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By Root 2284 0

own,” he could presume that most of the people he addressed had not only seen “mighty forest trees” but had formed intimate personal relationships with them and with the other parts of the landbases they were being called upon to defend. They knew the cycles of the insects and the cycles of the birds. They knew the places where elk bedded down and the paths where panthers pass across. They learned from and loved the big woodpeckers and the tiny voles. These were their relations. Now, rare indeed are the people who have seen “mighty forest trees,” much less participated in long-term relationships with them. This is not only because Tecumseh’s warning has come true and the forests have been cut down, but because for the most part we humans have been metabolized fully enough into this narcissistic culture that by now we spend far more time with machines and other human creations than with wild beings of any sort. Years ago John A. Livingston, author of The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation and One Cosmic Instant: Man’s Fleeting Supremacy, told me, “Nowadays most of us live in cities. That means most of us live in an insulated cell, completely cut off from any kind of sensory information or sensory experience that is not of our own manufacture. Everything we see, hear, taste, smell, touch, is a human artifact. All the sensory information we receive is fabricated, and most of it is mediated by machines. I think the only thing that makes it bearable is the fact that our sensory capacities are so terribly diminished—just as they are in all domesticates—that we no longer know what we’re missing. The wild animal is receiving information for all of the senses, from an uncountable number of sources, every moment of its life. We get it from one only—ourselves. It’s like doing solitary in an echo chamber. People doing solitary do strange things. And the common experience of victims of sensory deprivation is hallucination. I believe that our received cultural wisdom, our anthropocentric beliefs and ideologies, can easily be seen as institutionalized hallucinations.”453

(In related news, the stock market rose sharply today in heavy trading.)

Put another way, having long laid waste our own sanity, and having long forgotten what it feels like to be free, most of us too have no idea what it’s like to live in the real world. Seeing four salmon spawn causes me to burst into tears. I have never seen a river full of fish. I have never seen a sky darkened for days by a single flock of birds. (I have, however, seen skies perpetually darkened by smog.) As with freedom, so too the extraordinary beauty and fecundity of the world itself: It’s hard to love something you’ve never known. It’s hard to convince yourself to fight for something you may not believe has ever existed.

Another difference between conversations now about stopping the culture versus those happening before is that civilization’s stranglehold over life has grown stronger. It’s always easier to stop invaders before they establish a beachhead, and it would have been a good thing had someone been able to warn the Indians not to trust and help the civilized. Maybe the Atlantic Ocean would have held them at bay for a lot longer, and without the resources from the Americas civilization might not have been able to keep expanding, and so might have collapsed. In any case, many of the pleas by Indians trying to get other Indians to join them in the fight stressed the need to strike soon, before the civilized became even more numerous and the world and its people so much weaker.

Well, we all know by now that the civilized have pretty much insinuated themselves into all the nooks and crannies. We’ve already discussed the number of soldiers and cops at the disposal of the rulers. And we can’t forget the technologies such as video cameras, DNA banks, predator drones, RFID chips, all of which increase the control by those in power. In some ways we’ll need a far bigger lever to stop civilization than we would have needed a couple of hundred years ago.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that