A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [42]
It's not unheard of for old trees—big pines, firs, and cedars a thousand years old—to scream audibly when they're cut down. I've heard from loggers that the screams are disturbing at first, but as with anything else, you get used to it.
We've had a long time to get used to the screams. Just as our civilizations expansion is marked by a widening circle of genocide, so too forests and all of their inhabitants precede us. Deserts dog our heels.
The need to deforest started in what used to be the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, Mesopotamia. The land was fecund, as land so often is before we get our hands on it. Cedar forests stretched so far that no one knew their true size, and sunlight never penetrated far enough to touch the humus that has long since baked, crumbled, and blown away. Forty-seven hundred years ago Gilgamish, ruler of Uruk, a city near the Euphrates River, decided to make a name for himself by building a great city. Armed with "mighty adzes," and more importantly with a justification—the promise of "a name that endures"—that would allow him and his cronies to deafen themselves to "the sad song of the cedars" as they cut them down, Gilgamish entered the forest, briefly reflected on its beauty, vanquished its protector, and took what he needed.
There goes the neighborhood! It's not unlike the times my father found fault with one of us—he was right, end of conversation. So too the transformation of wild nature to usable resource marked the end of our conversation with wild nature. The rest has been a steady journey to an all-too-familiar destination, one devoid of life.
The story of this journey is as monotonous in its own terrible way as the story of our cultures genocidal practices, which is not surprising, considering, as we shall eventually see, that they spring from the same hollow impulses. Soon after Gilgamish was history (i.e., dead), the ruler Gudea of the nearby city of Lagash took up the mantle, and built his own city, cutting trees to build temples, and once again, to build a name. Name after name rulers are recorded, building up like silt in streams from the eroded hillsides they left in their paths. And nations, too, rise with the fall of forests and fall when they are gone. Troy, Greece, Lebanon, Rome, Sicily, the trees were cut for the greater good, for ships, for commerce, for this reason or that. Always a reason, always deforestation. France, Germany, Britain, the United States, a sandy thread of dead and dying forests that leads to South America, Siberia, Southeast Asia, and now back to my own home, where the last of the American forests fall.
It is not possible to commit deforestation, or any other mass atrocity—mass murder, genocide, mass rape, the pervasive abuse of women or children, institutionalized animal abuse, imprisonment, wage slavery, systematic impoverishment, ecocide— without first convincing yourself and others that what you're doing is beneficial. You must have, as Dr. Robert Jay Lifton has put it, a "claim to virtue." You must be convinced—as the Nazis were convinced that the elimination of the Jews would allow the Aryan "race" to thrive; as the founders of Judeo-Christianity were convinced their misogynist laws were handed down not from their own collective unconscious but from the God they could not admit they created; as my father was convinced he was not beating his son but teaching him diligence, respect, or even spelling; as politicians, scientists, and business leaders today are convinced they're not destroying life on earth but "developing natural resources"—that you are performing a service for humankind.
Forests have fallen as surely to these claims to virtue as they have to axes, saws, and fellerbunchers. By looking at the successive claims used to rationalize the deforestation of this continent, perhaps we can begin to see not only the transparent stupidity of them but further still to the motives that underlie the destruction.
Early European accounts of this