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By Root 2325 0

violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default of our culture. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence—required and caused by the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich—and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps long-term shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament, and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

PREDATOR AND PREY

Kill every buffalo you can, for every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.

Colonel R.I. Dodge, Fort McPherson, 1867 146

I’VE LONG UNDERSTOOD THAT CIVILIZATION REQUIRES LAND OWNERSHIP to be concentrated in the hands of the rulers, by force when necessary and tradition when possible. More basically, it requires that people be inculcated to believe land can be bought and sold. Ultimately, of course, it requires that people be inculcated to believe everything can be bought and sold, and requires also that ownership of everything be concentrated as completely as possible in the hands of the rulers.

Those in charge have always understood—and have often been explicit about it—that it’s difficult to control people who have access to land. Depriving them of this access puts them at your mercy. Without access to land there can be no self-sufficiency: land provides food, shelter, clothing. Without access to land people obviously have no place to stay. If you can force people to pay just so they can be alive on this earth—nowadays these payments are usually called rent or mortgage —you’ve forced them into the wage economy. The same holds true for forcing them to pay for materials the earth gives freely: the salmon, bison, huckleberries, willows, and so on that are central to the lives, cultures, and communities not only of indigenous peoples but to all of us, even if we make believe this isn’t the case. To force people to pay for things they need to survive is an atrocity: a community- and nature-destroying atrocity. To convince us to pay willingly is a scam. It also, as we see around us—or would see had we not been so thoroughly convinced—causes us to forget that communities are even possible.

Those in power have rarely hidden their intentions. Indeed, as I’ve written elsewhere, the need to separate the majority of people from their food supplies—thus separating them also from their freedom—was central to the design of civilization’s early cities.147 I’ve written, too, how slave owners described the land-ownership conditions under which chattel slavery was the optimal means to control a workforce, and described also the conditions under which not chattel but wage slavery was the owners’/capitalists’ best option. If there’s a lot of land and not many people, you’ll need to use force in order to convert free human beings into laborers. If, on the other hand, there’s a lot of people and not much land, or if those in power otherwise control access to land, those who do not own the land have no choice but to work for those in power. Under these conditions there’s no reason for owners to go to the expense of buying or enslaving people, then paying for their slaves’ food, clothing, and shelter: it’s much cheaper to simply hire them.148 As one pro-slavery philosopher put it: “In all countries where the denseness of the population has reduced it to a matter of perfect certainty, that labor can be obtained, whenever wanted, and that the laborer can be forced, by sheer necessity,