Today I’m driving through northern California. I started at the coast, passing through patches of afternoon fog that slid between the tops of tall redwoods like so many ghosts. Traffic was light, and in the two-lane stretches the slow cars inevitably (and unaccountably) used the turnouts, as they’re supposed to.
Sometimes insects arced into my windshield, white or black dots that came upon me too quickly for me to swerve, then splattered yellow, orange, white, or transparent against the glass. I thought often, too, of the insects I did not even see, but killed nonetheless. Roads are free-kill zones for anything that enters.
I crossed the Klamath River, running much fuller now: after the salmon had been safely killed, the feds released water into the river. Federal biologists (political scientists, I guess you’d call them, although one friend prefers the term biostitutes ) continue to claim—no surprises here—there’s been no causal connection shown between the lack of water and the death of fish, and I continue to fantasize about accountability.
The road moved away from the coast, and the day warmed. Traffic remained light. I crossed the Eel and Russian Rivers, which are little more than braided streams good for warm foot baths and for little children wading. The Eel once had runs of lampreys great as the runs of salmon it also now no longer has. I don’t know if the Russian ever had runs of Muscovites.
Then I entered wine country—Mendocino and Sonoma counties—and saw the reason for the rivers’ deaths: great seas of grapes extending as far as I could see. Even though everyone—including teetotalers like myself—know that non-irrigated grapes make better wines, the rivers have been effectively dewatered to grow these grapes, and more importantly to grow the bank accounts of those wealthy enough to own wineries: a few huge corporations control production, as always, which means they also control politics, as always, which means they also control land use policies, as always.154
Last year an insect called the glassy-winged sharpshooter made news through the region, because it was helping to spread Pierce’s Disease, an illness that threatened (or promised) to decimate grape plants. Federal, state, and local governments went all out to eradicate this threat (or promise), shoveling fistfuls of public moneys toward protecting these private (and especially corporate) investments.
But I must confess something else. Every time I see these dewatered rivers, and every time I see these miles upon miles of grapes (which are not used for food, nor for anything but an absolutely nonessential item commonly used for conspicuous consumption [note that I’ve nothing against luxuries; I do have something against luxuries that come at the expense of the landbase]), I think the same thing, that I’m in the wrong line of work. I need to quit writing, I think, and start raising glassy-winged sharpshooters to release in these fields.
A few years ago I was watching television with two indigenous people. One was a Maori woman, the other an American Indian man. A newscaster was speaking, which is to say he was lying, spinning events to promote the interests of his bosses, more broadly of capital, more broadly still of the culture, of civilization, more broadly yet of destruction. The particular story he was spinning had to do with the environment and indigenous rights. No causal connection could be shown, he was saying, between deforestation and species extinction. In fact, he said, the worst enemies of these creatures were environmental extremists keeping timber companies from going in and cleaning up forests, and indigenous peoples insisting on archaic “treaty rights” allowing them to hunt and fish where white people couldn’t. He made clear that decent people shouldn’t stand for such blatant obstructionism on the part of environmentalists and racism on the part of the indigenous.
My two friends suddenly spoke at the same time. The Maori woman: “I want to hit him in the head with a taiaha,” a Maori club. The Indian man: “I want to shoot an arrow through his throat.”
I burst out laughing. They looked at me. I could tell they were hurt by my laughter. I said, “No, it’s not that. It’s just this is such a wonderful example of parallel cultural evolution: different tools to accomplish the same important task.”
They laughed now, also.
We all face choices. We can have ice caps and polar bears, or we can have automobiles. We can have dams or we can have salmon. We can have irrigated wine from Mendocino and Sonoma counties, or we can have the Russian and Eel Rivers. We can have oil from beneath the oceans, or we can have whales. We can have cardboard boxes or we can have living forests. We can have computers and cancer clusters from the manufacture of those computers, or we can have neither. We can have electricity and a world devastated by mining, or we can have neither (and don’t give me any nonsense about solar: you’ll need copper for wiring, silicon for photovoltaics, metals and plastics for appliances, which need to be manufactured and then transported to your home, and so on. Even solar electrical energy can never be sustainable because electricity and all its accoutrements require an industrial infrastructure). We can have fruits, vegetables, and coffee brought to the U.S. from Latin America, or we can have at least somewhat intact human and nonhuman communities throughout that region. (I don’t think I need to remind readers that, to take one not atypical example among far too many, the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala was overthrown by the United States to support the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, leading to thirty years of U.S.-backed dictatorships and death squads. Also, a few years ago I asked a member of the revolutionary tupacamaristas what they wanted for the people of Peru, and he said something that cuts to the heart of the current discussion [and to the heart of every struggle that has ever taken place against civilization]: “We need to produce and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so.”) We can have international trade, inevitably and by definition as well as by function dominated by distant and huge economic/governmental entities which do not (and cannot) act in the best interest of communities, or we can have local control of local economies, which cannot happen so long as cities require the importation (read: theft) of resources from ever-greater distances. We can have civilization—too often called the highest form of social organization—that spreads (I would say metastasizes) to all parts of the globe, or we can have a multiplicity of autonomous cultures each uniquely adapted to the land from which it springs. We can have cities and all they imply, or we can have a livable planet. We can have “progress” and history, or we can have sustainability. We can have civilization, or we can have at least the possibility of a way of life not based on the violent theft of resources.
