A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [86]
Again I look over the tree—the aphids are gone, but the spiders and ladybugs remain, cleaning up after the party, as it were— and again I wonder if these dormant pupae feel, and if they dream, or if perhaps they sleep dreamlessly as one way of life passes and another takes its place.
Insatiability
"We need everything that's out there. We don't log to a ten-inch top or an eight-inch top or a six-inch top. We log to infinity. Because we need it all. It's ours. It's out there, and we need it all. Now." Harry Merlo Chief Executive Officer Louisiana Pacific
EVERY DAY NOW I hear heavy machinery as it comes closer to my home: the clank of treads, the rumble of diesel engines, and the scrape of steel blades on volcanic rocks. I don't know how much longer I can take it. I may soon flee, run down the path followed by so many before me—Indians and wolverines, buffalo and beavers, even my own ancestors, the indigenous of Europe: outcasts and refugees, each and every one. The dispossessed.
I don't know how much longer we can keep running. For the indigenous of Europe, there was always north, and east, directions they could go to try to maintain their way of living for another generation before falling to a people bent on subduing the planet and all its members. No matter that my ancestors' flight pushed them into the homes of others, disrupting and making refugees of community after community as each tried to avoid their inevitable extermination. For the first Americans to be contacted by Europeans, in the Caribbean, there were other islands to which they could escape, and for those met later there was always west. Never mind, again, that one dislocation leads to another, and an expanding wave of refugees thus always precedes the march of our culture. At least back then there was someplace to go.
Where can we go from here? There is nowhere left to hide. And where we do try to hide, there we will always be found. Found also will be excuses to continue to pick away at whatever autonomy and integrity—ecological and otherwise—remains, to grind away until we've nowhere and nothing left.
As if we need another example, we can find one without looking so far as the now-melting icecap in Antarctica, or the plummeting populations of krill and penguin, nor toward the other pole, where transnational oil companies melt the tundra and destroy caribou calving grounds to extract oil and make a buck. I can open my window, or simply listen with window still closed to hear the encroachment of bulldozers: the sound of money being made. Or to choose one more absurd and wasteful example among too many—one or more for every place and person and creature on earth—I can look at Mount Graham in Arizona.
For years the San Carlos Apaches have been staving off attempts by members of the dominant culture to build a huge astronomical observatory on one of their most sacred sites, Mount Graham. The mountain is also home to the gravely endangered Mount Graham red squirrel. Leading the fight to defend this mountain is an organization called, appropriately enough, the "Apache Survival Coalition." Leading the fight to build the observatory are the University of Arizona, the Max Planck Institute, and the Vatican, the unholy trinity of academia, science, and Christianity, supported by the full power of the state.
The land originally belonged to the San Carlos Apaches, or rather they belonged to it. The San Carlos Apaches buried their dead there. They prayed there. They communed there with Ga'an, or spirits who also call this mountain home. The mountain is central to their moral and physical universe, which cannot be separated.
The land was not lost through immediate conquest: the Indians retained it when Congress