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By Root 2465 0

for exactly this contingency. (And what does it say about our culture that mothers need to prepare their daughters for this possibility, or really, given the rates of rape in our culture, this likelihood?) Fortunately, the man didn’t look closely at the bottle, or he would have learned that the original prescription was several years old, for medicines designed to alleviate my sister’s migraines, and that the bottle was now full of aspirin. He told her that it wasn’t worth the risk, and that instead he wanted all of her money. She had twenty dollars in her purse and she gave him five.309 He left. The point is that my sister had caused the man to no longer identify himself as a rapist, but as a robber, and to act on that identification. She effectively killed the rapist. Sometimes, when men strongly identify as rapists, it is not possible to kill the rapist without killing the man. So be it.

The first part of our task, then, is to attempt to break our own identification as the civilized and remember that we are human animals living in and reliant on our landbases for survival, to begin to care more about the survival of our landbase than the perpetuation of civilization. (What a concept!) Then we must break our identification as victims of this awful and deathly system called civilization and remember that we are survivors, resolve that we will do what it takes so that we—and those we love, including nonhuman members of our landbase —will survive, outlast, outlive, defeat civilization. That we will in time dance and play and love and live and die among the plants and animals who will someday grow amidst its ruins. Once we have made that shift inside of ourselves, once we no longer see ourselves as victims of civilization but as its survivors, as those who will not let it kill us or those we love, we have freed ourselves to begin to pursue the more or less technical task of actually stopping those who are killing our landbases, killing us. One way to do that might be to get CEOs, cops, and politicians to identify themselves as human animals living in and reliant on their landbases and to break their identities as CEOs, cops, and politicians. The good news is that some few of them may listen to reason. The bad news is that history, sociology, psychology, and direct personal experience suggest that most—nearly all—will not.

In the second dream, I drove on a small road into a place I’d been before, a place that was wild. But my car could not pass between two small trees. I stopped and got out. I could not get into the wild. I was frustrated. There was a reservoir nearby, and as I walked toward it, it filled with warships. Richard Nixon was lashed, à la Admiral Farragut, to the mast (in this case radar tower) of a ship, flashing his trademark two-fingered salute. The beach was soon packed with patriots pushing me this way and that for not enthusing about the military takeover of the reservoir. The patriots began to party. I struggled to get away, and finally was able to walk alone into the wilderness.

Part of the grammar of my dreams is that when I have multiple dreams in the same sleep, they speak to the same questions. This dream, then, was a follow up to the first, with the first revealing our incapacity to face our predicament, to come up with any response more creative than suicide, and the second making clear that we cannot return to the wild and bring our cars and our machines with us. They will not fit. And so where does this leave us? It leaves us near artificial lakes filled with killers and liars who tie themselves to instruments of war. And it leaves us in the midst of crowds of people who perceive all of these death-machines as good things, and who party among their machines of death. It leaves us needing to find a different way to make it back to the wilderness, back to our home.310

The most common words I ever hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, “We’re fucked.” Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have—or rather whatever legal tools they have, which