Endgame Vol.1 (2 page)

AS A LONGTIME GRASSROOTS ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST, AND AS a creature living in the thrashing endgame of civilization, I am intimately acquainted with the landscape of loss, and have grown accustomed to carrying the daily weight of despair. I have walked clearcuts that wrap around mountains, drop into valleys, then climb ridges to fragment watershed after watershed, and I’ve sat silent near empty streams that two generations ago were “lashed into whiteness” by uncountable salmon coming home to spawn and die.

A few years ago I began to feel pretty apocalyptic. But I hesitated to use that word, in part because of those drawings I’ve seen of crazy penitents carrying “The End is Near” signs, and in part because of the power of the word itself. Apocalypse. I didn’t want to use it lightly.

But then a friend and fellow activist said, “What will it take for you to finally call it an apocalypse? The death of the salmon? Global warming? The ozone hole? The reduction of krill populations off Antarctica by 90 percent, the turning of the sea off San Diego into a dead zone, the same for the Gulf of Mexico? How about the end of the great coral reefs? The extirpation of two hundred species per day? Four hundred? Six hundred? Give me a specific threshold, Derrick, a specific point at which you’ll finally use that word.”

Do you believe that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?

For the last several years I’ve taken to asking people this question, at talks and rallies, in libraries, on buses, in airplanes, at the grocery store, the hardware store. Everywhere. The answers range from emphatic
no
s to laughter. No one answers in the affirmative. One fellow at one talk did raise his hand, and when everyone looked at him, he dropped his hand, then said, sheepishly, “Oh, voluntary? No, of course not.” My next question: how will this understanding—that this culture will not voluntarily stop destroying the natural world, eliminating indigenous cultures, exploiting the poor, and killing those who resist—shift our strategy and tactics? The answer? Nobody knows, because
we never talk about it: we’re too busy pretending the culture will undergo a magical transformation.

This book is about that shift in strategy, and in tactics.

I just got home from talking to a new friend, another longtime activist. She told me of a campaign she participated in a few years ago to try to stop the government and transnational timber corporations from spraying Agent Orange, a potent defoliant and teratogen, in the forests of Oregon. Whenever activists learned a hillside was going to be sprayed, they assembled there, hoping their presence would stop the poisoning. But each time, like clockwork, helicopters appeared, and each time, like clockwork, helicopters dumped loads of Agent Orange onto the hillside and onto protesting activists. The campaign did not succeed.

“But,” she said to me, “I’ll tell you what did. A bunch of Vietnam vets lived in those hills, and they sent messages to the Bureau of Land Management and to Weyerhaeuser, Boise Cascade, and the other timber companies saying, ‘We know the names of your helicopter pilots, and we know their addresses.’”

I waited for her to finish.

“You know what happened next?” she asked.

“I think I do,” I responded.

“Exactly,” she said. “The spraying stopped.”

Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.

Unquestioned beliefs are the real authorities of a culture. Therefore, if an individual can express what is undeniably real to him without invoking any authority beyond his own expe rience, he is transcending the belief systems of his culture.

LAST TUESDAY THE TWIN TOWERS OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER collapsed, killing thousands of people. That same day a portion of the Pentagon also collapsed, killing more than a hundred. In addition, a jet airliner crashed in Pennsylvania.

Let’s tell this story again:
Last Tuesday nineteen Arab terrorists unleashed their fanaticism on the United States by hijacking four planes, each containing scores of innocent victims. These terrorists, who do not value life the way we Americans do, slammed two of the planes into the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon. Courageous men and women in the fourth plane wrestled with their attackers and drove the plane into the ground, sacrificing themselves rather than allowing the killers to attack the headquarters of the CIA or any other crucial target. Our government will find and punish those who masterminded the attack. This will be difficult because, as President George W. Bush said, “This enemy hides in shadows and has no regard for human life. This is an enemy that [
sic
] preys on innocent and unsuspecting people and then runs for cover.”
⁶
When we find them, we must kill them. This killing will not be easy on us. We must steel ourselves against the possibility—inevitability—that we may be forced to kill even those whose guilt we cannot finally establish. As former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said, “There is only one way to begin to deal with people like this, and that is you have to kill some of them even if they are not immediately directly involved in this thing.”
⁷
Many politicians and journalists have spoken yet more directly. “This is no time,” syndicated columnist (and bestselling author) Ann Coulter wrote, “to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. . . . We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
⁸

