Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [122]
Flattering, isn’t it?
It’s not only Christians who believe the world was made for civilized humans.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE NINE. Each year Shell Oil corporation and the magazine The Economist hold an “international writing competition to encourage future thinking.” The banner headline screams: “YOU WRITE A 2,000 WORD ESSAY. WE WRITE A $20,000 CHEQUE.”
This year’s topic: “Do we need nature?”
Remember the first rule of propaganda: if you can slide your assumptions by people, you’ve got them. Another way to say that—and every good lawyer knows this—is the person who controls the questions controls the answers. How would essays written in response be different if instead The Economist/Shell had asked one of the following: Does nature need us? Does nature need Shell Oil? Do humans need Shell Oil? Does nature need oil extraction? Do humans need oil extraction? Does nature need industrial civilization? Do humans need industrial civilization? Can nature survive industrial civilization? Can humans survive industrial civilization? What can we each do to best serve our landbases? Who is the we in The Economist’s/Shell’s question?
Regarding this essay, here’s probably the most important question of all: if our answers do not jibe with the financial/propaganda interests of Shell Oil and The Economist, do you think they’ll still hand us a cheque for $20,000?
Just in case we’ve forgotten who precisely is cutting the cheque, the sponsors provide several questions to lead us on our (or rather their) way. Their first question is: “How much biodiversity is necessary?” This is an insane question, because it does not take physical reality (in this case biodiversity) as a given, but places it secondary to their mental constructs (in this case different people’s opinions of “how much is necessary”). More sane questions, that is, questions more in touch with physical reality, would be “How much oil extraction, if any, is necessary? How many corporations, if any, are necessary? How can we help the landbase, on its own terms?”
The question is also insanely arrogant, because it presumes that we know better than the landbase how much biodiversity it needs. If you want to know how much biodiversity is necessary, don’t ask me or any other human. Ask the land. And then wait a hundred generations, and your descendants will know the answer for that particular place where they have lived all this time.
And of course their question fails to ask, “How much biodiversity is necessary for what?”
Another of their questions: “Sustainable development sounds so natural and desirable that no one could possibly disagree with it. Yet technological advance makes today’s definition of what is sustainable or unsustainable quickly obsolete. How can a concept purporting to look to the long term have any real meaning if technology keeps changing the parameters in the short and medium term?”
Once again, we must watch for insane premises leading to meaningless questions. What is their second sentence actually saying? What are its assumptions? A central assumption is that technological change is primary—the independent variable—and definitions of sustainability are secondary, dependent on technological change. Yet I fail to see how technological changes alter the definition of what is sustainable: an activity is sustainable if it does not damage the capacity of the landbase to support its members. Technology does not affect the “parameters” of sustainability or its definitions in the short, medium, or long term. Technologies can hinder—or, depending on one’s definition of technology , help218—one’s ability to live in a place over a long time, but they do not affect what the term means. Of course living in place for a long time