Endgame Vol.1 (30 page)

The best and most courageous and most sincere of our efforts are never sufficient to the task of stopping those who would destroy.

Years ago, I wrote, “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam.” I wrote this because no matter how hard activists work, no matter how hard I work, no matter how much scientists study, none of it really seems to help. Politicians and businesspeople lie, delay, and simply continue their destructive behavior, backed by the full power of the state. And the salmon die. I said back then, and I say now, that it’s a cozy relationship
for all of us but the salmon. Every morning I still make the decision to write, and every morning I think more and more I’m making the wrong damn decision. The salmon are in far worse shape now than when I first wrote that line.

I am ashamed of that.

We are watching their extinction.

I am ashamed of that as well.

To mask our powerlessness in the face of this destruction, many of us fall into the same pattern as those abused children, and for much the same reason. We internalize too much responsibility. This allows us activists to pretend we have at least some power to halt or slow violence done to us and to those we love, however illusory, once again, all evidence inevitably shows this power to be. And don’t give me a lecture about how if we weren’t doing this work the destruction would proceed even more quickly: of
course
that’s the case, and
of course
we need to keep fighting these rearguard actions—I would never suggest otherwise—but do you realize how pathetic it is that all of our “victories” are temporary and defensive, and all of our losses permanent and offensive? I can’t speak for you, but I want more than to simply stave off destruction of this or that wild place for a year or two: I want to take the offensive, to beat back those who would destroy, to reclaim what is wild and free and natural, to let it recover on its own: I want to stop in their tracks the destroyers, and I want to make them incapable of inflicting further damage. To want any less is to countenance the ultimate destruction of the planet.

But we all settle for less, and to make ourselves feel the tiniest bit less impotent we turn the focus inward.
We
are the problem. I use toilet paper, so I am responsible for deforestation. I drive a car, so I am responsible for global warming. Never mind that I did not create the systems that cause these. I did not create industrial forestry. I did not create an oil economy. Civilization was destroying life on this planet before I was born, and will do the same—unless I and others, including the natural world, stop it—after I die.

If I were to die tomorrow, deforestation would continue unabated. In fact, as I’ve shown in another book,
¹⁷¹
demand does not even drive the timber industry: overcapacity of very expensive pulp and paper mills (as well as, of course, this culture’s death urge) determines in great measure how many trees are cut. Similarly, if I were to die, car culture would not slow in the slightest.

Yes, it’s vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrial civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility. With all the world at stake, it is self-indulgent,
self-righteous, and self-important. It is also nearly ubiquitous. And it serves the interests of those in power by keeping our focus off them.

I do this all the time.
We’re killing the planet
, I say. Well, no, I’m not, but thank you for thinking me so powerful.
Because I take hot showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers
. Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities (got to keep those golf courses green) and actual living breathing humans.
We’re deforesting 214,000 acres per day, an area larger than New York City
. Well, no, I’m not. Sure, I consume some wood and paper, but I didn’t make the system.

Here’s the real story:
If I want to stop deforestation, I need to dismantle the system responsible
.

Just yesterday I caught myself taking on nonsensical responsibility. I was finishing a book with George Draffan about causes of worldwide deforestation. For one hundred and fifty pages we laid out explicitly and undeniably that this culture has been deforesting every place it touches at an ever-increasing pace for some six thousand years, and that current deforestation is driven by a massively corrupt system of interlocked governments and corporations backed, as always, by plenty of soldiers and cops with guns. (But you knew that already, didn’t you?) Yet at the end, I found myself pleading with readers to drive the deforesters out of our own hearts and minds. I wrote, “We will not stop destroying forests until we have dealt with the urge to destroy and consume that hides in our hearts and minds and bodies.” I cut the line. It’s a fine first step—emphasis on
first
—because we surely cannot stop the destruction until we perceive it as destruction and not as “progress,” or “developing natural resources,” or even “inevitable,” or “the way things are.” But what about driving deforesters out of forests altogether?
That
is the real point. Anything less is far worse than just a waste of everyone’s time: it paves the way for further destruction.

