Endgame Vol.1 (22 page)

To hear and respect another’s
no
is to accept that the other has an existence independent of you. People generally refuse to hear another’s
no
—and this is certainly true of the entire culture’s refusal to enter into relationship with the natural world—when the possibility of intimate and genuine interactions with the other is too frightening to allow. Or when acculturation and personal history combine to make someone believe the other doesn’t even exist for its own sake.

Two weeks ago, the Klamath River, just south of here, was full of the biggest runs of salmon and steelhead (ocean-going rainbow trout) in years. “You could have walked across on their backs,” someone said to me. I talked to a Yurok Indian, whose culture is based on the salmon, who said the runs made him imagine what it must have been like to see the
real
runs before the white men arrived. It made me happy. I was going to go see them.

But I got another call. The fish were dying, piling up in mounds on the shore or floating bloated and bleeding from their vents. “Don’t come,” the caller said. “You don’t want to see this.”

Walt Lara, the Requa representative to the Yurok Tribal Council, said in a local newspaper interview, “The whole chinook run will be impacted, probably by 85 to 95 percent. And the fish are dying as we speak. They’re swimming around in circles. They bump up against your legs when you’re standing in the water. These
are beautiful, chrome-bright fish that are dying, not fish that are already spawned out.” There are probably, he said, a thousand dead fish per mile of river.
¹⁴³

Last summer the federal government decided there was no evidence that fish need water, and instead redirected the water to (a few heavily subsidized) farmers in the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon. The water in the Klamath is now too warm for the salmon.

This is the story of civilization. This culture is killing the planet.

The defensive right of the salmon community to live, and the defensive right of the river to exist for its own sake, would in any meaningful morality trump the perceived rights of the farmers to take the water, and the perceived right of the government to give it to them.

But, you could ask, what about the right of the farmers to continue their traditional (and in this case, taxpayer- and environmentally subsidized) lifestyle?

This brings us to the eighth premise of this book:
The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of any economic system.
This seems so self-evident I’m embarrassed to have to defend it, but it is a notion that entirely escapes our public (and private) discourse. Just yesterday I saw a tiny article on page seven of the
San Francisco Chronicle
stating that every single stream—
every single stream
—in the United States is contaminated with toxic chemicals (the completeness of this toxification should surprise me less than it does: surely if every mother’s breast milk is contaminated with toxic chemicals, why should we expect streams to be any more immune?), and that one-fifth of all animals and one-sixth of all plants are at risk for extinction within the next thirty years. Page one carried a huge article about Elvis memorabilia, and another that began, “Congress took its first tentative step Wednesday toward mandating that all television sets by 2006 include technology to foil piracy of digitized movies and television shows.”
¹⁴⁴
Don’t forget, once again, the entire sections of the paper devoted to sports, business, and comics/gossip.

Think about it for a second: what is the real source of our life? Of our food, our air, our water? Is it the economic system? Of course not: it is our landbase.

Just last week I learned that the air in Los Angeles is so toxic that children born there inhale more carcinogenic pollutants in the first two weeks of their lives than the EPA (which routinely understates risks so as not to impede economic production) considers safe for a lifetime. In San Francisco it takes about three weeks.
¹⁴⁵
We’re poisoning ourselves. Or rather, we are being poisoned. Another
way to put the eighth premise is:
Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and really stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

If someone put a plastic bag over your head, or over the head of someone you love, and said he would give you money if you leave it there, would you take the money?

And if you said
no
, what would you do if he insisted, even to the point of a gun?

Would you take the money?

Or would you fight back?

When they don’t have anything better to do—which frankly seems like most of the time—anti-environmentalists are fond of pointing out the hypocrisy of environmentalists.
You live in a house, don’t you? You wipe your ass with toilet paper. Your books are made of paper. Every one of these activities is environmentally destructive. You are not pure. Therefore what you say is meaningless.

It’s an interesting argument on several levels. The first is that it reveals the weakness of their own position: they cannot rebut the substance of our message, so they simply attack the messenger. It’s one of the most overused rhetorical tricks going. But there’s something even more interesting about their arguments—fundamentally stupid as they are—which is that they’re right, and in being right they make one of my central points better than I do. Building houses is destructive. Manufacturing toilet paper is destructive. Printing books is destructive. But there’s no reason to stop there. The industrial economy itself is inherently destructive, and every act that contributes to the industrial economy is inherently destructive. This includes buying my books. This includes buying something from Global Exchange. If we care about the planet, we then have a couple of options. The first—and this one is often suggested by anti-environmentalists—is that we simply off ourselves. I prefer the second one, which is that we dismantle the industrial economy.

I want to be clear. When people tell me population is the number one environmental problem we face today, I always respond that population is by no means primary. It’s not even secondary or tertiary. First, there’s the question of resource consumption I mentioned earlier. Second is the failure to accept limits, of which overpopulation and overconsumption are merely two linked symptoms. Beneath that is our belief we’re not animals, that we’re separate from the rest of the world, that we’re exempt from the negative consequences of our actions, and that we’re exempt from death. Beneath these beliefs is a fear and loathing of the body, of the wild and uncontrollable nature of existence itself, and ultimately of death. These fears cause us to convince ourselves not only of the possibility but the desirability of not being animals, of separating ourselves from the world. These fears drive us crazy, and lead us to create and implement insane and destructive economic and social systems.

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to my ninth premise, which is:
Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population may occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some will be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear Armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by a crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default of our culture. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would
consist
of decreasing the current levels of violence—required and caused by the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich—and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps long-term shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament, and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.