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By Root 1218 0

of the modern economy's web but also its destructiveness. Our meal was tied inescapably to pernicious activities across the globe: Tyson Food's monopoly and "virulently antiunion" attitudes, the unspeakable cruelty and debasement of factory farming, and water pollution in Arkansas; loss of topsoil and the depletion of the Oglala aquifer in Nebraska and Kansas; the indescribable immiseration and debasement of labor exploitation in Mexico; air pollution in Japan; toxic mining wastes in Australia, South Africa, and Jamaica; chemical pollution from refineries in four states, and degradation from oil exploration and extraction in four countries; soil toxification, the poisoning of groundwater, more labor exploitation, and the poisoning of agricultural workers in Mexico; air, water, and ground pollution in the United States and Canada, and so on. The food, the cruelty, the pollution, the exploitation, the debasement—all are tied together in this convoluted web that is the modern economy.

The point is not to confess George's and my own particular hypocrisy, nor to explicitly condemn Tyson, PACCAR, or Freeport McMoRan, although Freeport McMoRan is the single most polluting company in the United States, but instead to point out the interconnectedness of the modern economy and the ubiquity of the destruction it causes. The same exercise could be performed for the clothes we wear (sweat shops in Burma's military dictatorship, cotton pesticides, polypropylene petrochemicals), the houses we live in (formaldehyde in plywood, deforestation, extinction of fish and wildlife), other consumer products (40,000 American workers killed on the job each year), or any other activity that vibrates the strings of the web.

If our emphasis on production requires that resources be funneled toward producers, which seems self-evident; if the funneling of resources toward the already wealthy is a characteristic of a culture in which, as Ruth Benedict observed, "the advantage of one individual becomes a victory over another, and the majority who are not victorious must shift as they can"; if this funneling is also a cause of widespread inequality and insecurity, then it makes sense that our hyper-emphasis on production leads to hyper-militarism. The rich have to protect what they've got, and take what they don't. This is precisely what I observed in myself when I wanted to destroy the chicken-killing coyotes. An emphasis on production requires an emphasis on private ownership requires a means to protect this ownership requires, in the end, murder.

You may say it's crazy to suggest that hot showers are predicated on dams, nuclear power plants, hydrogen bombs, and napalm. I'd say it's even crazier to think we've built these things if they aren't necessary for hot showers.

Although it seems clear to me that the two are linked—that is, hot showers, computers, vaccinations, major league baseball games, and compact disks of Mozart on one hand are tied inextricably to global warming, evolutionary meltdown, ubiquitous genocide, institutionalized cruelty to nonhumans, immiseration of the majority ("who must shift as they can"), high rates of incarceration, and NASA space probes on the other (not to mention the designated hitter rule)—it doesn't really matter whether they are or not. Pretend for a moment that they are. Are you going to argue that compact disks are worth genocide? Or to take a "more difficult" dilemma, are you going to suggest that the wonders of modern medicine (available to the few) are worth the immiseration of the majority? To state these trade-offs are fair, as Grey Reynolds seemed to be suggesting, would immediately show that one is not fit to be a member of a functioning community. It would suggest that one has become deafened to the sufferings of others, and to one's own conscience.

Now pretend that they are not linked. We can have hot showers and email and a computer that plays chess without having any of the negative characteristics of our culture. This leads immediately to an even more difficult question: in that case, why the hell