Endgame Vol.1 (63 page)

The same person wrote: “It feels right to say one of the fundamental reasons people don’t resist even when it’s obvious that those in charge are destroying us is that so many of us just never psychologically grew up.”
³³⁹

So we understand each other: We
need
a healthy landbase. That is the most important thing in the world.
³⁴⁰
While a healthy landbase is not the only thing that matters, it is undeniably true that without a healthy landbase, nothing else matters.

It should be obvious that what is true on the personal level is even more true on the social level. One reason I have recovered from my childhood to the degree that I have is that I have worked very hard at it, and have had the loving support of my friends, my mother, and my sisters. If I’ve had to work this hard to make a life after only a formative decade of violence when I was young (as well as
coercive schooling, ubiquitous advertising, and the other ways our psyches are routinely—almost mechanically—hammered into, or rather, out of, shape); and when there are so many people who have for whatever reasons not had the opportunity or ability to work toward a recovery, and so who are passing on their pain to those others who have the misfortune of coming into contact with them (and we should acknowledge that those suffering this misfortune include at this point more or less every human and nonhuman on the planet); and when this culture rewards anti-social behavior (meaning behavior that destroys human and non-human communities); how much more difficult it is and must be for an entire culture to change.

More clarity: When I say that most people don’t care, I mean this in the most popular sense of the word
care
, as in, “If people just cared enough about the salmon, they would act to protect them from those who are killing them.” Obviously they don’t care, or they would do what it takes to save them: We’re not
that
stupid, and these tasks are not cognitively challenging, once you drop the impossible framing conditions of civilization’s perpetual growth and perceived divorce from the natural world (and its perceived divorce from consequence).

There is a deeper sense, however, in which having been inculcated into this death cult(ure), we do care about salmon and rivers and the earth (and our own bodies): we hate them all and want to destroy them. Otherwise why else would we do it, or at least allow it to happen?

Fortunately, there is an even deeper sense in which we do care. Our bodies know what is right, if only we listen to them. Beneath the enculturation, beneath the addiction, beneath the psychopathology, our bodies remember that we are meant for something better than this, that we are not apart from our human and nonhuman communities, but a part of them, that what we allow to be done to our landbase (or our body) we allow to be done to ourselves. Our bodies remember a way of being not based on slavery—our own and others’—but on mutual responsibility. Our bodies remember freedom. Our bodies remember that our intelligence is meant for something better than building monuments to death, that our intelligence is meant to help us connect to the rest of the world, to understand, communicate, relate. Our intelligence is meant, as are the particular intelligences of rivers and manatees and panthers and spiders and salmon and bumblebees, to help us realize and participate—play our part—in the beautiful and awesome symphony that is life.

There are many who will never be able to reach these memories, to accept them in a way that leads them away from their addiction to slavery, their addiction to civilization. That is a tragedy: personal, communal, biological, geological.

But there are others—many of them—who can and do remember the knowledge of bodies, and who are willing to do what is necessary to protect their bodies, their landbases, to stand in solidarity with salmon, grizzlies, redwoods, voles, owls, to work with these others—as humans have done forever outside the iron shackles of civilization—for the benefit of the larger community. And that is a beautiful and powerful and moral thing.

It’s also really fun.

You should try it sometime.

If those in power really aren’t reachable, and if the majority of people probably will never act to defend their—and our—landbases and bodies, and if the culture is in fact enacting a death urge that will lead to planetary annihilation unless it is stopped, and if you care about your body, your landbase, what are you going to do? What are the right actions to take?

One needs something to believe in, something for which one can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one’s life has meaning, that one is needed in this world.

DURING THE CONVERSATION IN WHICH MY FORMER AGENT TOLD ME that if I ever wanted to reach an audience, I’d have to tone down my work, she also told me that I was a nihilist.

I felt vaguely insulted. I didn’t know what a nihilist was, but I knew from her tone that it must be a bad thing. I pictured an angry teenager leaning against a building, wearing black slacks, turtleneck, and beret, scowling and chain-smoking.

But that’s not me, so I looked up
nihilist
in the dictionary.

The first definition—that life is meaningless and that there are no grounds for any moral truths—clearly doesn’t fit me. Nor is it true that I do not believe in truth, beauty, or love.
³⁴²
The second definition—that the current social order is so destructive and irredeemable that it needs to be taken down to its core, and to have its core removed—fits me like a glove, I suppose the kind you’d put on to not leave fingerprints.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with Casey about nihilism, and about how the whole black turtleneck thing really doesn’t work for me. And how I rarely scowl. Emma Goldman is famously (and incorrectly) quoted as saying, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
³⁴³
Well, I don’t like to dance, but if I can’t laugh, then you can start the revolution without me.

One day Casey said, “I’ve got you figured out.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“You,” he said, “are a romantic nihilist.” And then he laughed.

So did I. I laughed and laughed. Yes, I thought, a revolution of romantic nihilists. I would be down for that. Count me in.

I did a talk in Portland the other day. I heard that afterwards something of a firestorm erupted on a local discussion website, as some pacifists attacked me for not adhering to the One True Way of Social Change™, and then non-pacifists responded, pacifists re-responded, and so on. A friend told me not to bother going to read the whole thing (“There’s nothing useful. Lots of heads in the sand.”) but did send me one post that seems to me to capture the essence of
what I’m trying to get at (in four short paragraphs instead of hundreds of pages). Here it is:

“Himalayan blackberries are not native to Oregon. Their hideous thorny brambles have taken over huge tracts of land here. They kill native species. They hurt like hell when you step on one or fall into a clump of them. If you try to hack them down they’ll grow back (they are tough suckers). If you try to pull them out by the roots their thorns bury themselves in your thumb and fester. The best thing to do for a big field full of blackberries would be to burn it, then bulldoze the hell out of it. Get them out of there down to every last root.

“The social, political and psychological state that we find ourselves in is the cultural equivalent of blackberries. Our culture is invasive, destructive, painful, and should never have been planted in the first place. We are a part of it (whether we want to be or not).

“Derrick Jensen wants to burn it all down.

“I want to drive the bulldozer.”

A few months ago the editors of
The Ecologist
started a new feature in their magazine: Each issue they ask an environmentalist or writer a series of questions about the books that have most deeply influenced them, and what books they would like to recommend to others. Many of the books are those we might expect,
Small is Beautiful
,
When Corporations Rule the World
,
The Lorax
. One writer evidently decided to forego modesty, and recommended his own books.