Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [124]
It’s all insane. It’s precisely the sort of nonsense the CIA extolled in their torture handbook—sorry, human resource exploitation manual. If you babble long enough, you can break people, get them to go along with almost any program.
But we still have one more part of this question: “Is the line between artificial and natural itself artificial?” We’ve all heard this argument before, usually put forward by those who wish to further exploitation: humans are natural, therefore everything they create is natural. Chainsaws, nuclear bombs, capitalism, sex slavery, asphalt, cars, polluted streams, a devastated world, devastated psyches, all these are natural.
I have two responses to this. The first I explored already in The Culture of Make Believe, where I said, “This is, of course, nonsense. We are embedded in the natural world. We evolved as social creatures in this natural world. We require clean water to drink, or we die. We require clean air to breathe, or we die. We require food, or we die. We require love, affection, social contact in order to become our full selves. It is part of our evolutionary legacy as social creatures. Anything that helps us to understand all of this is natural: any ritual, artifact, process, action is natural to the degree that it reinforces our understanding of our embeddedness in the natural world, and any ritual, artifact, process, action is unnatural to the degree that it does not.”221
My second response to their question is: Who cares? I want to live in a world that has wild salmon and tiger salamanders and tigers and healthy forests and vibrant human communities where mothers don’t have dioxin in their breastmilk. If you really want to argue that oil tankers, global warming, DDT, the designated hitter rule, and the rest of the massive deathcamp we call civilization is natural, well, you can just go off in a corner with your $20,000 cheque and your utilitarian-philosopher buddies and play your bullshit linguistic games while the rest of us try to do something about the very real problems caused by civilization. If you want to seriously propose these waste-of-time questions,222 I’ve got nothing to say to you. I’ve got work to do. I’ve got a world to help save, from people exactly like you. I’ve got a civilization to help bring down before it does any more damage.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TEN. It’s 2003 and I read in the newspaper that “Industrial fishing practices have decimated every one of the world’s biggest and most economically important species of fish. . . . Fully 90 percent of each of the world’s large ocean species, including cod, halibut, tuna, swordfish, and marlin, have disappeared from the world’s oceans in recent decades. . . . [F]ishing has become so efficient that it typically takes just 15 years to remove 80 percent or more of any species unlucky enough to become the focus of a fleet’s attention.”223 Although these three sentences by themselves starkly reveal how and why civilization is killing the world, neatly tying together economics, technology, and planetary murder, there are other things about the article and others like it that reveal even more about what we are up against.
The first is the placement of the article, on page A13 (and taking up about one-fourth of the page, with the rest devoted to an ad for the new PCS Vision™ Picture Phone with BUILT-IN Camera). This is a point I’ve made before: if the murder of the oceans doesn’t deserve to rank as front page news, I don’t know what does.
The next is that, somewhat contradicting the first, I’m not sure this is really news at all. I told several activist friends about the article, and most responded, “I thought we already knew this.”
They’re right. Anybody who doesn’t understand that industrial fishing is killing the oceans is either an industry stooge, a politician,