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By Root 2480 0

The function is not to save salmon, nor to respect the autonomy or existence of indigenous peoples, nor to protect the vocational or personal integrity of workers, nor to support life on this planet. Nor is the function to serve communities. It never has been and never will be. To expect corporations to do anything other than the purpose for which they are expressly and explicitly designed, that is, to amass wealth at the expense of human and nonhuman communities, is at the very least poor judgment, and more accurately delusional.

“Similarly, after Hanford, Rocky Flats, the Salvage Rider, dams, governmental inaction in the face of the Bhopal, the ozone hole, global warming, the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet, surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

“The responsibility for protecting our landbases thus falls to each of us. This means that all of us who care about salmon need to force accountability—force accountability—onto those causing their extinction; we must learn to be accountable to salmon rather than loyal to political and economic institutions that do not serve us well. If salmon are to be saved, we must give BPA and Kaiser Aluminum a reason to save them. We must tell these institutions that if they cause salmon to go extinct, we will cause these institutions to go extinct. And we must mean it. We must then say the same to every other destructive institution and to those who run them, and we must act on our words; we must do whatever is necessary to protect our homes and our landbases from those who are destroying them. Only then will salmon be saved. Only then will the genocide stop.

“Saving salmon from extinction means taking out dams. Everyone knows this. Even the Corps of Engineers now acknowledges this. But there is a vast difference between acknowledgement and action. So we must tell the government that if it will not help us in this, if it will not back up our resolve to save salmon, to stop the committing of genocide, to save our communities, if it will not remove the dams, then it must be us who do so. Again, we must mean it.

“When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that keeps us imprisoned within an economic and political system that does not blanche at committing genocide and ecocide.

“I’ve been told that before making important decisions, members of many native cultures would ask, ‘Who speaks for wolf? Who speaks for salmon?’ I ask that here. If salmon were able to take on human manifestation, to assume your body, or yours, or yours, or yours, what would they do?

“And why aren’t you doing it?”

The response by members of the panel? They called security on me.

The response by the rest of us, myself included? The dams still stand. The salmon still slide toward extinction.

So much for discourse.

It’s one thing, as my friend Jim at the Post Office pointed out, to talk or write about taking out dams, to talk or write about taking down civilization, to talk or write about protecting the landbases where we live, and it’s quite another thing to make it all happen.

I’m riding in a car with my friend Carolyn Raffensperger. It’s late, and we’re making good time across northern Iowa, in part because everyone else drives so fast. If I drive 85, everyone passes me. Driving 75 in, say, Oregon, makes me the fastest driver on the road. Carolyn asks what I hope to accomplish with my work.

I say, “I would like to change discourse so that we start talking honestly and deeply about bringing down civilization.”

She responds immediately: “That’s not what you want.”

“You’re right,” I say. “That’s not what I want. I want to bring