Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [126]
Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are gone. Those making decisions concerning the fate of the remaining fish do not consider this a problem. What are you going to do about it?
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE ELEVEN. Targeted stupidity.
The interconnectedness of the global economic system is taken for granted. Most people understand that a downturn in one sector of the economy can lead to problems in another. The collapse of the Asian economies in 1997, for example, harmed the timber industry in the northwestern and southeastern United States, as corporations that had exported to Asia lost their markets. Yet many of the same people who natter endlessly about this form of interdependence somehow seem to believe that you can cut down a forest, replant with one species, and still have a forest. They will stare at you stupidly—or more likely scoff at you—if you talk about how harming voles harms Douglas firs. They see no problem with wiping out species after species, and cannot seem to grasp that species need habitat, and that habitat need species.
It is not that these people cannot understand interconnectedness. It is that their stupidity is targeted.
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TWELVE. Auschwitz. Treblinka. Bergen-Belsen. That’s the reason. No, not because civilization turns the entire world into a labor camp, then a death camp, although that is the case. No, not because the endpoint of civilization is assembly-line mass murder, although that, too, is the case.227 Instead it’s because of the doctors at Auschwitz.
Here’s why. Do you remember when I talked about how environmentalism is an abysmal failure, and I gave a reason or two for our ineffectiveness? I left off what I think is the most important reason, and it has to do with those doctors.
In his extraordinarily important book The Nazi Doctors228 Robert Jay Lifton explored how it was that men who had taken the Hippocratic oath could participate in prisons where inmates were worked to death or killed in assembly lines. He found that many of the doctors honestly cared for their charges, and did everything within their power—which means pathetically little—to make life better for the inmates. If an inmate got sick they might give the inmate an aspirin to lick. They might put the inmate to bed for a day or two (but not for too long or the inmate might be “selected” for murder). If the patient had a contagious disease, they might kill the patient to keep the disease from spreading. All of this made sense within the confines of Auschwitz. The doctors, once again, did everything they could to help the inmates, except for the most important thing of all: They never questioned the existence of Auschwitz itself. They never questioned working the inmates to death. They never questioned starving them to death. They never questioned imprisoning them. They never questioned torturing them. They never questioned the existence of a culture that would lead to these atrocities. They never questioned the logic that leads inevitably to the electrified fences, the gas chambers, the bullets in the brain.
We as environmentalists do the same. We work as hard as we can to protect the places we love, using the tools of the system the best that we can. Yet we do not do the most important thing of all: We do not question the existence of this death culture. We do not question the existence of an economic and social system that is working the world to death, that is starving it to death, that is imprisoning it, that is torturing it. We never question a culture that leads to these atrocities. We never question the logic that leads inevitably to clearcuts, murdered oceans, loss of topsoil, dammed rivers, poisoned aquifers.
And we certainly don’t act to bring it down.
Here’s an example. I recently gave a talk at a gathering of environmentalists called Bioneers. The speeches I listened to were quite good, with people speaking