Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [24]
More wind, more rain. I said, “And what if you need slaves to run your industries? Would you take them, too? And if you need not just food and slaves, but if oil is the lifeblood of your economy, metal its bones? What if you need everything under the sun? Are you going to take it all?”
“If I need them—”
I cut her off: “Or perceive that you need them . . .”
She didn’t seem to mind. “Yes,” she said, thoughtfully. I could tell she was changing her mind. We were silent a moment, before she said, “And there’s the land. Cities damage the land they’re on.”
I thought of pavement and asphalt. Steel. Skyscrapers. I thought of a five-hundred-year-old oak I saw in New York City, on a slope overlooking the Hudson River. I thought of all that tree had experienced. As an acorn it fell in an ancient forest—except that back then there was no reason to call those forests ancient, or anything but home. It germinated in this diverse community, witnessed runs of fish up the Hudson so great they threatened to carry away the nets of those who would catch them, witnessed human communities living in these forests, the humans not depleting the forests, but rather enhancing them by their very presence, by what they gave back to their home. It witnessed the arrival of civilization, the building of a village, a town, a city, a metropolis, and from there, as Mumford put it, the “Parasitopolis turns into Patholopolis, the city of mental, moral, and bodily disorders, and finally terminates in Necropolis, the City of the Dead.”42 Along the way, the tree said good-bye to the wood bison, the passenger pigeon, the Eskimo curlew, the great American chestnuts, the wolverines who paced the shores of the Hudson. It said good-bye (at least for now) to humans living traditional ways. It said good-bye to the neighboring trees, to the forest where its life began. It witnessed the laying down of billions of tons of concrete, the erection of rigid steel structures and brick buildings topped with razor wire.
Unfortunately, it did not live long enough to witness all of this come back down. The tree, I learned last year, is no more. It was cut down by a landowner worried that its branches would fall on his roof. Environmentalists—doing what we seem to do best—gathered to say prayers over its stump.
I told her this story.
“Fuck,” she said. “I get it.” She shook her head. Pale brown hair fell to cover one eye. She pouted, as she often does when she thinks. Finally she said, “Damn it.” Then she smiled just slightly, although I could tell from her eyes she was tired. Suddenly she said, “You know, if we’re going to do this much damage, the least we can do is tell the truth.”
VIOLENCE
A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
Herbert V. Prochnow 43
THE SECOND PREMISE OF THIS BOOK IS THAT, FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities. This can be accomplished more or less physically, such as through the murder of the peoples and the land on which they depend, or more or less spiritually or psychologically, through the destruction of sacred sites, through aggressive and/or forceful proselytization, by forcefully addicting them to the aggressor’s products, by kidnapping their children (most often legally), and through many other means all-too-familiar to those who attend to the relations between the civilized and noncivilized.
Resources for the civilized have always been more important than the lives of those in the colonies. A German colonial officer in South West Africa was more honest than many: