The fourth is the entirely predictable yet still horrifying response by those other industry representatives, those who work for the government. Michael Sissenwine, director of scientific programs with the National Marine Fisheries Service and head of fisheries sciences at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, revealed that my conflation of bureaucrats and morons was not in fact a slur either when he responded to the death of the oceans by saying, “We shouldn’t . . . conclude that a substantial reduction is a problem,”225 and, further, that the “expected outcome of fishing is that stocks will decline. Even with very efficient sustainability [sic] plans in place you have to expect declines, sometimes of 50 percent or more. The issue is how much of a decline is reasonable and sustainable.”226
Read this last sentence again. My dictionary defines decline as to slope downward . I learned in grade school math that if a line slopes downward, it eventually reaches zero. If a line slopes downward by 90 percent over fifty years (even assuming the line to be linear, while in this case the decline becomes ever-steeper as civilization approaches its endgame), this means in less than ten years the line will cross zero. My dictionary defines sustainable as “using a resource [sic] so that the resource [sic] is not depleted or permanently damaged.”
I must be stupid. I cannot for the life of me understand what Michael Sissenwine, who is in charge of the two largest federal bureaucracies ostensibly tasked with protecting ocean fish, is saying. He seems to be saying that declines are sustainable, that declines of 90 percent are sustainable. And reasonable. And not a problem.
But he can’t be saying that. Nobody can be that stupid. Or that brazen. Not even someone whose job it is to oversee the systematic murder of the oceans.
In a mere twelve words he has rendered the words decline, reasonable, and sustainable meaningless. Add his first sentence and he has destroyed the word problem . If the death—the murder—of the oceans isn’t a problem, what is? Not only are these people vacuuming oceans, they are killing discourse. Defending the indefensible makes anyone who tries it absurd.
Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. Those making decisions concerning the fate of the remaining fish do not consider this a problem. What are you going to do about it?
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE ELEVEN. Targeted stupidity.
The interconnectedness of the global economic system is taken for granted. Most people understand that a downturn in one sector of the economy can lead to problems in another. The collapse of the Asian economies in 1997, for example, harmed the timber industry in the northwestern and southeastern United States, as corporations that had exported to Asia lost their markets. Yet many of the same people who natter endlessly about this form of interdependence somehow seem to believe that you can cut down a forest, replant with one species, and still have a forest. They will stare at you stupidly—or more likely scoff at you—if you talk about how harming voles harms Douglas firs. They see no problem with wiping out species after species, and cannot seem to grasp that species need habitat, and that habitat need species.
It is not that these people cannot understand interconnectedness. It is that their stupidity is targeted.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TWELVE. Auschwitz. Treblinka. Bergen-Belsen. That’s the reason. No, not because civilization turns the entire world into a labor camp, then a death camp, although that is the case. No, not because the endpoint of civilization is assembly-line mass murder, although that, too, is the case.227 Instead it’s because of the doctors at Auschwitz.
Here’s why. Do you remember when I talked about how environmentalism is an abysmal failure, and I gave a reason or two for our ineffectiveness? I left off what I think is the most important reason, and it has to do with those doctors.
In his extraordinarily important book The Nazi Doctors228 Robert Jay Lifton explored how it was that men who had taken the Hippocratic oath could participate in prisons where inmates were worked to death or killed in assembly lines. He found that many of the doctors honestly cared for their charges, and did everything within their power—which means pathetically little—to make life better for the inmates. If an inmate got sick they might give the inmate an aspirin to lick. They might put the inmate to bed for a day or two (but not for too long or the inmate might be “selected” for murder). If the patient had a contagious disease, they might kill the patient to keep the disease from spreading. All of this made sense within the confines of Auschwitz. The doctors, once again, did everything they could to help the inmates, except for the most important thing of all: They never questioned the existence of Auschwitz itself. They never questioned working the inmates to death. They never questioned starving them to death. They never questioned imprisoning them. They never questioned torturing them. They never questioned the existence of a culture that would lead to these atrocities. They never questioned the logic that leads inevitably to the electrified fences, the gas chambers, the bullets in the brain.
We as environmentalists do the same. We work as hard as we can to protect the places we love, using the tools of the system the best that we can. Yet we do not do the most important thing of all: We do not question the existence of this death culture. We do not question the existence of an economic and social system that is working the world to death, that is starving it to death, that is imprisoning it, that is torturing it. We never question a culture that leads to these atrocities. We never question the logic that leads inevitably to clearcuts, murdered oceans, loss of topsoil, dammed rivers, poisoned aquifers.
And we certainly don’t act to bring it down.
