Endgame Vol.1 (24 page)

“Does all of this mean predation is bad?” she asked.

“How so?”

“If a heron eats a tadpole, we can say for certain the tadpole will never develop into an emotionally healthy frog. It will never develop into a frog at all.”

“I don’t think we have any concept of what it means to participate in a larger-than-human community. A while ago I did a radio interview in Spokane. The interviewer said pre-conquest Indians exploited salmon as surely
as do the civilized. I had two responses. The first: if that were the case, why were there so many salmon before, and so few now? Something clearly has changed. The second: Indians
ate
salmon, not exploited them. He asked what’s the difference. I said Indians entered into a relationship with the salmon whereby they gave respect to the salmon in exchange for the flesh.”

“I’ve read about that.”

“I wasn’t happy with that answer. It was true so far as it went, but also left out so much as to be effectively false.
¹⁵⁰
There was another necessary condition to the agreement between predator and prey, but I didn’t know what it was. Then that afternoon I took a walk to the coyote tree.”

The coyote tree was a pine under which I’d fed coyotes when I lived in Spokane. I loved the tree, and part of the reason I moved from Spokane was that the forest of which the tree was a part was being destroyed to put in a subdivision. Each day I’d heard the clank and roar of heavy machinery, and I’d had no idea what I could do to stop the destruction. So, and I’m not proud of this, rather than watch the destruction of this place I loved, I fled, moved far away. But I was back in town, and I went to sit by the tree.

“I kept asking the questions: what are the bonds between predator and prey? What are the conditions on which their relationships are based? How is respect for the spirit of the eaten manifested by the one who eats?”

“And?”

“The coyote tree told me the answer.” My friend knew me well enough to not be surprised, and to know I wasn’t speaking metaphorically. “When you take the life of someone to eat or otherwise use so you can survive, you become responsible for the survival—and dignity—of that other’s community. If I eat a salmon—or rather,
when
I eat a salmon—I pledge myself to ensuring that this particular run of salmon continues, and that this particular river of which the salmon are a part thrives. If I cut a tree, I make the same pledge to the larger community of which it’s a part. When I eat beef—or for that matter carrots—I pledge to eradicate factory farming.”

“Did Indians have this deal?”

“On one level I have no idea. I can’t speak for them.
¹⁵¹
But on the other, it’s clear to me that
every
one makes this deal. It’s the only way to survive.”

“In the case of nonhumans, do you think the exchange is conscious?”

“Once again, I have no idea. But I can’t see any reason why not.” I paused, then said, “And I have to say that none of this is woo-woo or particularly cosmic. It’s very physical.”

“How so?”

“Not only is this crucial on moral and relational levels, but if I eat salmon without devoting myself to their continued survival, I’ll soon find myself hungry. The same is true for bears or anyone else eating them, or, to take your example, herons eating tadpoles.”

We sat a long time without speaking before I said, “I don’t think what the coyote tree said was precisely a rebuke for me having abandoned that forest to the machinery after having gained and shared so much there. But I did become extremely aware I’d abandoned my responsibility. I had abandoned a place I love. And that doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t feel right.”

Far more silence. Finally she nodded, and said, “It’s like poisoning that glass of water we talked about. Or letting it be poisoned.”

“Yes,” I said, “I acted immorally.”

Whether it takes me four weeks or 14 hours to get to Hamburg from Munich is less important to my happiness and to my humanity than the question: How many men who yearn for sunlight just as I do must be imprisoned in factories, their healthy limbs and lungs sacrificed in order to build a locomotive? For me the only important thing is: The more swiftly our thriving economy is completely brought to ruin, the more pitilessly the last remnant of industry is wiped out, the sooner will people have enough to eat and have a small measure of that happiness to which every man has a right.

RIGHT NOW BEAKED WHALES ARE BEING KILLED BY SCIENTISTS IN THE Gulf of California. The scientists, from the National Science Foundation and Columbia University, are on a ship (the
Maurice Ewing
) that has on board an impressive array of airguns that fire sonic blasts of up to 260 db. The scientists use these airguns at least ostensibly to map the ocean floor. They say they’re exploring how continents rift apart, but honesty (on my part, not theirs) requires mention that data generated this way is crucial to underwater oil exploitation.

A 260 db sound is very intense. For comparison, damage to human hearing begins at 85 db. A police siren at thirty meters is about 100 db. And decibels are logarithmic, meaning every 10 db increase translates to ten times more intensity, and sounds (because human perception is also logarithmic) twice as loud. In this case, that means the blasts from the research vessel are approximately ten quadrillion times more intense than a siren at thirty meters, and would sound to humans about 16,384 times as loud (we could easily round this off to 16,000, since in either case the sound would have killed you). The sound of a jet taking off at 600 meters is about 110 db. The Ewing’s blasts are a quadrillion times more intense, and sound 8,192 times louder. A loud indoor rock concert weighs in at 120 db (the threshold of human pain, by the way): whales and other creatures in the Gulf of California are subjected to sounds 100 trillion times more intense than that. The threshold at which humans die from sound alone is 160 db. People—including nonhuman people—die because sound is a pressure wave (which is why you can feel your body vibrate during loud, low sounds: one of the attractions of rock concerts for me was the feeling of the bass notes massaging and piercing my body). Too-intense waves rip ear, lung, and other vibrating tissues. They cause internal bleeding. Two hundred and sixty decibels: that’s 10,000 times more intense than the sound of a nuclear explosion at a range of five hundred meters.

