireo $53,538,000; Swamp Pink $29,026,000.”45 I’m not sure I trust their research, or, for that matter, their intelligence because even when trying to show how expensive implementation of the Endangered Species Act is, they left off more pricey efforts. Costs for projects aimed toward recovering salmon in the Northwest (or rather, projects aimed at providing the illusion of recovery while allowing business to continue as usual) were $119 million just in 1995. Not including land acquisition, annual expenditures for recovery efforts for all endangered species went from $43 million in 1989 to $312 million in 1995.46 Recently, the federal government made big news when it granted more than $16 million to twenty-five states to promote the conservation of such varied species as marbled murrelets, salmon, bull trout, aplomado falcons, Karner blue butterflies, Florida scrub jays, and the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse.47 This may all seem like a lot of money, but in fiscal year 2001 the federal government spent more than $5.7 billion on the physical impossibility called the Ballistic Missile Defense System (a.k.a. Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. Star Wars, and most especially a.k.a. a black hole into which money disappears, to conveniently reappear on the ledgers of favored corporations). It spent $3.9 billion on new F-22 fighters, $3 billion on new C-17 Transport aircraft, $1.7 billion on new V-22 Osprey aircraft (which seem capable so far only of killing their own crews), $4 billion as a partial payment on a new aircraft carrier, $3 billion as a partial payment on a new submarine. Even prior to the events of September 11, the military received nearly one billion dollars per day during fiscal year 2001.48 Just in the last seven years, the military spent more than $100 million on airline tickets it did not use. The tickets were fully refundable, but the military never bothered to ask for a refund.49 The United States government spends $44 billion per year on spying. I used to often fantasize about using all that that money used for harm—real money, not the crumbs tossed in the direction of wildlife—to help salmon, spotted owls, Carson wandering skipper butterflies (listed as endangered only after having been reduced to a few individuals), Columbia Basin pygmy rabbits (of whom only fifty remain in the wild), Mississippi gopher frogs (of whom only one hundred members remain, breeding in one pond), Tumbling Creek cavesnails (down to forty individuals), and so many others. But the truth is that this will never happen.
The reason that my fantasies are nothing more than fantasies, and the reason that the same is true for Buckminster Fuller’s more well-known fantasies, is that the money must be spent on weaponry, and not on livingry. To believe the U.S. military does not serve an absolutely vital purpose is to have failed to pay any attention to the path of civilization for the past six thousand years. The importation of resources into cities has always required force, and always will. And that’s why Fuller’s fantasy is dangerous—as is my own, when I forget it is a fantasy—because it pretends that resource extraction can be accomplished without force and exploitation, thus diverting attention toward the outrageous and obscene military budgets and away from the social and technological processes that require them. If you need—or perceive yourself as needing—gold, wood, food, fur, land, or oil that resides in someone else’s community, and if this other community does not want to hand these resources over to you—and why on God’s green earth should they?—how are you going to get them? We have seen this process too many times to not know the answer.
In late 2001, the United States military began bombing the people and landscape of Afghanistan, at a cost to the American public of approximately a billion dollars a day, or about four dollars for every man, woman, and child in this country (or more was spent in three hours than in all of 1995 ostensibly to save salmon). This amounts to about forty dollars per day for every one of the human targets, that is, every Afghan man, woman, and child. Based on Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, for
ty dollars is about twenty times their average daily income.50 It would, in a sense, be the equivalent of a government spending about eighteen hundred dollars per day per person in the United States to kill us here.
Much as I enjoy being the center of attention (I am, after all, a male), given the choice, I’d be willing to settle for a lot less attention were it given to me in the form of cash or foodstuffs, rather than bombs. No, thank you, I’d say politely, I don’t really want a bomb, nor even a “bomblet,” not even one as cool as a BLU-26 Sadeye, although I might be able to use a few of the hundreds of razor-sharp projectiles to cut some things around the house. Instead, a cow would be nice. And some chickens. And some native trees. You could buy all of that for me in one day. And then tomorrow we could talk about a bicycle, and then the day after that we could start thinking about a new well. Truth be told I wouldn’t even know what to do with eighteen hundred dollars every day, or its equivalent in the Afghan community. I’d probably give most of it away. But I still think I’d rather have a cow and some chickens than a bomb.
On further reflection, do you know what I’d like even more? To simply be left alone.
The United States has historically spent about $70 million per year on humanitarian aid for Afghanistan (about four dollars per person per year, the equivalent of about a hundred and eighty dollars if it were given in the United States),51 which is about how much the United States spent per Afghan on the bombing campaign every hour and forty minutes.
If United States citizens have paid four dollars a piece per day to support this war effort, the Afghan people have paid rather more. The bombs—such a nice, short word to describe inventions that have as their purpose destruction—include, fairly typically, the two-thousand pound MK-84, which was developed in the 1950s and has served its masters well in the time since. About twelve thousand were dropped on Iraq during the First Gulf War.52 If the bomb detonates on contact with the ground, it creates a crater fifty feet in diameter, and thirty-six feet deep (Sorry, guys, this is not precisely what I had in mind when I asked for a new well). If it explodes above ground, it disperses shrapnel to a lethal radius of four hundred yards.53
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