Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [66]
To hear and respect another’s no is to accept that the other has an existence independent of you. People generally refuse to hear another’s no—and this is certainly true of the entire culture’s refusal to enter into relationship with the natural world—when the possibility of intimate and genuine interactions with the other is too frightening to allow. Or when acculturation and personal history combine to make someone believe the other doesn’t even exist for its own sake.
Two weeks ago, the Klamath River, just south of here, was full of the biggest runs of salmon and steelhead (ocean-going rainbow trout) in years. “You could have walked across on their backs,” someone said to me. I talked to a Yurok Indian, whose culture is based on the salmon, who said the runs made him imagine what it must have been like to see the real runs before the white men arrived. It made me happy. I was going to go see them.
But I got another call. The fish were dying, piling up in mounds on the shore or floating bloated and bleeding from their vents. “Don’t come,” the caller said. “You don’t want to see this.”
Walt Lara, the Requa representative to the Yurok Tribal Council, said in a local newspaper interview, “The whole chinook run will be impacted, probably by 85 to 95 percent. And the fish are dying as we speak. They’re swimming around in circles. They bump up against your legs when you’re standing in the water. These are beautiful, chrome-bright fish that are dying, not fish that are already spawned out.” There are probably, he said, a thousand dead fish per mile of river.143
Last summer the federal government decided there was no evidence that fish need water, and instead redirected the water to (a few heavily subsidized) farmers in the Klamath Basin in southern Oregon. The water in the Klamath is now too warm for the salmon.
This is the story of civilization. This culture is killing the planet.
The defensive right of the salmon community to live, and the defensive right of the river to exist for its own sake, would in any meaningful morality trump the perceived rights of the farmers to take the water, and the perceived right of the government to give it to them.
But, you could ask, what about the right of the farmers to continue their traditional (and in this case, taxpayer- and environmentally subsidized) lifestyle?
This brings us to the eighth premise of this book: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of any economic system. This seems so self-evident I’m embarrassed to have to defend it, but it is a notion that entirely escapes our public (and private) discourse. Just yesterday I saw a tiny article on page seven of the San Francisco Chronicle stating that every single stream—every single stream—in the United States is contaminated with toxic chemicals (the completeness of this toxification should surprise me less than it does: surely if every mother’s breast milk is contaminated with toxic chemicals, why should we expect streams to be any more immune?), and that one-fifth of all animals and one-sixth of all plants are at risk for extinction within the next thirty years. Page one carried a huge article about Elvis memorabilia, and another that began, “Congress took its first tentative step Wednesday toward mandating that all television sets by 2006 include technology to foil piracy of digitized movies and television shows.”144 Don’t forget, once again, the entire sections of the paper devoted to sports, business, and comics/gossip.
Think about it for a second: what is the real source of our life? Of our food, our air, our water? Is it the economic system? Of course not: it is our landbase.
Just last week I learned that the air in Los Angeles is so toxic that children