• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2393 0

important than the one about figure skaters getting ripped off in the Olympics, which was, “Britney Crosses Over: Spears Trods Well-worn Path from Pop Star to Movie Actress in ‘Crossroads.’” And let’s not even compare the importance of the article about the killing of the planet to, say, the entire sections of the newspaper devoted daily to business, travel, and sports (Go Giants!). It bothered me also, maybe even more than the placement, that three full paragraphs of even this meager coverage were devoted to a Danish statistician who has gained great fame by arguing that the global environment is in fact improving, revealing once again the truth behind the thesis of another of my books, that in order for us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

It’s important to note that the Chron followed up this article by giving the Danish statistician an article all to himself that was three times as large as the original (seventy column-inches versus twenty-four—yeah, I know, I’ve got to get a social life), covering an entire page (with the exception of two ads, one stating that larger Post-It notes give you “More yada yada per note,” and one that reads “SEX FOR LIFE! Erection Problems? Premature Ejaculation? Immediate results after one consultation!”), complete with smiling photograph and statistical sidebar stating “it is not cost efficient to spend money on certain environmental problems” because “the cost per year of [human] life saved” is too high. Perhaps because this person’s obscene calculations—his damn lies, or even worse, his statistics, as the saying goes—fit so well with the goals of civil society, he has been named to head a government-funded environmental monitoring agency in his native Denmark.79

I think, however, that what bothered me most about the original article was the pull-quote the editors chose to bold, which was, “We clearly will have an increasingly difficult time in maintaining our current levels of affluence.”80 The world is being killed before our eyes, and these editors are concerned primarily for the maintenance of their affluence?

That’s a silly question. Of course the answer is yes.

But it makes me ask again: What is the calculus of casualties? There’s no reason to confine this calculus to humans. How many baubles is life on the planet worth? How many salmon, how many generations of salmon, swimming upstream, spawning, dying, feeding humans, bears, eagles, their own offspring, entire forests, are worth the life of one politician, one executive, one lying statistician? The lives of how many species of salmon are worth the fortune of one politician, one executive? How many salmon are we willing to sacrifice so that an efficient executive can have a vintage car? How many rivers of fish—and how many rivers themselves, with their once-clean, free-flowing water—are worth sustaining a lifestyle based on exploitation, a lifestyle that will not last, and that will, we can only hope (the we in this case evidently not including the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle), end very soon.

The fifth premise of this book is that the property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

This is all certainly true of our intraspecies relations. Police can and routinely do bust up homeless camps, but homeless people are not allowed to dismantle police stations (or the homes of the police). Petrochemical companies are allowed to make people’s homes uninhabitable by toxifying the surrounding landscape, but the residents of those homes are not allowed to destroy the refineries (or the homes of the owners). Whites could, should, and would systematically destroy the possessions of the Indians,