A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [176]
They ask not only about salmon, but also about forests, bears, fisher, marten, lynx, cutthroat trout, bull trout, sturgeons. They ask about them all. And there is nothing I can do except hand them my book, and say I'm sorry.
I sometimes wonder if the other creatures on the planet are doing what they can to shut down the machine. Perhaps salmon are leaving not just because of dams, and not just because they do not like our unwillingness to participate in reciprocal relationships, and not just because we make life intolerable for all others, but also to deprive us of calories; perhaps they are willing to give away their existence in order to stop civilization. Perhaps trees sometimes refuse to grow on clearcuts because they do not want to give their bodies to be used to enrich those in power. Perhaps Eskimo curlews—whose appetite for grasshoppers was legendary—left the planet so we would poison ourselves with pesticides. Perhaps the planet as a whole is now pushing us along in our own headlong rush to self-extinguishment, so that whatever creatures remain behind can at last and again breathe easily. Or perhaps the salmon and the trees are not acting merely physically but also symbolically, and perhaps then it becomes our task to ask them clearly and carefully what it is they are saying through their own deaths, what it is that they are dying to tell us. It becomes our task after that to listen to their stories, and to act upon what they have to say.
Here is another thought: perhaps the others—the extirpated salmon, the disappearing frogs—have not gone away forever. Perhaps they have only gone into hiding, and will return after civilization collapses, once we learn, or remember, how to behave. When we are ready to receive them, and to give ourselves up to them in relationship as all along they have given themselves up to us and to each other, they will return. Only then.
At that point we will again see herds of bison stretching from horizon to horizon, the huge creatures eating grasses taller than a human. We'll see flocks of passenger pigeons that stretch also to every horizon, and that take days to pass overhead. Then, too, we'll see so many Eskimo curlews that we could not count them if we lived a thousand years. Salmon will keep us awake at night with the slapping of their tails against the water, and we will have plenty to eat. We need only dip a basket weighted with a stone in order to catch a fish for dinner, in fact enough fish to feed the whole village.
And at night, we will talk to each other, and talk to the moon, who looks down not quite so sadly, and we will talk to wolves, and to bears and to porcupines and weasels. And they will talk to us. Children will paint the faces of wolf pups. Perhaps women and children will not need to dread the night. Women may walk alone with no fear of rape—rape? I do not know that word—and children will sleep soundly with no worry of nightly visits from their fathers. Fathers and mothers will look at their children and say, "It was not always this way," and the children will listen, puzzled.
Stars, too, will speak, and will no longer find themselves the holders of memories too painful to be held by children, but will hold other memories, and other conversations, of celebration, of the changing of the seasons, of growing old or perhaps dying young but in any case living within the larger community of existence.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps the salmon really are gone. Perhaps extinction really is forever, and when at long last we do awaken from our nightmare