I recently saw an excellent articulation of the dangers of identifying with those who are killing the planet. It was in a “Derrick Jensen discussion group” on the internet. When I first heard of the group’s existence, I was of course, flattered. People everywhere discussing me! Every guy’s dream! My head swelled. Before this happened, I wasn’t even convinced
I
would log on to discuss me. But I did. I followed the posts. My head swelled even more. I thought I’d give them a thrill, and posted something unpublished elsewhere. I considered the excitement they’d surely feel at this honor, and imagined how excited I’d have been when I was younger had the rock groups
UFO
or
Spirit
made some song
accessible to only a few of us. I probably would have stayed up late that night listening to it over and over, and considering how special I was. Fortunately the response on the discussion group was more sedate. A few people wrote, “Nice essay.” That’s about it. Then they went back to discussing whatever they’d been discussing before. My head returned to normal size.

Now to the articulation I just read. A woman had commented that “We are going to go to war in Iraq.” A man commented on her use of
we
, not realizing she was being ironic. His misunderstanding doesn’t lessen the importance of his comments: “I find that many people (including myself when I’m not paying attention) slip into using the term ‘we’ when referring to actions of the U.S. government. I agree with Derrick’s assertion that the government (I would say all governments) is a government of occupation, just as this culture is a culture of occupation. Though I’m coerced into participating in the system (by paying taxes, working, spending money in the economy) I do not consider myself one of the decision-makers. My choices are false choices, and my voice is not ‘represented’ by the government. A friend was wearing a great button the other day: ‘U.S. out of North America.’”

He continued, “Those in power want us to associate ourselves with them, make us part of the ‘we’ so we become inseparable from them. This way they cannot be challenged, questioned, or overthrown without attacking ourselves. This is the ultimate goal of nationalism, to fuse an entire nation into agreement with the leaders so no action, no matter how obscene, is questioned. Perhaps this is why when I bring up faults in the government, capitalism, the techno-industrial complex, or the culture as a whole, many people get extremely defensive, as if I’d just insulted their mother. The more we allow those in power to convince us we are to blame for their actions, the more we are unable to separate what we do from what we are forced to do or what rulers do in our name. The more all of this happens, the more power they gain and the more difficult any form of dissent becomes.”
¹⁷²

The phone rings. I answer. It’s a friend. She asks, “How much longer do you think we’re going to be in Afghanistan?”

She can’t see this, but I look around, look outside at the redwood trees. I respond, “We’re in Afghanistan? I thought we were in northern California.”

Silence on the phone. A sigh, and finally she says, “How much longer do you think
our troops
are going to be in Afghanistan?”

I say, “I’ve got troops? Really? Will they do whatever I tell them? If I tell them to take out the dams on the Columbia River will they do that?”

More silence, until she says, “This is why I only call you every few weeks. I’ll be in touch.”

We are no longer children. It is dangerous to us and to others to maintain the illusion that we are responsible for the destruction, an illusion that may have been appropriate when we were powerless. But we are not.

I remember the decision I made in my mid-twenties to pursue my life as a writer. I was scared to do this. I did not have sufficient self-confidence, I thought, to follow my dreams. I traced this lack of confidence to the abuse I’d suffered as a child. Part of my father’s
modus operandi
—and I recognized this while very young—was that any time any one of us children (or our mother) revealed that something was important to us, one of three things would happen: he might use that thing as a form of payment for cooperation in his sexual abuse (I was interested in the Civil War as a child, and we took long trips to see battlefields, but at what cost?); he might use the promise of this thing to build up hopes so he could watch our faces as he dashed them; or he might simply destroy the thing itself in front of our eyes. I learned to not express my dreams.

I recognized in my mid-twenties that because of this abuse, I would have the best excuse in the entire world to not follow my dreams of becoming a writer. Who could blame me after what I’d been through? Mere emotional survival was triumph enough.

The choice quickly came to this: I could go the rest of my life with an airtight excuse for not doing what I wanted; or I could go the rest of my life doing what I wanted. It took me only a few months to decide which it would be.

As a consequence of the belief that violence done to us is our own fault—or sometimes more simply because we do not want to be violated—we often become self-policing. I write this on an airplane flying home from giving talks. A friend took me to the airport. As we pulled into the parking lot we saw a uniformed man whose job it is, evidently, to search every car that enters.

I said, “I can’t believe this.”

“Do you want to not go in?”

I thought of the words I’d been told years before by a police officer when I’d commented that drivers licenses are in essence government “identity papers” we’re “asked” to produce at least as often as people were in those old black-and-white movies of resistance against Nazis. He didn’t appreciate my film reference, and told me, “If you don’t like it, don’t drive.”