This is in no way abstract. It is physical. On a finite world, the forced and routine importation of resources is unsustainable. Duh.
Show me how car culture can coexist with wild nature, and more specifically, show me how anthropogenic global warming can coexist with ice caps and polar bears. And any fixes such as solar electric cars would present problems at least equally severe. For example, the electricity still needs to be generated, batteries are extraordinarily toxic, and in any case, driving is not the main way a car pollutes: far more pollution is emitted through its manufacture than through its exhaust pipe. We can perform the same exercise for any product of industrial civilization.
We can’t have it all. The belief that we can is one of the things that has driven us to this awful place. If insanity could be defined as having lost functional connection with physical reality, to believe we can have it all—to believe we can simultaneously dismantle a world and live on it; to believe we can perpetually use more energy than arrives from the sun; to believe we can take more than the world gives willingly; to believe a finite world can support infinite growth, much less infinite economic growth, where economic growth consists of converting ever larger numbers of living beings to dead objects (industrial production, at its core, is the conversion of the living—trees or mountains—into the dead—two-by-fours and beer cans)—is grotesquely insane. This insanity manifests partly as a potent disrespect for limits and for justice. It manifest
s in the pretension that neither limits nor justice exist. To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation. And it is to have paid absolutely no attention to the past six thousand years.
One of the reasons we fail to perceive all of this is that we—the civilized—have been inculcated to believe that belongings are more important than belonging, and that relationships are based on dominance—violence and exploitation. Having come to believe that, and having come to believe the acquisition of material possessions is good (or even more abstractly, that the accumulation of money is good) and in fact the primary goal of life, we then have come to perceive ourselves as the primary beneficiaries of all of this insanity and injustice.
Right now I’m sitting in front of a space heater, and all other things being equal, I’d rather my toes were toasty than otherwise. But all other things aren’t equal, and destroying runs of salmon by constructing dams for hydropower is a really stupid (and immoral) way to warm my feet. It’s an extraordinarily bad trade.
And it’s not just space heaters. No amount of comforts or elegancies, what that nineteenth-century slave owner called the characteristics of civilization, are worth killing the planet. What’s more, even if we do perceive it in our best interest to take these comforts or elegancies at the expense of the enslavement, impoverishment, or murder of others and their landbases, we have no right to do so. And no amount of rationalization nor overwhelming force—not even “full-spectrum domination”—will suffice to give us that right.
Yet we have been systematically taught to ignore these trade-offs, to pretend that we don’t see them (even when they’re right in front of our faces) they do not exist.
Yesterday, I received this email: “We all face the future unsure if our own grand-children will know what a tree is or ever taste salmon or even know what a clean glass of water tastes like. It is crucial, especially for those of us who see the world as a living being, to remember. I’ve realized that outside of radical activist circles and certain indigenous peoples, the majority has completely forgotten about the passenger pigeon, completely forgotten about salmon so abundant you could fish with baskets. I’ve met many people who think if we could just stop destroying the planet right now, that we’ll be left with a beautiful world. It makes me wonder if the same type of people would say the same thing in the future even if they had to put on a protective suit in order to go outside and see the one tree left standing in their town. Would they also have forgotten? Would it still be a part of mainstream consciousness that there used to be whole forests teeming with life? I think you and I agree that as long as this culture continues with its preferred methods of perception, then it would not be widely known to the majority. I used to think environmental activists would at least get to say, ‘I told you so’ to everyone else once civilization finally succeeded in creating a wasteland, but now I’m not convinced that anyone will even remember. Perhaps the worst nightmare visions of activists a few hundred years ago match exactly the world we have outside our windows today, yet nobody is saying, ‘I told you so.’”155
I think he’s right. I’ve long had a nightmare/fantasy of standing on a desolate plain with a CEO or politician or capitalist journalist, shaking him by the shoulders and shouting, “Don’t you see? Don’t you see it was all a waste?” But after ruminating on this fellow’s email, the nightmare has gotten even worse. Now I no longer have even the extraordinarily hollow satisfaction of seeing recognition of a massive mistake on this other’s face. Now he merely looks at me, his eyes flashing a combination of arrogance, hatred, and willful incomprehension, and says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
And he isn’t even entirely lying.
Except of course to himself.
