A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [172]
It is spring. Deep within a pocket of remaining old growth the seed of a douglas fir germinates. A tiny root reaches its tip toward the fresh fecal pellet of a deer mouse. The night before, the mouse ate truffles, and so the pellet contains a half-million truffle spores that passed intact through the mouses digestive system. Because the pellet is fresh, the root tip penetrates easily, and comes in contact with the spores and also a yeast extract that is food for nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The yeast stimulates the spores to germinate, and they grow into and around the tip of the root, and grow also to envelope the nitrogen-fixing bacteria and yeast. The bacteria feeds off both fungus and yeast, and in turn fixes nitrogen crucial to both fungus and tree. The truffle continues to expand, and forms a mantle around the tree's feeder root: the association is called mycorrhiza, which literally means "fungus-root." The tree provides simple sugars and metabolites without which the fungus cannot live. The fungus provides minerals, nutrients, nitrogen, and water without which the tree would die. The fungus also grows new truffles to feed new deer mice, and the whole symphony begins again.
A termite uses its powerful jaws to chew wood. But it cannot digest this food. That task is accomplished by a protozoan that lives in its gut. There is, however, another problem: the protozoan requires more nitrogen than decaying wood provides. The solution? Bring another creature into the dance: nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Termites feed wood to the protozoa and bacteria, both of whom reside in its gut. The bacteria feed nitrogen to the protozoa, and the protozoa digest wood and nitrogen to feed acetic acid to the termite. Everyone's satisfied.
An ancient tree is ready to die. It is a lodgepole pine. After its death its body will be used by birds, squirrels, mice, termites, ants, bees, fungi as their home. It may take centuries to decay and become the soil it used to be. But it is not yet dead. For that it needs help. So it speaks. It emits an audible signal heard by a species of beetle that has been listening for just this sound. Hearing, the beetle comes. It kills the tree.
This is how the world works.
Last month, a handful of environmental activists walked into the office of Frank Riggs, a congressman from Eureka, California, who is deeply beholden to big timber corporations. The activists—young women, including two teenaged girls—dumped sawdust on the floor as a protest against Riggs' efforts to deforest the last of this continent's old growth redwoods, then handcuffed themselves in a circle around a stump they had also brought. Riggs' secretary called the police. When the police arrived, they sprayed pepper into the eyes of the handcuffed and helpless women from a range of less than three inches. Over the women's screams they then forced open their eyes and daubed a concentrated liquid form of this substance directly onto their eyeballs.
Remember that the women were already handcuffed. It would be comforting, as always, to believe these policemen were acting alone, or were somehow rogues. We would, as always, be wrong. The policemen videotaped themselves applying the pepper to show that they were correctly following official policy. A poll taken in Eureka two weeks later revealed that 86 percent of the residents believed it is appropriate for police to use pepper spray on nonviolent, nonresisting political and environmental protestors. Two weeks after that