Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [211]
The problem is not our humanity. The problem is this culture—this entire culture—and slight changes in spending habits won’t significantly stop the destruction.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t enact whatever changes we can to make whatever difference we can—remember, we do need it all—and buying organic lettuce is better than buying pesticide lettuce, on any number of levels. It’s just to say that when I spoke earlier of this culture being a culture of occupation, of the government being a government of occupation, of the economy being an economy of occupation, I wasn’t speaking metaphorically or hyperbolically. I was speaking sincerely, literally, physically, in all seriousness and truth. If we were Russians living under the German occupation in 1943, would we believe we could stop the Nazis by buying products made by German companies we like a little more and not buying them from I.G. Farben and other companies we don’t like?
The same is true for boycotts. We can’t boycott our way to sustainability any more than we can spend our way to it. The industrial economy, as is true for any economy of occupation (which means any civilized economy), is fundamentally a command economy (defined as “an economy that is planned and controlled by a central administration”). I know, I know, we’ve all been fed the line that “our” economy is based on some mythical thing called the free market, and that whatever it produces is by definition what we want. But I don’t want depleted uranium any more than I want depleted oceans. Do you? So how did we get them? If the economy really were free, why are armed military and police necessary to secure producers’ access to resources? And even if it were a “free market,” that wouldn’t help our landbases, since these markets do not value those parts of our landbases not perceived as productive (in other words, not obviously amenable to exploitation). And as mentioned before, in a global economy, free market or not, any wild thing that is vulnerable to exploitation (in other words, is valuable) will either be domesticated—enslaved—or exploited to extinction. But it’s worse than this. It’s not a free market anyway. Remember the words of Dwayne Andreas: “There’s not one grain of anything in the world that is sold in the free market. The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians.” 405 Economist Brad DeLong puts this another way: “As producers and employees many of us live in an economy that is better thought of as a corporate economy: an economy in which patterns of economic activity are organized by the hands of bosses and managers, rather than one in which the pattern of activity emerges unplanned by any other than the market’s invisible hand.”406 Yet another way to say all this is to note that, as alluded to above, all sectors of the economy, in fact the economy as a whole, would collapse almost immediately without huge subsidies. If every person in the country suddenly decided to somehow boycott, for example, the oil industry—which of course won’t happen, for any number of obvious reasons—the U.S. and other governments would merely increase the subsidies to that sector of the economy, and probably for good measure arrest the boycott organizers on racketeering charges.407
Another reason we can’t spend our way to sustainability is that we will always be outspent by those who are actively destroying the world. Destroying the world is how they make their money. It is always how they have made their money: through production, through the conversion of the living to the dead, through forcing others (the natural world, human communities) to pay the price for their activities. If you don’t produce—that is, destroy—you won’t make money. That still isn’t to say that there aren’t degrees of destructiveness: the damage caused by a permaculture farmer hand-delivering his lettuce leaves