Here is another version of the same story
: Last Tuesday nineteen young men made their mothers proud. They gave their lives to strike a blow against the United States, the greatest terrorist state ever to exist. This blow was struck in response to U.S. support for the dispossession and murder of Palestinians, to the forced installation of pro-Western governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and many other countries, to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. bombs, to the nine thousand babies who die every month as a direct
result of U.S. sanctions on Iraq, and to the irradiation of Iraq with depleted uranium. More broadly, it was a response to the CIA-backed murder of 650,000 people in Indonesia, and to the hundreds of thousands murdered by U.S.-backed death squads in Central and South America. To the four million civilians killed in North Korea. To the theft of American Indian land and the killings of millions of Indians. To the imposition of business-friendly dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko, Augusto Pinochet, the Shah, Suharto, or Ferdinand Marcos. (As Secretary of Defense William Cohen said to a group of
Fortune
500 leaders, “Business follows the flag. . . . We provide the security. You provide the investment.”
⁹
) It was a response to an American foreign policy driven by the needs of industrial production—as manifested through the unnatural logic of the bottom line—not life. This was a blow delivered not only against the United States but against a murderous global economy—a half a million babies die each year as a direct result of so-called debt repayment
¹⁰
—that is a continuation of the same old colonialism under which those who exploit get rich and the rest get killed. The poor of the world would all be better off if the global economy—run by transnational corporations backed by the military power of the United States—disappeared tomorrow. When a country, an economy, and a culture are all based on the systematic violent exploitation of humans and nonhumans the world over, it should come as no surprise when at long last someone fights back. We can only hope and pray that the organizations behind this have the resources and stamina to keep at it until they bring down the global economy.

Here’s another version
: Last Tuesday was a tragedy for the planet, and at least a temporary victory for rage and hatred. But let us not seek to pinpoint blame, nor meet negativity with negativity. The terrorists were wrong to act as they did, but to meet their violence with our own would be just as wrong. Violence never solves anything. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” Even if you believe the United States and the global economy are fundamentally destructive, you cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. The most important thing any of us can do is eradicate the anger that lies within our own hearts, that wounds the world as surely as do all the hijackers in Arabia and all the bombs in the United States. If I wish to experience peace, I must provide peace for another. If I wish to heal another’s anger, I must first heal my own. I know that all of the terrorists of the world are, beneath it all, searching for love. It is the task of those of us who’ve been granted this understanding to teach them this, simply by loving them, and then by loving them more. For love is the only
cure. I deplore violence, and if the United States goes to war, I will oppose that war in whatever peaceful ways I can, with love in my heart. And I will love and support our brave troops.

Or how about this
: It should be clear to everyone by now—even those with a vested interest in ignorance—that industrial civilization is killing the planet. It’s causing unprecedented human privation and suffering. Unless it’s stopped, or somehow stops itself, or most likely collapses under the weight of its inherent ecological and human destructiveness, it will kill every living being on earth. It should be equally clear that the efforts of those of us working to stop or slow the destruction are insufficient. We file our lawsuits; write our books; send letters to editors, representatives, CEOs; carry signs and placards; restore natural communities; and not only do we not stop or slow the destruction, but it actually continues to accelerate. Rates of deforestation continue to rise, rates of extinction do the same, global warming proceeds apace, the rich get richer, the poor starve to death, and the world burns.

At the same time that we so often find ourselves seemingly helpless in facing down civilization’s speeding train of destruction, we find that there’s a huge gap in our discourse. We speak much of the tactics of civil disobedience, much of the spiritual politics of cultural transformation, much of the sciences of biotechnology, toxicology, biology, and psychology. We talk of law. We also talk often of despair, frustration, and sorrow.

Yet our discourse remains firmly embedded in that which is sanctioned by the very overarching structures that govern the destruction in the first place. We do not often speak of the tactics of sabotage, and even less do we speak of violence. We avoid them, or pretend they should not be allowed to enter even the realm of possibility, or that they simply do not exist, like disinherited relatives who show up at a family reunion.