Endgame Vol.1 (25 page)

Of course there’s no accountability for those who work for the centralization of power. Their violence is not really violence (see Premise Four), or at least can never be seen as such. Thus the murder of whales is not
really
violence, nor indeed is the murder of entire oceans. The same is true for trees, forests, mountains, entire continents. The same is true for entire peoples. None of this violence can be considered violence, which means all talk of accountability makes no sense: there’s nothing to be held accountable
for
.

Today I’m driving through northern California. I started at the coast, passing through patches of afternoon fog that slid between the tops of tall redwoods like so many ghosts. Traffic was light, and in the two-lane stretches the slow cars inevitably (and unaccountably) used the turnouts, as they’re supposed to.

Sometimes insects arced into my windshield, white or black dots that came upon me too quickly for me to swerve, then splattered yellow, orange, white, or transparent against the glass. I thought often, too, of the insects I did not even see, but killed nonetheless. Roads are free-kill zones for anything that enters.

I crossed the Klamath River, running much fuller now: after the salmon had been safely killed, the feds released water into the river. Federal biologists (political scientists, I guess you’d call them, although one friend prefers the term
biostitutes
) continue to claim—no surprises here—there’s been no causal connection shown between the lack of water and the death of fish, and I continue to fantasize about accountability.

The road moved away from the coast, and the day warmed. Traffic remained light. I crossed the Eel and Russian Rivers, which are little more than braided streams good for warm foot baths and for little children wading. The Eel once had runs of lampreys great as the runs of salmon it also now no longer has. I don’t know if the Russian ever had runs of Muscovites.

Then I entered wine country—Mendocino and Sonoma counties—and saw the reason for the rivers’ deaths: great seas of grapes extending as far as I could see. Even though everyone—including teetotalers like myself—know
that non-irrigated grapes make better wines, the rivers have been effectively dewatered to grow these grapes, and more importantly to grow the bank accounts of those wealthy enough to own wineries: a few huge corporations control production, as always, which means they also control politics, as always, which means they also control land use policies, as always.
¹⁵⁴

Last year an insect called the glassy-winged sharpshooter made news through the region, because it was helping to spread Pierce’s Disease, an illness that threatened (or promised) to decimate grape plants. Federal, state, and local governments went all out to eradicate this threat (or promise), shoveling fistfuls of public moneys toward protecting these private (and especially corporate) investments.

But I must confess something else. Every time I see these dewatered rivers, and every time I see these miles upon miles of grapes (which are not used for food, nor for anything but an absolutely nonessential item commonly used for conspicuous consumption [note that I’ve nothing against luxuries; I do have something against luxuries that come at the expense of the landbase]), I think the same thing, that I’m in the wrong line of work. I need to quit writing, I think, and start raising glassy-winged sharpshooters to release in these fields.

A few years ago I was watching television with two indigenous people. One was a Maori woman, the other an American Indian man. A newscaster was speaking, which is to say he was lying, spinning events to promote the interests of his bosses, more broadly of capital, more broadly still of the culture, of civilization, more broadly yet of destruction. The particular story he was spinning had to do with the environment and indigenous rights. No causal connection could be shown, he was saying, between deforestation and species extinction. In fact, he said, the worst enemies of these creatures were environmental extremists keeping timber companies from going in and cleaning up forests, and indigenous peoples insisting on archaic “treaty rights” allowing them to hunt and fish where white people couldn’t. He made clear that decent people shouldn’t stand for such blatant obstructionism on the part of environmentalists and racism on the part of the indigenous.

My two friends suddenly spoke at the same time. The Maori woman: “I want to hit him in the head with a taiaha,” a Maori club. The Indian man: “I want to shoot an arrow through his throat.”

I burst out laughing. They looked at me. I could tell they were hurt by my
laughter. I said, “No, it’s not that. It’s just this is such a wonderful example of parallel cultural evolution: different tools to accomplish the same important task.”

They laughed now, also.

