Endgame Vol.1 (70 page)

Tonight I tried to save a wasp. I failed. I was standing in line on a Jetway. The flight had been delayed. Lots of people were cranky. For whatever reason, I wasn’t.

The wasp was beautiful. She was a small hunting wasp, with delicate translucent wings and a body the color of peaches. I saw her long before I got to her. Each person in front of me in line looked at her. I prayed no one would smash her. No one did. I got there. I wanted to reach up and grab her to carry her to the small space between the Jetway and the airplane wall to release her to the outside. But I hesitated, mainly because I didn’t want to be noticed “doing something odd” in line. I wasn’t sure what to do.

I made up my mind when I heard the woman behind me ask her boyfriend, “Can I borrow your shoe?”

I reached up, cupped the wasp in my hand, closed my fingers gently, brought my hand to my chest. People behind me in line gasped. The wasp got out from between my fingers, flew to the ceiling lights. I reached as high as I could, standing on my toes, and missed her again and again. Each time I almost had her, she flew a few inches away.

Finally I had her. Because she was so high that I could not cup her, I had to hold her gently between my thumb and all four fingers. I brought her to my chest.

She stung me. The stings of hunting wasps barely hurt. The venom is meant instead to paralyze spiders or caterpillars, depending on the species of wasp, so she can lay her eggs inside her intended prey. They only sting in defense when all other options are gone, and when they’re terrified.

The sting startled me, and I accidentally let go my grip. She flew back up to the ceiling. The line moved on. I should have stayed back and tried again, but I didn’t. I got on the plane, and hoped she made it out on her own.

In many ways the story of the wasp highlights a distinction between two forms of violence, one of which I evidently didn’t like, and one of which I evidently didn’t care to think about. The former is direct and by omission. It seemed clear to me that if I didn’t do something, this wasp would die, either by being smashed for no good reason by someone wielding a shoe, or by eventually starving or being poisoned in the sterile airport environment. I knew that if I could help her outside she would at least have the chance to make it somewhere away from the concrete and kerosene fumes of the runways, where she might find whole fields of caterpillars or spiders, and where she might find a male wasp eagerly awaiting her attentions. I did not want to stand by and let her die this unnatural death.

The latter—the type of violence I evidently didn’t care to think about—was that I was getting on a plane. If whenever I drive I smash moths against my windshield, I think it’s safe to presume airplanes do the same to wasps (as well as moths, spiders, birds, and everything else that cannot get out of the way of this big metal bullet pushing through the air at several hundred feet per second). And far greater than this is the habitat damage wreaked by the airline, oil, aluminum, electricity, and other industries all necessary to get this thing in the air. I’m sure many fine fields of fat caterpillars and spiders are systematically sacrificed on the sacred altar of air travel. But it’s perhaps better if we don’t speak of that kind of violence, don’t you think?

I don’t want to take this logic too far, however, and suggest that because I boarded this plane that I’m responsible for all the creatures killed by the airline industry. The truth is that had I not flown, the airplane would still have killed those wasps, and the industry would still have destroyed those fields. Sure, I would have cost the airline money, and United’s gross income for the year would have been $400 less than $38 billion, which I suppose makes me responsible for about 1/95,000,000th of the damage caused by this one airline.

I don’t have a lot of patience for those who blame “all of us consumers” for
damage caused by the economic and social system, those who say, “We’re all in this together,”
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and who point out, “If we didn’t buy tickets, the airline industry would go broke.” Well, first, if we didn’t buy airline tickets, the feds would bail them out. All major industries rely on massive subsidies of public moneys to stay afloat. Second, if we’re going to throw out a fantasy about the mass of Americans rising up to not buy airline tickets, why dream so low? Why not dream big and have this same fantastic mass of people start taking out dams? Why don’t we have them storm vivisection labs and factory farms to liberate tormented animals? Why not have them dismantle the entire infrastructure? (Oh, because that might lead to real change, and we don’t even want to
dream
about that.) The same people who tell me I can make a difference by not buying an airline ticket quite often tell me I shouldn’t try to take out a dam because taking out one lone dam wouldn’t accomplish anything. And not buying one lone airline ticket will?

