Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [148]
It may be possible to save some specific places or peoples or plants or animals or fungi or rocks or other natural life from being devoured and destroyed by this deathly culture (if the 138,000 cell phone towers, for example, kill 27.6 million migratory songbirds per year [roughly mid-range of the estimates] each collapsed cell phone tower saves an average of two hundred migratory songbirds per year). There’s a world to be liberated. What are you going to do about it?
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE SIXTEEN. Polar bears: “About half a mile upriver, I came to a very strong shoot of water, from thence I saw several white-bears fishing in the stream above. I waited for them, and in a short time, a bitch with a small cub swam close to the other shore, and landed a little below. The bitch immediately went into the woods, but the cub sat down upon a rock, when I sent a ball through it, at the distance of over a hundred and twenty yards at the least, and knocked it over; but getting up again it crawled into the woods, where I heard it crying mournfully and concluded that it could not long survive.
“The report of my gun brought some others down, and another she bear, with a cub of eighteen months old, came swimming close under me. I shot the bitch through the head and killed her dead. The cub perceiving this and getting sight of me made at me with great ferocity; but just as the creature was about to revenge the death of his dam, I saluted him with a load of large shot in his right eye, which not only knocked that out, but also made him close the other. He no sooner was able to keep his left eye open, than he made at me again, quite mad with rage and pain; but when he came to the foot of the bank, I gave him another salute with the other barrel, and blinded him most completely; his whole head was then entirely covered with blood. He blundered into the woods; knocking his head against every rock and tree that he met with.
“I now perceived that two others had just landed about sixty yards above me, and were fiercely looking round them. The bears advanced a few yards to the edge of the woods, and the old one was looking sternly at me. The danger of firing at her I knew was great, as she was seconded by a cub of eighteen months; but I could not resist the temptation.”
The author, a Captain George Cartwright, really the first person to solidly establish civilization on the shores of Newfoundland, then moved toward another part of the river. “I had not sat there long, ere my attention was diverted to an enormous, old, dog bear, which came out of some alder bushes on my right and was walking slowly towards me, with his eyes fixed on the ground, and his nose not far from it. I rested my elbows, and in that position suffered him to come within five yards of me before I drew the trigger; when I placed my ball in the centre of his scull, and killed him dead: but as the shore was a flat reclining rock, he rolled around until he fell into the river.
“On casting my eyes around, I perceived another beast of equal size, raised half out of the water. . . . I crept through the bushes until I came opposite to him, and interrupted his repast, by sending a ball through his head; it entered a little above his left eye, went out at the root of his right ear, and knocked him over, he then appeared to be in the agonies of death for some time; but at last recovered sufficiently to land on my side of the river, and to stagger into the woods.
“Never in my life did I regret the want of ammunition so much as on this day; as I was by the failure interrupted in the finest