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By Root 2294 0

“Reality Tours,” lawsuits, writing, civil disobedience, vandalism, sabotage, violence, and even voting. (Recently I was talking to a number of college students about the fix we’re in and said, “We need to stop civilization from killing the planet by any means necessary.” An instructor at the college, a longtime pacifist, corrected me, “You mean by any nonviolent means, of course.” I replied that I meant precisely what I said.) I advocate listening to my body. I advocate clean water and clean air. I advocate a world with wild salmon in it, and grizzlies, and sharks, whales (just yesterday I read—not in the capitalist press, obviously—that the federal government recently refused to provide protection for the North Pacific right whale, the world’s most imperiled large whale, because, in the words of an industry spokesperson—oh, sorry, a government spokesperson—“the essential biological requirements of the population . . . are not sufficiently understood”115), red-legged frogs, and Siskiyou Mountain salamanders (then tonight I read—also not in the capitalist press, silly: what do you think their purpose is, to provide useful information?—“The rare Siskiyou Mountain salamander may be facing extinction because the Bureau of Land Management will soon allow Boise Cascade to begin logging in the amphibian’s [last remaining] habitat”116). I advocate a world in which human and nonhuman communities are allowed to live on their own landbases. I advocate not allowing those in power to take resources by force, by law, by convention, or any other real or imagined means. Beyond not allowing, I advocate actively stopping them from doing so.

Most of our discourse surrounding counterviolence in this country runs from nonexistent all the way to superficial. So the course for this book seemed clear. One-by-one I would carefully examine the arguments that are commonly—and I have to say, I’ve learned through long and tedious experience, most often unthinkingly—thrown out against any use of violence in any (especially political) circumstances. You can’t use the master’s tools to take down the master’s house, says the person still attempting to work within religious, philosophical, economic, and political systems—Can you say “green capitalism?”—devised explicitly to serve the rich (John Locke put it succinctly: “Government has no other end than the preservation of property”117). You will become just like they are, say people whose knowledge of violence is almost entirely theoretical (I asked some of my students, in for murder, if killing someone is a psychological or spiritual Rubicon, and some said yes while some said no; unfortunately, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo aren’t available for comment, although I’d wager their wars against civilization did not civilize them). Violence doesn’t work, say those who tell us to shop and fax our way to sustainability, and who have to ignore—as is true for most of us working on these issues, else we’d probably go mad—that nothing is working to stop or even significantly slow the destruction. Hell, as I mentioned before, we can’t even slow the destruction’s acceleration! I would say this is partly because those in power have on their side so many tanks and guns and airplanes, as well as writers, therapists, and teachers; partly because we’re all crazy (and our sickness is very strong); partly because in the main neither our violent nor nonviolent responses are attempts to rid us of civilization itself—by allowing the framing conditions to remain we guarantee a continuation of the behaviors these framing conditions necessitate—and partly because we’re all scared spitless about doing what we all know needs to be done.

But in the couple of years between the book’s conception and the start of writing I realized that the question of whether or when to use violence is only a small yet integral part of the real question I’m after. I’m after much bigger game indeed.

LISTENING TO THE LAND

To be civilized is to hold oneself in opposition to nature, which is to hold oneself in opposition to oneself, to