• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2426 0

torture. A Department of Justice memo defined torture only as the intentional infliction of pain associated with “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” The President of the United States has insisted that the United States does not torture. In the process of not torturing, U.S. agents and their allies cuff prisoners’ hands behind their backs, suspend them by these cuffs, and beat them with iron rods. They effectively liquefy their kneecaps. They force them to stand naked in freezing cells and douse them with water. They drown them time and again in a process used frequently enough to have a name: waterboarding, where “the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”190 They smother them to death inside of sleeping bags. They and their allies use electric drills to bore into their kneecaps, shoulders, skulls.

I wonder how the authors of that memo would define torture if they were not defining it in the abstract, if Premise Four did not reign supreme in this culture, if they knew that they and those they love could possibly receive the treatment they so blithely order.

When are we going to acknowledge that those in power will scruple at nothing—have already scrupled at nothing—to increase their power? There is no limit to their obsession to control. This won’t change because we ask nicely. It won’t change because we live peaceably (just ask the indigenous).

What are you going to do about it?

For years now I’ve been talking about blowing up dams to help salmon, but suddenly today I realized I’ve been all wrong.

This understanding came as I read a description of attempts by ancient Egyptians to dam the Nile, and the Nile’s resistance to these attempts. It was all a pretty straightforward process. The Egyptians would erect a dam, and the river would shrug it off, probably with as little effort as a horse quivering the skin of its shoulder to get rid of a fly.

By now, however, the concrete straitjackets have become massive enough that rivers have a harder time sloughing them off, the equivalent, to extend the above simile, to encasing a horse in concrete, then leaving holes at the head and tail to allow food and water to pass. The rivers need our help. (I first wrote “They may need our help,” but, even without my asking, a couple of rivers strongly requested I remove the qualifier.) They can’t do it themselves, at least in the short or medium run.

I’ve always wanted to blow up dams in order to save salmon, sturgeon, and other creatures whose lives depend on wild and living rivers. But that’s not right. We need to blow up dams for the rivers themselves, so they can again be the rivers they once were forever, the rivers they still want to be, the rivers they themselves are struggling and fighting to once again become.

Liberating rivers, blowing up dams. The difference may seem semantic to you—like liberating versus invading Iraq, like “creating temporary meadows” versus clearcutting—but it doesn’t to me, for a number of reasons.

The first, and probably most important, has to do with everything I’ve been talking about in this book. Rhetoric aside, both invading Iraq and clearcutting are motivated by the culture’s obsession to control and exploit. The primary reason is to gain, maintain, and use resources—oil in the first case (as well as to provide a staging area for further invasions), trees in the second. Further, both invading and clearcutting damage landscapes, damage our habitat. They further enchain the natural world.

The primary motivation for liberating a river, on the other hand, isn’t selfish, except insofar as it benefits oneself to live in an intact, functioning natural community (duh!), and insofar as doing good feels good.

This all leads to probably the most important question of this book so far: with whom or what do you primarily