A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [127]
When thinking about the risk from Cassini, remember the missing suitcase bombs. Remember also the radioactive tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southern Washington: these tanks are leaking into the groundwater, and, soon enough, into the already-beleaguered Columbia River. They also explode with some regularity. No one even knows what's in many of them. Remember that in the 1950s the United States exposed citizens downwind of Hanford to intentional releases of radiation to see what would happen. Remember also that because of nuclear testing—the explosion of hundreds of nuclear bombs worldwide— plutonium residues have been found in the bodies of creatures from pole to pole. Remember also that between 1950 and 1998, the rate for women's breast cancer in this country has gone from one in fifty to one in eight.
I hate to say this, but Cassini is nothing out of the ordinary.
A Life of My Own
"The greatest virtue between heaven and earth is to live." 'The Great Treatise' of the I Ching
WISHING AWAY THE WAGE economy did not make it cease to exist, and my determination to stop selling my hours did not lessen my need for food, nor for a place to stay. In other words, despite my highfalutin philosophy, I still had to find a way to earn some cash.
I was fortunate. There's a world of difference between having the opportunity to take a well-paying job and walking away, and not having been granted that opportunity in the first place. There was a time not long after college when I was poor enough that I collected aluminum cans for money to buy food, but had things gotten really bad, I could simply have taken a job. Or I could have borrowed additional money from my mother (something I have done with too-great frequency). I wasn't going to starve. The same can't be said for the majority of people in the world.
During my parents' divorce, my father essentially got everything but the house. He kept the stock shares, condos in Jackson Hole, and fast food franchises, as well as the other toys and trappings of a truly (monetarily) wealthy person. But the house was valuable, and when after years of working jobs everywhere from race tracks to art galleries my mother sold it, she had enough so that probably she could survive to the end of her days without being forced to reenter the wage economy.
I approached with a plan. I loved working bees, and wanted to borrow enough to become a small-scale commercial beekeeper. That way I could work hard during the season, and use the offseason to read and think and write. She consented.
My time with bees was in some ways a disaster: they all died— twice. It wasn't my fault either time, but that doesn't lessen the sorrow of seeing so many millions of deaths, nor lessen the sense of failure.
It did not begin disastrously, only dishonestly. I bought three hundred hives from a man going out of business in Arkansas. At least that's what he initially told me, and presumably what he continued to tell the bank. His luck had been awful: he'd had eight hundred hives when he'd moved down from Oregon several years back, but he lost hundreds by this means and that. He placed several hundred in beautiful drop sites between rivers and irrigated fields of soybeans: no one told him that rivers in the South flood every winter, and when he went to visit his drops early that spring he found nothing but a few empty hive bodies high in the boughs of trees. Later that year he lost hundreds of stored bee boxes when a pile of oil-soaked rags spontaneously combusted, taking with them his honey house. The bank was after him for his remaining 150 hives, or to my extremely vague understanding, the 150 the loan officers knew about. All I know is that I bought 150 from the bank, and the same number from him. Those I bought from him were located in drops down labyrinthine roads I could not have retraced alone.
I took the bees to California, in many ways the promised land for beekeepers. The winters are warm, and there's nearly