The point, once again and as always, is leverage.
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Sure, I support individuals and sometimes even industries I believe are headed the right direction through spending my hard-earned dollars in places and ways that are less destructive,
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and similarly, insofar as possible, I don’t support through my spending individuals and industries that are especially destructive, but I also recognize that far more needs to be done than this. I am not
merely
a consumer, much as those in power would like for me to define myself as such. The tools of consumerism are but one set available to me. The trick is to know when and how to use that set, and when and how to use others. The trick, to put it another way, is to leverage my efforts, to make my own small force have larger effects. The questions: What do I want to move?
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What do I use for levers? Where do I place the fulcrums? How hard and when do I push?

There are other problems with attempting to spend or boycott our way to sustainability. The first is that it simply won’t work. Spending won’t work because within an industrial economy nearly all economic transactions are destructive. Because the industrial economy—indeed a civilized economy—is systematically, inherently, functionally, and inescapably destructive, even buying “good things” isn’t really doing something good for the planet so much as it is doing something not quite so bad. Let’s say I purchase organic lettuce at the grocery store. That’s a good thing, right? Well, not particularly. The problem is that the mass cultivation of lettuce—organic or not—still destroys soils, and
its transportation to market still requires the use of oil. I suppose if I purchased lettuce grown in small-scale permaculture beds from my next door neighbor, I’d be doing something even less bad, but this is rare enough to be the exception that makes the rule crystal clear.
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For an act to be sustainable, it must benefit the landbase, which means the soil, the critters who live in the soil, the plants who live on the soil, the animals who eat the plants, the animals who eat the animals, the insects and others who turn the dead back into soil. Producing, marketing, or purchasing organic lettuce doesn’t do that. Rare indeed within our culture is the economic activity that improves the landbase (and that doesn’t pay taxes, to boot, since more than 50 percent of the discretionary federal budget goes to pay for war). And don’t throw up your hands in despair and give me the old saw about how
all
human activities damage landbases: noncivilized people have lived on landbases for a very long time without destroying them, in fact enhancing their landbases according to the needs of the landbases.

The problem is not our humanity. The problem is this culture—this
entire
culture—and slight changes in spending habits won’t significantly stop the destruction.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t enact whatever changes we can to make whatever difference we can—remember, we do need it all—and buying organic lettuce is better than buying pesticide lettuce, on any number of levels. It’s just to say that when I spoke earlier of this culture being a culture of occupation, of the government being a government of occupation, of the economy being an economy of occupation, I wasn’t speaking metaphorically or hyperbolically. I was speaking sincerely, literally, physically, in all seriousness and truth. If we were Russians living under the German occupation in 1943, would we believe we could stop the Nazis by buying products made by German companies we like a little more and not buying them from I.G. Farben and other companies we don’t like?

The same is true for boycotts. We can’t boycott our way to sustainability any more than we can spend our way to it. The industrial economy, as is true for any economy of occupation (which means any civilized economy), is fundamentally a command economy (defined as “an economy that is planned and controlled by a central administration”). I know, I know, we’ve all been fed the line that “our” economy is based on some mythical thing called the free market, and that whatever it produces is by definition what we want. But I don’t want depleted uranium any more than I want depleted oceans. Do you? So how did we get them? If the economy really were free, why are armed military and police necessary to
secure producers’ access to resources? And even if it were a “free market,” that wouldn’t help our landbases, since these markets do not value those parts of our landbases not perceived as productive (in other words, not obviously amenable to exploitation). And as mentioned before, in a global economy, free market or not, any wild thing that is vulnerable to exploitation (in other words, is valuable) will either be domesticated—enslaved—or exploited to extinction. But it’s worse than this. It’s not a free market anyway. Remember the words of Dwayne Andreas: “There’s not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.”
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Economist Brad DeLong puts this another way: “As producers and employees many of us live in an economy that is better thought of as a
corporate
economy: an economy in which patterns of economic activity are organized by the hands of bosses and managers, rather than one in which the pattern of activity emerges unplanned by any other than the market’s invisible hand.”
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Yet another way to say all this is to note that, as alluded to above, all sectors of the economy, in fact the economy as a whole, would collapse almost immediately without huge subsidies. If every person in the country suddenly decided to somehow boycott, for example, the oil industry—which of course won’t happen, for any number of obvious reasons—the U.S. and other governments would merely increase the subsidies to that sector of the economy, and probably for good measure arrest the boycott organizers on racketeering charges.
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