A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [110]
Last week I read in the newspaper that the largest white pine in Idaho is dying. Nearly four hundred years old, its time has come, and beetles have arrived to finish it off. The tree stands on Forest Service ground, and the district forester does not want to allow the beetles, nor the tree, their way. Of course he's not talking about saving the tree's life; he wants to cut it down, pulp it, and turn the stump into a display. The reporter noted that despite the size of the tree, it may very well take more paper to justify implementation of the forester's plan than the tree would provide as pulp. A citizen has penned on the marker in front of the old one: "This tree is dying, too bad they cut all the rest." The tree shall not stand alone for long.
Last week I also read, in a different newspaper, that the Forest Service has begun injecting heart rot fungus into healthy trees in order to kill them. Here is the rationale: Logging has damaged forests. In order to justify continued deforestation, the Forest Service and timber industry fabricated the previously mentioned claim to virtue that additional logging is needed to repair the logging-induced damage. Thus, as I alluded to before, dead trees, dying trees, and trees that may someday die—this definition has been intentionally created to encompass all trees—must be cut so that they do not someday become sick. Now, evidently, at least some National Forests are beginning to suffer a shortage of dead, standing trees. Because in a healthy, functioning forest, dead trees remain for decades or centuries to house and feed other members of the community, those other members are suffering. The solution proposed by the Forest Service is of course not to stop cutting trees, which would mean an end, or at least a slowing, of deforestation, but instead to kill more trees. To inject poison into their hearts. Presumably once enough trees have been injected, the Forest Service will declare another forest health crisis and cut down all merchantable timber within a few-mile radius. The only way I can make sense of all this is to invoke our culture's belief in Armageddon—and its associated death urge.
Yet another example. On October 13, 1997, Columbus Day plus one, NASA launched the Cassini Space Probe. The ostensible purpose was to explore Saturn. We could discuss the arrogance, stupidity, and inhumanity of spending $3.4 billion to explore another planet while $285 million would save the lives of 2.5 million children annually on the planet we already occupy. But the death urge is made even more clear by another factor. Because Cassini's propulsion source didn't have the power to send it straight to Saturn, NASA sent it first to Venus, and then, after two swings around that planet, the probe returned home, approaching within 312 miles of Earth's surface. It used the acceleration caused by our gravity to slingshot the probe out to Saturn. Here's the danger: in order to power its instruments, the probe contains 72.3 pounds of plutonium, mainly plutonium-238, which is about two hundred times more deadly than plutonium-239. Seventy-two and three-tenths pounds of plutonium is al most thirty-three thousand grams, or almost thirty-three million milligrams, or almost thirty-three billion micrograms, or almost thirty-three trillion nanograms.
There are two ways the plutonium could have been delivered to human victims. The first is that the Titan IV rocket carrying the probe could have exploded on launch. NASA estimated the danger of this at one in four hundred and fifty-six, which is bad enough, considering the consequences, but the truth is that a Titan IV rocket has already exploded. Nongovernmental estimates of failure were "between one in ten and one in twenty."
The other way the plutonium could have killed people would have been if on the flyby the probe suffered what NASA scientists dryly called "an inadvertent reentry." If NASA calculations would have been imprecise