We're at the point at which even if the alleged
"dream" of beauty contestants everywhere, "World Peace," were
to come tomorrow, to the Mideast, to Chechnya, to India-Pakistan, everywhere,
we'd still be doomed.
We're running out of the oil, the drug that's killing us,
but we've made no real plans for a survivable "detox." As with
everything else, we try not to think about our dwindling supply, or we tell
ourselves that "they" (you know, "them," the ones who
addicted us in the first place) will come up with a cleaner, safter drug, a
"renewable" fix that will keep us high forever.
Twenty-five years ago, when it still might have been
possible to save ourselves, I remember reading and hearing of damage already
done to the planet by "climate change" and "global
warming." But the government, "ours" and others -- it's all one
corporate shell game -- needed more "hard facts" and
"scientific" proof.
On the level of plain experience, which the religion of
science considers something along the level of blasphemy, I remember seasons,
according to the sports I played. "Spring Training" for Baseball
began in the high school Gymnasium in February before it moved outside in March
and the season began in April, ending in June. Football training began without
equipment in August, then went into full-contact practice with equipment in
early-mid September, before the season started in late September, lasting until
early December, when it became too cold to play. Now, though I don't play
sports, "November --cold, rainy -- begins in early October and lasts until
late June, when it becomes "August" -- hot, humid --until
mid-September and "November" begins again. Though this is my
"unscientific" personal experience, several years of record-breaking
heat and outrageous storms provide the essential statistics to back me up.
Conversation, among those not completely decorticated by
Mainstream Media (a.ka., Corporate Meida), and sometimes even within Mainstream
Media, when the weatherman isn't smilingly telling us we're facing a week of
100-degree weather, stay indoors (and burn more fuel), centers around the
weather. The old adage, "we can't do anything about the weather" has
become "what will the weather do to us?" What will "they"
do to fix this mess? Solar power? Wind power? Water power? Recycling? Beam us
to another planet? Given that "they" got us into this mess and let us
stew in it for as long as "they" could rake in profits before the jig
was up, I doubt "they" will do anything, even if they had the power
to do so.
Meanwhile, the talk and the long silences have become more
pessimistic. A) "Well, most species only last about 150,000 years, and our
number's just about up," or, B) "We've made a mess of things
anyway; maybe the planet will be better off without us," or, C) "It
might not happen for another century or so; might as well enjoy life while we
can, one day at a time."
Before I read Derrick Jensen's "End Game," I was a
"type A" pessimist. I believed humanity had had its "run,"
now Atlas would "shrug" in a way Ayn Rand never dared imagine, and in
a few thousand, maybe even a few hundred years life would begin anew. But
having read "End Game," I realize it's not "humanity"
that's the problem, merely "civilization," which unfortunately, in
its brief 6,000 years (humanity's been around for about 150,000 years), managed
to usurp the cultures and traditions and land bases of nearly all of humanity. Before
"civilization" (which includes any society living beyond its means,
or "land base," as Jensen defines it, East and West, from China to
Sumer to Egypt, Rome, Britain and the perhaps the most murderous, most wasteful
civilization ever to have existed, the United States) and even during, even
now, primitive cultures have lived on the same land base, followed the same
culture and traditions for thousands of years and would have continued had not
civilization, specifically European civilization, violently colonized the
planet over the past 500 years.
If we look at the United States alone, which currently
consumes more oil (50 percent going to its corporate/military structure) than
the next four largest oil consumers combined, much of it going to the military
so it can invade countries like Iraq and procure more oil, Jensen's desire to
bring down "civilization" by "any means necessary" is not
merely the most radical idea to come down the pike in years, it's the most
sensible.
"Civilization begins with repression at home and
conquest abroad," wrote Stanley Diamond, in his 1974 classic, "In
Search of the Primitive." From its inception in the early 1600s to this
day, the "colonies," later to become the United States in 1789,
completed the most successful genocide in history, wiping out nearly every one
of the millions of natives of various tribes, language groups and cultures, who
lived here for at least 10,000 years, possibly more. As slavery exists in
civilization almost by definition -- someone's gotta do the work for the ruling
classes -- America imported tens of millions of Africans -- that is, kidnapped
and enslaved tens of millions of human beings -- to work its mostly Southern
plantations until at last the Northern factory based economy, which realized it
could make more on wage-slavery in factories (paying workers barely subsistence
wages, then tossing them aside, rather than "caring for" slaves from
birth to death) won a bloody civil war and the modern corporate U.S. was set in
place.
