Endgame Vol.1 (43 page)

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 bioweapons 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.”