Here’s an example. I recently gave a talk at a gathering of environmentalists called Bioneers. The speeches I listened to were quite good, with people speaking passionately and often very positively about the changes that need to be made, and the changes that are already being made. They spoke of the need for different models for farming, different models for community organization, different models for schooling. But no one spoke of power. No one discussed the self-evident fact that those in power destroy sustainable communities. No one spoke of the fact that even if farmers develop different models for how to live on their land more sustainably, those in power may decide that the farmers’ land is needed for a Wal-Mart or should be drowned behind a dam, and those in power will simply take their land. And no one spoke of psychopathology. No one spoke of the dominant culture’s need to destroy. No one spoke of the dominant culture’s implacable destruction of indigenous cultures.
Not only our actions but our discourse remains inside the confines of this concentration camp we call civilization.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE THIRTEEN. I recently shared a stage with a dogmatic pacifist, who said there are no circumstances under which the shedding of human blood is appropriate. “Violence schmiolence,” he said. “I wouldn’t kill a single human being to save an entire run of salmon.”
“I would,” I shot back.
But I wasn’t happy with my response. Here is what I wish I would have said, “Thank you for so succinctly stating the problem—why civilization is killing the world—which is the belief that any single human life (mine or anyone’s) is worth more than the health of the landbase, or even that humanity can be separated (physically, morally, or any other way) from the landbase. The health of the landbase is everything. A run of salmon is worth far more than my life, or any other individual human life. The continuation of the existence of the great ocean fishes is worth more than any individual human life. The continuation of albatrosses is worth more than any individual human life. The continuation of leatherback sea turtles, redwoods, spotted owls, clouded leopards, Kootenai River sturgeon, all these are worth more than any individual human life. If we do not understand that, we can never hope to survive.”
That is what I wish I would have said.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE FOURTEEN. The United States is currently planning to build at least three new biowea
pons laboratories dedicated to the creation of new classes of toxins, including genetically engineered toxins.
This is, from the perspective of those in power, a good thing. From the perspective of the rest of us, this isn’t quite so good.
How will they use these “bioweapons,” and to what purposes?
Their own language provides a hint. They wrote about bioweapons, among other things, in the document Rebuilding America’s Defenses [sic] put out by The Project for the New American Century, which, according to their website, is “a non-profit, educational organization whose goal is to promote American global leadership.”229 In other words, it’s a right-wing think tank which has as its goals U.S. domination of the world. Who cares, right? It’s just a few lunatics, right?
Well, yes, it is just a few lunatics. Unfortunately the lunatics include vice-president Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense [sic] Donald Rumsfeld, the president’s brother Jeb Bush, and Paul Wolfowitz, generally considered the master-mind behind the invasion of Iraq.
You really should get a copy of Rebuilding America’s Defenses [sic].230 Just don’t read it late at night. But if you do get a copy, take a look at page sixty, where the authors state that “advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”231
Pretty clear, no?
These are the people with their fingers on the buttons. This is why civilization is killing the world.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE FIFTEEN. The Unabomber/Tylenol rule of threat perception.
I think about this rule every time I stand in line at the post office, which is fairly often. I live in a small town, where everyone seems to know everyone, and where the postal clerks enjoy chatting with all of us: one of the clerks has a son named Darrick with the same birthday as mine, another has a bad back, one spent his early years in the Detroit/Windsor area and likes Charlie Musselwhite, and . . . you get the idea. You also perhaps start to understand why the line so often extends past the double doors and well into the main lobby. Why are we all standing here? The Unabomber/Tylenol rule of threat perception.
After the Unabomber sent bombs through the mail that killed three people and injured twenty-three more, the United States Postal Service responded by instituting regulations banning any package weighing more than a pound from being dropped into a mailbox, instead forcing patrons to stand in line before (eventually) handing a package to a postal clerk. The good news is that I enjoy the conversations.
Now to the Tylenol half of it. In 1982 seven people died after taking Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide. Johnson and Johnson, the corporation that makes Tylenol, immediately recalled 31 million bottles of the pain reliever, at a cost of $125 million, and within a month and a half had designed new tamper-evident containers. The entire industry followed suit, until today nearly all consumables are packaged in similar containers.
What do these have to do with civilization killing the planet? Contrast the response to the Unabomber/Tylenol killings with the fact that air pollution from this country’s coal-fired power plants causes 24,000 premature deaths each year,232 or with the fact that global warming already kills tens of thousands of humans per year, or with the fact that dangerous products kill 28,000 Americans per year, exposure to dangerous chemicals and other unsafe conditions in the workplace kills another 100,000, and workplace carcinogens cause 28 to 33 percent of all cancer deaths in this country.233 Contrast the Unabomber/Tylenol responses with the response by the government to the 240,000 Americans who will die over the next thirty years from asbestos-related cancers, the 100,000 miners who have died from black lung, the one million infants worldwide who died just in 1986 because they were bottle-fed instead of breastfed.234
Threats to a comparatively small number of people were responded to almost immediately. The threats were removed. Why? Because the threats were aberrations and not systematic. The solutions did not point toward problems that inhere in the system itself. Had the problems inhered in the system itself, not only would the problems not have been solved, but almost no one would even have noticed.
