A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [45]
Trust experience. Descartes' inversion of what is to be believed makes no sense to me, not to any of my senses. Thought divorced from experience is nonsense. I know from my own childhood this divorce can be essential to survival, but paradoxically, it is this same divorce on the part of perpetrators that gives rise to these awful claims to virtue.
I was not at Auschwitz. I wasn't there for the first clearcut, or the second, or the thousandth. I can read about death camps, and I can read about the forest that was turned into this book, but if the story is to mean anything to me, if it is to change my life, it must lead back to my own experience. And it does. From a rocky knoll not far from my home, the knoll where the coyotes came to remind me of our deal, I can see clearcuts white on green on a snowy winters day. Entering the region's forests I am sure to encounter more stumps, slash piles, and dead hillsides than trees ancient enough to scream as they go down. There's a place I know near Spokane—by no means unique—where clearcuts wrap around a mountain, drop into a valley, climb a nearby ridge, and cut a swath deep into the next watershed. Recently I walked those clearcuts, past whitened slash piles of wood cut a dozen years ago and past the green limbs of this year's cut, and in ten consecutive miles I never once came within twenty yards of a live tree.
Do not, however, for a moment believe me. I could be conjuring this clearcut as easily as Gilgamish conjured his claim to virtue. Go look for yourself. Listen to the wind pick up soil that has baked and crumbled. Listen to distant trees speak as they sway, and listen, finally, if you can hear them above the whine of the chainsaws, to their screams as they are felled.
The relationship between Judeo-Christianity and exploitation is not so straightforward as I may have made it seem. It would not have been enough for the religions founders to have simply made up a God and, as with a hand puppet, put words into the Deity's mouth. To become deaf to the clamoring of one's conscience and to the pleas of victims requires more than fabrication: it requires a belief stronger than experience, unshakable by the spilling of blood.
This doesn't mean that those who exploit don't consciously fabricate or lie, for they clearly do. Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.
In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Hitlers justification was that Polish troops had already attacked. This was a simple and conscious lie. Beneath and behind this lie, pushing it into action, was the notion that in order to fulfill its destiny the Aryan "race" needed room to expand. I don't know to what degree Hitler believed this; already we are sliding out of the realm of the conscious lie and into the realm of semiconscious justification for unspoken (and often unspeakable) urges. Pursuing this further we find the belief that Aryans were superior to Poles or other Eastern Europeans, and so more deserving of land. Beneath this belief there were undoubtedly others equally absurd, nesting like so many Russian dolls.
Another example: The United States Forest Service regularly uses the presence of armilleria root rot as an excuse to cut trees. This is often a conscious lie: examination by plant pathologists routinely reveals armilleria at or beneath endemic levels. In any case, armilleria is a secondary pathogen, which means disturbances, such as cutting trees, actually increase its prevalence in the remaining roots. So the conscious lie becomes self-fulfilling, and the rot becomes pandemic. And then comes another lie, the only way to improve the health of the forest is to cut it down. Beneath all of these lies is the notion that we can manage the landscape without destroying it. And underneath this? The God-given mandate, the evolutionarily-ordained duty, the economic policy, all driven by the notion that we are not normal citizens of this planet, that instead we are the most important creatures— really