Endgame Vol.1 (42 page)

It’s the same old statement posed by the scientist from the National Science Foundation when he denied any link between air guns and beached whales. And to be honest, I want to respond the same way: If my success as a person, in terms of having the ability to purchase a gun and the knowledge on how to find you, is a natural phenomenon, and if death itself is a natural phenomenon, how can I be said to threaten you?

It’s all insane. It’s precisely the sort of nonsense the CIA extolled in their
torture handbook—sorry, human resource exploitation manual. If you babble long enough, you can break people, get them to go along with almost any program.

But we still have one more part of this question: “Is the line between artificial and natural itself artificial?” We’ve all heard this argument before, usually put forward by those who wish to further exploitation: humans are natural, therefore everything they create is natural. Chainsaws, nuclear bombs, capitalism, sex slavery, asphalt, cars, polluted streams, a devastated world, devastated psyches, all these are natural.

I have two responses to this. The first I explored already in
The Culture of Make Believe
, where I said, “This is, of course, nonsense. We are embedded in the natural world. We evolved as social creatures in this natural world. We require clean water to drink, or we die. We require clean air to breathe, or we die. We require food, or we die. We require love, affection, social contact in order to become our full selves. It is part of our evolutionary legacy as social creatures. Anything that helps us to understand all of this is natural: any ritual, artifact, process, action is natural to the degree that it reinforces our understanding of our embeddedness in the natural world, and any ritual, artifact, process, action is unnatural to the degree that it does not.”
²²¹

My second response to their question is: Who cares? I want to live in a world that has wild salmon and tiger salamanders and tigers and healthy forests and vibrant human communities where mothers don’t have dioxin in their breastmilk. If you really want to argue that oil tankers, global warming, DDT, the designated hitter rule, and the rest of the massive deathcamp we call civilization is natural, well, you can just go off in a corner with your $20,000 cheque and your utilitarian-philosopher buddies and play your bullshit linguistic games while the rest of us try to do something about the very real problems caused by civilization. If you want to seriously propose these waste-of-time questions,
²²²
I’ve got nothing to say to you. I’ve got work to do. I’ve got a world to help save, from people exactly like you. I’ve got a civilization to help bring down before it does any more damage.

WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TEN.
It’s 2003 and I read in the newspaper that “Industrial fishing practices have decimated every one of the world’s biggest and most economically important species of fish. . . . Fully 90 percent of each of the world’s large ocean species, including cod, halibut,
tuna, swordfish, and marlin, have disappeared from the world’s oceans in recent decades. . . . [F]ishing has become so efficient that it typically takes just 15 years to remove 80 percent or more of any species unlucky enough to become the focus of a fleet’s attention.”
²²³
Although these three sentences by themselves starkly reveal how and why civilization is killing the world, neatly tying together economics, technology, and planetary murder, there are other things about the article and others like it that reveal even more about what we are up against.

The first is the placement of the article, on page A13 (and taking up about one-fourth of the page, with the rest devoted to an ad for the new PCS Vision™ Picture Phone with BUILT-IN Camera). This is a point I’ve made before: if the murder of the oceans doesn’t deserve to rank as front page news, I don’t know what does.

The next is that, somewhat contradicting the first, I’m not sure this is really news at all. I told several activist friends about the article, and most responded, “I thought we already knew this.”

They’re right. Anybody who doesn’t understand that industrial fishing is killing the oceans is either an industry stooge, a politician, or a bureaucrat. Or maybe a moron. But I repeat myself.

Time and again scientists put out studies showing how the natural world is being killed, and time and again the culture keeps killing the planet. I can guarantee that in three or four years another study will come out saying that the oceans are being killed. This study will make a big splash on page A13 of many papers. Ho hum. Wanna hand me the sports section?

For example, about thirty seconds of searching the internet revealed articles from 1996 and 1999 detailing how industrial fishing—in each case the technique of long-line fishing where lines thirty or more miles long holding thousands of hooks are strung behind boats—are killing the oceans (including seabirds such as albatross, who are getting absolutely hammered). 1996, 1999, 2003. Let’s wait for 2006.

The world is not being destroyed because of a lack of information: it’s being destroyed because we don’t stop those doing the destroying.

The third is the entirely predictable yet still horrifying response by industry representatives. Linda Candler, speaking for the trade group International Coalition of Fisheries Associations, revealed that my conflation of industry stooges and morons was not in fact a slur by saying, “Research shows fisheries are more productive when fished.” She noted that “fish populations respond by reproducing more” when a new predator, in this case the exact same long-line techniques decried in 1996 and 1999, doesn’t overdo it.
²²⁴

She’s right, of course. Think of your own body. When you bleed, you obviously produce more blood to replace that which is lost. Using her logic, the more you bleed, the more you produce: QED, bleeding is actually good for you. Putting her logic in context, if someone were to drain 90 percent of Ms. Candler’s blood, making sure, of course, to not overdo it, her body would presumably go into hyperproduction, and she would be even healthier than before.

Defending the indefensible makes anyone who tries it absurd.

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 Doctors
²²⁸
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.