This is the intensity with which whales and other creatures in the Gulf of California are assaulted.

Whales live by their ears. They communicate with them, singing complex songs we will probably never understand. Babies find their mothers by them. Adults navigate by them. They find food by them. Whales subjected to loud
noises stop singing, sometimes for days: which means they do not eat, do not court, probably do not sleep. Whales subjected to loud enough noises lose their hearing. Eardrums rupture. Brains hemorrhage. They die.

Since the experiment began, dead beaked whales have been discovered stranded on beaches of the Gulf of California by senior marine biologists at the National Marine Fisheries Services, including several experts in beaked whales, the impacts of noise on marine mammals, and the stranding of marine mammals. These scientists, and others who care about whales, wrote letters to the expedition’s sponsors. Columbia University failed to meaningfully respond. The National Science Foundation’s response was to write a letter stating, “There is no evidence that there is any connection between the operations of the Ewing and the reported [
sic
] beached whales.”
¹⁵³

I must be honest with you, even at the risk of offending or alienating you. When I read of the torture and murder of these whales by scientists from the National Science Foundation, and of their and their attorneys’ response to concerns about the whales, my first impulse was to wish someone would put a gun to the heads of the scientists and pull the trigger. If somehow (unfortunately) caught by police, the person could respond, “There is no evidence that there is any connection between the operation of this gun and the reported holes in these men’s heads.”

Even if I
do
admit this fantasy, decorum requires my next paragraph to be a denial of it, a statement of its unthinkability, its immorality, a plea for forgiveness for my fall from grace. I should disown it as dishonorable, disgusting, and having no place in any discussion of social change. But I won’t do that. I can’t. There is no accountability in this culture, at least for those who work for the centralization of power. And that lack of accountability is not sustainable. It is killing the planet. It is killing those I love. This lack of accountability is itself obscenely immoral.

I have a student at the prison who, when he was seventeen, killed someone. He did so in what he has since described as drug-induced psychosis. He is now spending the rest of his life in prison. Never again will he put his feet into a stream. Never again will he even
see
a stream. Never again will he pull an apple from a tree. Never again will he feel the long, slow kiss of a woman, nor feel her breasts against his chest, feel the muscles of her vagina contract around his penis. Never again, unless and until civilization comes down, will he walk free. He is paying for his decision, his action, with every moment of his life.

Yet scientists decide fish don’t need water, and a judge goes along with them. Activists, including me, wring our hands and cry. Salmon die. There’s no
accountability anywhere in this web of non-relationships except for the salmon. They pay with their lives. Engineers design oil processing facilities, CEOs and shareholders gain profits from them, politicians pass laws protecting the profits of the corporations against all environmental and human costs, police protect the property against all trespassers, and from this volatile stew of immorality emerges a cancer cluster. The ones who pay are the children who receive the gifts of asthma, leukemia, and other illnesses. And of course the land itself pays. The land always pays. And when that facility is no longer profitable? Those in charge move on to destroy some other place. But the children—those in graves, and those not yet there—remain. As does the land. There is no accountability anywhere. I will not back away from my fantasy. Accountability needs to be brought into this web of non-relationships. And it needs to be brought in quickly.

I’ve little doubt the whales would agree.

I need to say, furthermore, that scientists from the National Science Foundation and Columbia University aren’t the only ones deafening, torturing, and killing whales, dolphins, and other sea life. In fact they’re rank amateurs. The U.S. Navy has begun to deploy a system that will soon blanket 80 percent of the world’s oceans with pulse blasts of at least 200 db. And oil companies routinely run ships around the ocean exploring for oil by blasting at 260 db. It’s happening right now. It’s got to stop.

We’ve got to stop it.

In the particular case of whales being killed in the Gulf of California, the “accountability model” probably wouldn’t have been the best choice. The good folks at the Biodiversity Legal Foundation were able to get a temporary restraining order against the organizations involved, and halt the experiment.

It ends up, also, that the judge in the case had, probably accidentally, an idea that would have an effect similar to my fantasy. Initially he was going to ask representatives of the National Science Foundation to bring soundmakers into the courtroom and match the volume of the ship’s airguns, presumably to give him a tangible idea of what they’re talking about. Someone who helped bring the case to the judge’s attention told me, “One can only imagine how great it would have been if that had come to pass. I imagine the judge asking the NSF lawyer to test out the air guns in the courtroom. The NSF apologists would have been forced to explain that doing so would have blown out the windows in the
federal building, not to mention what it would have done to everyone in the courtroom (all the better if NSF researchers had been there). I think that would have been a delectable example of accountability.”