Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [102]
I think we—at least those of us who consider genocide a bad thing—can safely say traditional indigenous people living traditional ways would be better off if civilization disappeared tomorrow. They’d have been far better off if it had disappeared a long time ago. They could easily survive—and would survive better—without it.
The rural poor would also survive better without civilization. With no one to dispossess them, to use their land for cash crops, they could return to the subsistence farming that has supported them for a very long time. Recall the quote by the member of the tupacamaristas: “We need to be able to grow and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so.” The rural poor of the world know how to keep themselves alive. They merely need to be allowed to do so.
It seems pretty clear to me also that the rural rich—including, on a global scale, most rural people in the United States—would survive pretty well, too. They’d lose a lot of luxuries, like strawberries in January and shrimp year round. But because, as I’ve said several times, access to land means access to food, clothing, and shelter, these people would probably do well. Their relative wealth in material possessions—owning a gun, for example—would at least somewhat counterbalance their ignorance of how to feed themselves.
None of this alters the fact that there are too many humans for the land to permanently support. And we haven’t yet begun to talk about cities.
The urban poor are in a much worse position than the rural poor. They obviously do not have access to land. In the long run, they would of course be far better off without civilization. The problem—and this is obviously a huge one—is that in the short run many of them would be dead: their food is funneled through the very system that immiserates them. Yet we need to remember that the continued existence of civilization and its extractive economies already guarantees the early deaths of many of them: these extractive economies are precisely how they became urban poor in the first place. I say this not to dismiss those deaths but to point out that we—or really, they—are in a double-bind of civilization’s making: if we break down the distribution systems that feed them, many would probably die, yet those distribution systems are parts of a larger megasystem that cannot last, and that is quickly depleting the earth’s capacity to support humans, a megasystem that already does these people great damage. This reveals the stupidity—and evil—of making people dependent on a system that exploits them, cutting off their direct connection to the real support for all life: the landbase.
But who cares about the poor, right? If they can’t adapt to civilization, fuck ’em, and if they can’t survive without it, fuck ’em twice. We want to know about the only humans who matter. What about the urban rich?
Well, I’m not too worried about them: they’re the ones who got us in this mess. They can fend for themselves. And if they can’t, fuck ’em.
There are a number of reasons why my analysis of whether the urban poor could survive without civilization is bullshit. The first is that anytime anyone makes a prediction, that person should expect to be wrong. I can no more predict the outcome of such a complex set of actions as the end of civilization—whatever that means—than I could have predicted the Tampa Bay Devil Rays would lose more than a hundred games in 2002. Well, okay, I might have been able to predict the latter.
I do not know