Jensen uses the "metaphor" of rape, specifically,
family abuse or other abuse by someone who is supposed to be taking care of the
person/place/creature bearing the brunt of abuse.
In this case it is the land, specifically, and the human
population, but only because those are the only populations left to abuse. For
thousands of years humans lived in harmony with other animals -- sounds strange
to say that, "other animals" as if we are not and never were animals,
trees, on land and in the sea.
But in order to make his case, as if we needed further
convincing, Jensen forces us to take a deep, long look at
"civilization," not just America or China, or Capitalism or
Communism, but all that has developed over the past 6,000 years. His
conclusion, as will be the conclusion of anyone who reads this seminal volume,
is that we are insane.
It's not that we won't get fooled again, it's that we can't --
well some of us; most of us, it seems, can go on getting fooled for as long as
the new boss remains the same as the old boss -- but really we're running out
of time. This widespread feeling of madness, nervous madness (not to mention
our aggressive actions at home and abroad), is almost in keeping with the
energy level promulgated by the sitcoms, "reality shows" and
"Mainstream News," so it seems like the same old same old. But when
we look under the hood for even a second, when we spend an hour reading an
"alternative" web site instead of the New York Times, or actually
talking about why the weather is not the same as it was 20 years ago instead of
joking about it -- ha ha, ho, ho -- it all becomes too clear. It is then that
we realize that even though magazine, like the alternative websites "those
in the know" read, tell us "the truth" as compared to the
corporate media's lies, and we ourselves write angry articles against the
insanity and violence being perpetrated by a very few people against the
powerless many other living beings -- yes, it's time to fess up: animals feel
pain; hence, I.B. Singer's statement that industrial agriculture is a
"Treblinka for animals" is not far off the mark; and plants are alive
and form complex relationships with other living systems, and when we kill a
bunch of them or cause an entire species to go instinct, we're bringing
terrible "karma" upon ourselves by destroying the ecological balance
of life that the awesomely beautiful, complex universe (way more powerful than
any puny anthropocentric "god," including Bono, civilization has come
up with) set in place -- a forever changing place -- many years before
"we" evolved.
But we can't help fooling ourselves, or asking to be fooled
by our "leaders" because it's so damn easy, so much easier than
facing the horrible reality that 90 percent* of the life on this once thriving
planet is dead already, and if we don't act, fast, the rest will be gone in a
heart-beat -- a few years, decades, does it even matter if we have the luxury
of centuries? Do you think THAT would get us up off our asses. No. Iraq didn't.
Palestine isn't. Iran, Syria, North Korea, New York, Chicago, LA, and whoever
else after that, won't. And even if it were just "us," a bunch of
wasted slaves and media junkies -- junkies: those people we love to hate and
blame for growing up in a culture run on addiction and advertiser's ability to
take advantage of it; those people who instead of helping, we put in jail for
"breaking the law" even as we scarf down our narcotizing pain-killers
and sedatives, even as we grow addicted and increase our dosage month after
month year after year -- it's okay, the doctor said so! -- and take down the
name and website of the latest drug advertised on TV, while we scream murderous
approval at the same television screen when our favorite lobbyist-turned-senator
calls for the new "three strikes and you're dead" law.
We're so insane, unreasonable, violent, addicted and full of
terror that just to list a fraction of the contradictions in our thinking,
the discrepancies between what "we" say and what "we" do
would turn this article into a book. So I'll just list a few important ones and
move one.
Before Columbus -- who has a holiday named after him --
landed in 1492, over 100 million natives lived in North, Central and South
America, spanning thousands of cultures, languages, tribes, and ways of living
(I was going to say "lifestyles" but that word has been so tainted by
corporate media as to be rendered worse than meaningless, it's offensive, which
was probably the point all along) -- now there are a few million, if that. True,
the blood of Sioux, Pequot, Inca, Aztec, Algonquin etc. runs in tens of
millions of veins today, but blood without culture is meaningless, important
only to racists and "ethnic purists."