We all face choices. We can have ice caps and polar bears, or we can have automobiles. We can have dams or we can have salmon. We can have irrigated wine from Mendocino and Sonoma counties, or we can have the Russian and Eel Rivers. We can have oil from beneath the oceans, or we can have whales. We can have cardboard boxes or we can have living forests. We can have computers and cancer clusters from the manufacture of those computers, or we can have neither. We can have electricity and a world devastated by mining, or we can have neither (and don’t give me any nonsense about solar: you’ll need copper for wiring, silicon for photovoltaics, metals and plastics for appliances, which need to be manufactured and then transported to your home, and so on. Even solar electrical energy can never be sustainable because electricity and all its accoutrements require an industrial infrastructure). We can have fruits, vegetables, and coffee brought to the U.S. from Latin America, or we can have at least somewhat intact human and nonhuman communities throughout that region. (I don’t think I need to remind readers that, to take one not atypical example among far too many, the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala was overthrown by the United States to support the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, leading to thirty years of U.S.-backed dictatorships and death squads. Also, a few years ago I asked a member of the revolutionary tupacamaristas what they wanted for the people of Peru, and he said something that cuts to the heart of the current discussion [and to the heart of every struggle that has ever taken place against civilization]: “We need to produce and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so.”) We can have international trade, inevitably and by definition as well as by function dominated by distant and huge economic/governmental entities which do not (and cannot) act in the best interest of communities, or we can have local control of local economies, which cannot happen so long as cities require the importation (read: theft) of resources from ever-greater distances. We can have civilization—too often called the highest form of social organization—that spreads (I would say metastasizes) to all parts of the globe, or we can have a multiplicity of autonomous cultures each uniquely adapted to the land from which it springs. We can have cities and all they imply, or we can have a livable
planet. We can have “progress” and history, or we can have sustainability. We can have civilization, or we can have at least the possibility of a way of life not based on the violent theft of resources.

This is in no way abstract. It is physical. On a finite world, the forced and routine importation of resources is unsustainable. Duh.

Show me how car culture can coexist with wild nature, and more specifically, show me how anthropogenic global warming can coexist with ice caps and polar bears. And any fixes such as solar electric cars would present problems at least equally severe. For example, the electricity still needs to be generated, batteries are extraordinarily toxic, and in any case, driving is not the main way a car pollutes: far more pollution is emitted through its manufacture than through its exhaust pipe. We can perform the same exercise for any product of industrial civilization.

We can’t have it all. The belief that we can is one of the things that has driven us to this awful place. If insanity could be defined as having lost functional connection with physical reality, to believe we can have it all—to believe we can simultaneously dismantle a world and live on it; to believe we can perpetually use more energy than arrives from the sun; to believe we can take more than the world gives willingly; to believe a finite world can support infinite growth, much less infinite economic growth, where economic growth consists of converting ever larger numbers of living beings to dead objects (industrial production, at its core, is the conversion of the living—trees or mountains—into the dead—two-by-fours and beer cans)—is grotesquely insane. This insanity manifests partly as a potent disrespect for limits and for justice. It manifests in the pretension that neither limits nor justice exist. To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation. And it is to have paid absolutely no attention to the past six thousand years.

One of the reasons we fail to perceive all of this is that we—the civilized—have been inculcated to believe that belongings are more important than belonging, and that relationships are based on dominance—violence and exploitation. Having come to believe that, and having come to believe the acquisition of material possessions is good (or even more abstractly, that the accumulation of money is good) and in fact the primary goal of life, we then have come to perceive ourselves as the primary beneficiaries of all of this insanity and injustice.

Right now I’m sitting in front of a space heater, and all other things being equal, I’d rather my toes were toasty than otherwise. But all other things aren’t equal, and destroying runs of salmon by constructing dams for hydropower is a really stupid (and immoral) way to warm my feet. It’s an extraordinarily bad trade.

And it’s not just space heaters. No amount of comforts or elegancies, what that nineteenth-century slave owner called the characteristics of civilization, are worth killing the planet. What’s more, even if we do perceive it in our best interest to take these comforts or elegancies at the expense of the enslavement, impoverishment, or murder of others and their landbases, we
have no right to do so
. And no amount of rationalization nor overwhelming force—not even “full-spectrum domination”—will suffice to give us that right.