In related news, during the years since the September 11 bombings, the FBI has “reduced by nearly 60% the number of agents assigned to white-collar crime, public corruption and related work,”235 transferring these agents to terrorism investigations, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that corporate crimes cost orders of magnitude more��both in lives and in dollars—than either street crime or “terrorism.”
Instead of the Unabomber/Tylenol rule, I could have called it the Fantasy Football rule, or maybe the Rotisserie League rule. The Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front are considered by the FBI to be together the nation’s number one domestic terrorist threat, even though they’ve never hurt anyone. The feds’ rationale is that the ELF and ALF have caused significant financial loss to corporations. And it is true that some members of the ELF—elves—seem proud of the fact that the ELF has cost corporations and the government tens of millions of dollars through “economic sabotage.” I hate to break it to both the elves and the G-men, but that’s comparatively trivial compared to the real terrorists. I am of course describing those who play fantasy football and baseball. According to a scoop in today’s San Francisco Chronicle , “America’s addiction to fantasy sports could cost the nation’s businesses $36.7 million daily”236 as people who “should” be working are instead checking the internet to see how their favorite players fared (I’ll bet you wish you’d picked up Johan Santana after his first few starts). If the FBI really cared about stopping serious economic sabotage, they would crack down immediately on websites that encourage such behavior. They would shut down rototimes.com, rotoworld.com, hardballtimes.com, and even ESPN.com. It’s a travesty that such sites are allowed to operate openly, without harassment! They’re encouraging terrorist behavior!
Maybe this means that if members of the ELF really want to cause economic damage to those in power, instead of burning SUVs they should just play fantasy baseball.
Or maybe not.
Instead of the Unabomber/Tylenol rule, I could have called it the Terrorism rule. Although members of governments around the world and members of the capitalist press like to talk a lot about terrorism, the numbers aren’t that high. Using their definitions of terrorism,237 there have been about 1,300 people killed per year by terrorists since the September 11, 2001 attacks, and precisely zero in the United States. Contrast that with the numbers above. But the politicians talk incessantly about terrorism (or at least terrorism by enemies of states), and they do not talk about these other deaths. This is partly because of premise four of this book, and partly because of the Unabomber/Tylenol rule.
Think of that whenever you hear those in power mention the word terrorism.
Abusers are volatile. They may be pleasant one moment, and violent the next. I go back and forth on whether I believe their volatility is real.
Argument in favor: Abusers are fragile. They’re frightened. Because they have no identities of their own (which also means that they could never identify with their bodies nor with the landbases that give them life) they have no capacity to react fluidly to whatever circumstances arise. They must then control their surroundings. So long as those surroundings remain perfectly under control abusers can maintain at least an exterior calm. But threaten that control (or their perceived entitlement to control and exploit) and the fury that forever seethes beneath their surface bursts full-blown into the world.
Argument against: I strongly suspect, based on my own experience of abusers, that their volatility is at least quite often fabricated for manipulative purposes, making the volatility of abusers akin to the planned “outbursts” of CIA interrogators when victims refuse to fall into the trap of abusing themselves, refusing, for example, to stand for days at a time. In other words, the volatility may not be real at all, but part of a calculated strategy to keep vic
tims off guard, to get them to police themselves.
But there’s another argument for the fundamental falsity of an abuser’s volatility, which refers instead to the first half of the statement: it is possible that an abuser’s pleasantness is never real pleasantness, instead being a mere temporary (and probably tactical) lessening of the relentless tightening of attempted control. Instead of an abuser being like a jug of gasoline—noxious enough, but often not immediately fatal until and unless some spark sets it off, meaning ultimate responsibility for your own immolation rests on you for being silly enough to ever let flint strike steel—perhaps it’s more accurate to say that to enter or to be forced to enter into a relationship with an abuser is more like being bound tightly by ropes tied by someone trained in the Japanese art of hojojutsu, about which one expert wrote: “Knots were developed that could hold almost anybody in any position. The knots were so designed that if a person tried to wiggle free the rope around the neck would tighten, restricting the airflow and choking the victim.”238
This, for me, is the experience of being in a relationship with an abuser: if you do not struggle but only lie motionless, the abuser merely confines you, but every slightest movement in any direction on your part—and I want to emphasize every movement in any direction—tightens the abuser’s hold over you.
Given all this, how real is the “pleasantness” of an abuser? Only very stupid or very desperate abusers—and this is as true on the larger social scale as it is on the familial—are always oppressive. Unrelenting oppression is not nearly so effective at control as is intermittent oppression mixed with rewards. If the oppressor were only oppressive, victims would realize they have nothing left to lose. Those who believe they have something left to lose are ever-so-much-more manipulable. Those who realize they have nothing left to lose have nothing left to fear, and they can be extremely dangerous to their victimizers.
Endgame Vol.1 Page 28
