Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [75]
A few years ago I was watching television with two indigenous people. One was a Maori woman, the other an American Indian man. A newscaster was speaking, which is to say he was lying, spinning events to promote the interests of his bosses, more broadly of capital, more broadly still of the culture, of civilization, more broadly yet of destruction. The particular story he was spinning had to do with the environment and indigenous rights. No causal connection could be shown, he was saying, between deforestation and species extinction. In fact, he said, the worst enemies of these creatures were environmental extremists keeping timber companies from going in and cleaning up forests, and indigenous peoples insisting on archaic “treaty rights” allowing them to hunt and fish where white people couldn’t. He made clear that decent people shouldn’t stand for such blatant obstructionism on the part of environmentalists and racism on the part of the indigenous.
My two friends suddenly spoke at the same time. The Maori woman: “I want to hit him in the head with a taiaha,” a Maori club. The Indian man: “I want to shoot an arrow through his throat.”
I burst out laughing. They looked at me. I could tell they were hurt by my laughter. I said, “No, it’s not that. It’s just this is such a wonderful example of parallel cultural evolution: different tools to accomplish the same important task.”
They laughed now, also.
We all face choices. We can have ice caps and polar bears, or we can have automobiles. We can have dams or we can have salmon. We can have irrigated wine from Mendocino and Sonoma counties, or we can have the Russian and Eel Rivers. We can have oil from beneath the oceans, or we can have whales. We can have cardboard boxes or we can have living forests. We can have computers and cancer clusters from the manufacture of those computers, or we can have neither. We can have electricity and a world devastated by mining, or we can have neither (and don’t give me any nonsense about solar: you’ll need copper for wiring, silicon for photovoltaics, metals and plastics for appliances, which need to be manufactured and then transported to your home, and so on. Even solar electrical energy can never be sustainable because electricity and all its accoutrements require an industrial infrastructure). We can have fruits, vegetables, and coffee brought to the U.S. from Latin America, or we can have at least somewhat intact human and nonhuman communities throughout that region. (I don’t think I need to remind readers that, to take one not atypical example among far too many, the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala was overthrown by the United States to support the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, leading to thirty years of U.S.-backed dictatorships and death squads. Also, a few years ago I asked a member of the revolutionary tupacamaristas what they wanted for the people of Peru, and he said something that cuts to the heart of the current discussion [and to the heart of every struggle that has ever taken place against civilization]: “We need to produce and distribute our own food. We already know how to do that. We merely need to be allowed to do so.”) We can have international trade, inevitably and by definition as well as by function dominated by distant and huge economic/governmental entities which do not (and cannot) act in the best interest of communities, or we can have local control of local economies, which cannot happen so long as cities require the importation (read: theft) of resources from ever-greater distances. We can have civilization—too often called the highest form of social organization—that spreads (I would say metastasizes) to all parts of the globe, or we can have a multiplicity of autonomous cultures each uniquely adapted to the land from which it springs. We can