A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [37]
The resemblance between this behavior—a steadfast refusal to acknowledge physical reality—and my own denial as a child is frightening. I see myself at the kitchen table, bringing the spoon to my mouth with a mechanical precision that would have made Descartes proud. I see my father by my bed, a dark figure on a background nearly as dark, and in that one so-brief instant of awful recognition, I feel my consciousness slip away— This can not happen. This cannot happen to me —quickly, like running foot falls down a distant corridor, or like the last bit of water sucking down an open pipe. As my consciousness disappears, so, too— poof-—does my father. Poof, no more father, no more rape. Poof, no more clearcuts, no more lead, no more crash. Suddenly for all our claims to rationality, we are, each and every one of us, as much out of our minds as we are out of our bodies. Poof.
Just today a friend told me she used to date a man who hunted. She hated the fact that he killed.
"Do you eat meat?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied, "but I don't have to see them die." A moment's pause, and she added, "I can't believe I just said that." Another pause, and we both laughed.
Poof.
A few weeks ago I participated in a conference of about twenty- five environmentalists and small farmers. For three days we at tempted to name values we hold in common and in opposition to each other. The purpose was to begin a dialogue between these two beleaguered groups, which may lead to better working relationships as we both try to stop the destruction of family farms and farming communities by transnational agribusiness corporations.
One of our exercises was to pretend that the year was 2018, and that somehow our culture had undergone a revolution in values such that we were now living sustainably. We wrote what we believed sustainable communities and farms would look and feel and smell like, what technologies would be used, and so on.
I don't know whether it broke my heart more to perform the exercise or for the group to share the results. This was due in part to the fact that no mention was made, either in the setup of the exercise or in the answers, of the nearly insuperable physical difficulties we face—for example, the fact that those in power control guns, tanks, airplanes, biological and nuclear weapons, as well as all major media outlets, and have shown themselves time and again more than eager to use these various tools to destroy any perceived threat. Nor did anyone mention the probably unconscious and certainly irrational imperative that drives all of the destruction. My discomfort arose primarily because even when we spoke of technology, no one mentioned the crash. We spoke much of "appropriate" or "friendly" technologies, but we did not define either one, nor did we mention how or why people would implement these technologies. Finally, I could hold back no longer.
"Everyone here knows industrial civilization isn't sustainable. We all know that any technology that relies on the use of nonrenewables is by definition not sustainable. We also know that by definition, any technology or activity that damages any other community—human or nonhuman—isn't sustainable. Finally, everyone here knows that there's no way within the next twenty years we'll make a transition to a technologically sustainable culture. The best we can hope for is that we begin to throttle down our overblown technology, to bring ourselves to a soft landing instead of a full crash."
Everyone seemed to agree, and it came clear to me that while these thoughts had probably occurred to nearly everyone in the room, no one else had been willing to speak until someone broke the ice. Poof.
When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon