Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [210]
I don’t have a lot of patience for those who blame “all of us consumers” for damage caused by the economic and social system, those who say, “We’re all in this together,”400 and who point out, “If we didn’t buy tickets, the airline industry would go broke.” Well, first, if we didn’t buy airline tickets, the feds would bail them out. All major industries rely on massive subsidies of public moneys to stay afloat. Second, if we’re going to throw out a fantasy about the mass of Americans rising up to not buy airline tickets, why dream so low? Why not dream big and have this same fantastic mass of people start taking out dams? Why don’t we have them storm vivisection labs and factory farms to liberate tormented animals? Why not have them dismantle the entire infrastructure? (Oh, because that might lead to real change, and we don’t even want to dream about that.) The same people who tell me I can make a difference by not buying an airline ticket quite often tell me I shouldn’t try to take out a dam because taking out one lone dam wouldn’t accomplish anything. And not buying one lone airline ticket will?
The point, once again and as always, is leverage.401 Sure, I support individuals and sometimes even industries I believe are headed the right direction through spending my hard-earned dollars in places and ways that are less destructive,402 and similarly, insofar as possible, I don’t support through my spending individuals and industries that are especially destructive, but I also recognize that far more needs to be done than this. I am not merely a consumer, much as those in power would like for me to define myself as such. The tools of consumerism are but one set available to me. The trick is to know when and how to use that set, and when and how to use others. The trick, to put it another way, is to leverage my efforts, to make my own small force have larger effects. The questions: What do I want to move?403 What do I use for levers? Where do I place the fulcrums? How hard and when do I push?
There are other problems with attempting to spend or boycott our way to sustainability. The first is that it simply won’t work. Spending won’t work because within an industrial economy nearly all economic transactions are destructive. Because the industrial economy—indeed a civilized economy—is systematically, inherently, functionally, and inescapably destructive, even buying “good things” isn’t really doing something good for the planet so much as it is doing something not quite so bad. Let’s say I purchase organic lettuce at the grocery store. That’s a good thing, right? Well, not particularly. The problem is that the mass cultivation of lettuce—organic or not—still destroys soils, and its transportation to market still requires the use of oil. I suppose if I purchased lettuce grown in small-scale permaculture beds from my next door neighbor, I’d be doing something even less bad, but this is rare enough to be the exception that makes the rule crystal clear.404 For an act to be sustainable, it must benefit the landbase, which means the soil, the critters who live in the soil, the plants who live on the soil, the animals who eat the plants, the animals who eat the animals, the insects and others who turn the dead back into soil. Producing, marketing, or purchasing organic lettuce doesn’t do that. Rare indeed within our culture is the economic activity that improves the landbase (and that doesn’t pay taxes, to boot, since more than 50 percent of the discretionary federal budget goes to pay for war). And don’t throw up your hands in despair and give me the old saw about how