Sometimes lying awake at night in bed, I fantasize. I imagine how fun it would be to wrestle with the problems we face if only we weren’t insane, if only the problems really were just technical, if only we could cling even to any remotely feasible, remotely forgivable hope of a soft landing rather than a hard crash, if only our culture were not driven to destroy all life on the planet, if only there were even the slightest chance our culture would undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living.
By now there can be few who do not understand that without massive public subsidies (far larger than total profits) the entire corporate economy would collapse overnight. People pay to deforest the planet, decapitate mountains, decimate oceans, destroy rivers.
Were we to suddenly find ourselves sane in this insane situation, we could easily and immediately shift subsidies. So long as we care neither about justice nor accountability, but merely want to stop the damage, we could subsidize the same corporations to repair damage they’ve already caused. Instead, for example, of the public paying Weyerhaeuser to deforest, as is currently the case, we could pay it to reforest. Not to make tree farms—virtual forests of genetically identical Douglas firs—but to use the inventiveness we talk so much about but rarely seem to use to life-serving ends in order to make life better for the forests and its other members with whom we share our home.
Of course this is a fantasy, as absurd as Fuller’s notion of converting weaponry to livingry. Indeed, it’s essentially the same fantasy. And not only is it an impossible fantasy for the reasons already discussed—a) weaponry (as well as massive public subsidies) being absolutely necessary to the unceasing flow of resources toward the center of empire, and b) Fuller’s notion ignores violence to the natural world—but we face an even greater challenge to the possibility of ever living sanely, peacefully, or, saying much the same thing, sustainably. This impediment forms the tenth premise of this book, which I’ve described in previous books and which I’ll explore more later on: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.
Here is how governments and people in this culture spend money. These make clear their priorities. In 1998, governments and people spent US $6 billion on basic education across the world; $8 billion on cosmetics in the United States; $9 billion on water and sanitation for everyone in the world; $11 billion on ice cream in Europe; $12 billion on reproductive health for all women in the world; $12 billion on perfumes in Europe and the United States; $13 billion on basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world; $17 billion on pet foods in Europe and the United States; $35 billion on business entertainment in Japan; $50 billion on cigarettes in Europe; $105 billion on alcoholic drinks in Europe; $400 billion on narcotic drugs in the world; $780 billion on military spending in the world. As the compiler of the list notes: “It would seem ironic that the world spends more on things to destroy each other (military) and to destroy ourselves (drugs, alcohol and cigarettes) than on anything else.”156
Most of my students at the prison are there at least partly because of drugs. Since the prison is a supermax, almost none of them are there for simple possession, or even dealing. Many are in for armed robbery committed to support their habits, or for murders committed under the influence or during drug deals gone bad.
Nearly all of them, as I mentioned before, hate prison with a passion I’ve rarely seen matched. They hate it partly because of characteristics that make prison really the quintessence of civilization: its routine dehumanization, its destruction of community, its isolation. My students are deprived of their families, with many knowing their children only through occasional letters and infrequent photos: they’ve shown me high school graduation pictures of children they’ve not seen since they were six and not held since they were infants. They’ve shown me pictures of wives and parents they’ll never see again. Prisons also mirror and magnify the bureaucratic power structures and strict rules that characterize civilization. This is when you eat. This is what you eat. This is how many books you may have (which must have been sent directly from a bookstore or publis
her). This is the sort of writing implement you may use. This is the sort you may not.
Those prisoners who do not hate prison generally fall into a very few categories. There are lifers and a few others—usually those who’ve already served decades—who’ve come to an enlightened sort of acceptance—the serenity to accept things they cannot change. There are people whose horrific childhoods make prison a comparative cakewalk. And there are J-cats, or crazy people (J-cat stands for category J, a prison classification meaning the insane).
Yet as I said before, when I ask my students whether they’ll use again when they get out, even at the risk of coming back to prison, most say yes.
“It’s very difficult,” one said to me. “The first problem is the physical addiction. That can be hard to beat. And if you beat that, there’s still the memory of how good it feels. Even though I’ve been clean now all these years in prison if you put drugs in front of me right now I’d want to take them, just so I could feel that good again. But these problems are nothing compared to the emotional addiction. So much of my identity has been wrapped up in drugs. Drugs became who I am. Without them I was nothing. But even kicking the emotional addiction still isn’t the hardest part. It’s all of my relationships. My wife and I used together—that was all bound up in our courtship, in our sex-life, in our daily activities. And she still uses. What am I supposed to do when I get out? Not only do I have to give up this thing that makes me feel so very good—or at least I think it makes me feel good—and not only do I have to step away from this thing that’s been my identity for most of my life, but I’ll have to change my whole web of friendships, and maybe even my family. I’m facing a third strike if I get caught again, which means I’d be in forever, but even facing that I just don’t know if I can give up so much.”
Endgame Vol.1 Page 17