Once a language dies, a way of living or story-telling
(media: like CNN, Fox, Star Wars are the stories WE tell and pass on), a
history and set of myths shared by a distinctive group, that group dies as a
group, regardless of the number of "blood survivors." If all of the
Navajo survived, but did not look, act or behave like Navajo, did not even know
themselves that they were Navajo, we could say effectively that the Navajo did
not survive. In human societies, the existence of the codes, stories, language,
myths that identify them as societies are more important to the concept of
the society than the body count. Though it can work both ways. If we, the
civilized, could learn to live as the natives did, ecologically, in
communication with the land base, cultures would develop organically out of the
land-base, whatever it may be, and such cultures, like those of the natives or
primitives that developed out of the land and what it had to offer and what it
needed to receive in return, would be stable, healthy and enduring. Like the
rivers, the trees, the animal life, the vegetative life, human life, held
together by its culture, could last as long as any other natural facet of the
land base. River. Trees. Mountains. Deer. Humans.
"End Game" is a book of hope, not despair; the
best such book I've seen since Mumford's "Myth of the Machine" in the
early 70s pointed the problem is not "humanity," but
"civilization." If we look at what is now North America in 1491, we
see thousands of tribal units and culture/language groups living of what Jensen
refers to as the "land base," that is, the bounty of Nature. These
people lived the same way for at least 10,000 years in more or less the same
place -- the place we managed to almost totally trash in a few hundred years,
particularly the past 150.
Jensen is not merely a writer, but an activist. Once the
problem is identified, and he identifies the problem in abundance in "End
Game," hundreds of footnotes and references for the "scientifically
skeptical," it must be solved. While I refer to "End Game" as an
"optimistic" book because it doesn't hold on to the "humanity is
finished" view held by many, nor rely on false "solutions" such
as solar energy and recycling that use more energy than they produce, he is
dead set on destroying civilization, specifically its technology, as soon as
possible. Civilization has destroyed 90 percent of the life on this planet;
Jensen believes it must be stopped so that, when the inevitable crisis comes
via peak oil, global warming, overpopulation, unequal distribution of food and
resources or any of the other hallmarks of civilization, those who are left
will have something to live on.
This is not a happy ending for those alive right now, or
even for their children. The population will shrink to a sustainable number:
millions, perhaps billions will die. It will take several generations for
survivors to "unlearn" civilization and return to the primitive life
that is sustainable for humans and other beings. One doesn't hear or read much
about non-human life-forms, but in "End Game" they are integral to a
thriving land-base, a true "state of nature" in which humans, plants
and animals mutually thrive. A state much like the ones we exterminated in
Africa and the Americas over the past 500 years.
So committed to this view is Jensen that his "main
goal" throughout the book is to destroy dams in order to save salmon. These
are not "metaphorical salmon" representing all life-forms endangered
by our "way of life," especially our own, but actual salmon. They are
a source of life and sustenance to countless animals, forest and river life,
and natives who have lived off the bounty of their runs since time immemorial;
therefore, Jensen is willing to fight, to give his life, if necessary, to save
the salmon in his area and throughout the country from dams and other
corporate/government abuses.
His message in "End Game" is to "find your
salmon," the life form or source that is most important to you, and fight
for it with everything you have.
Civilization, as we know it, is on its way to extinction. The
signs are too apparent for the corporate media to hide any longer. Global
warming, peak oil, these are realities that will reach a critical point, if
they have not done so already, of no return. Once this critical point is
reached, life won't be fun for the majority of us -- it's already hell for the
majority of humans and animals -- or our children, or perhaps even our
children's children. But if we can save what's left, what hasn't yet been
destroyed by civilization's madness, its abusive relationship to the planet -- Jensen
uses the metaphor relation to great effect throughout "End Game" -- there
will be generations who will again know Paradise and the bounty of Nature, the
majority not minority of whom will again love live and its seasons.
Adam
Engel can be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net.