Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [76]
This is in no way abstract. It is physical. On a finite world, the forced and routine importation of resources is unsustainable. Duh.
Show me how car culture can coexist with wild nature, and more specifically, show me how anthropogenic global warming can coexist with ice caps and polar bears. And any fixes such as solar electric cars would present problems at least equally severe. For example, the electricity still needs to be generated, batteries are extraordinarily toxic, and in any case, driving is not the main way a car pollutes: far more pollution is emitted through its manufacture than through its exhaust pipe. We can perform the same exercise for any product of industrial civilization.
We can’t have it all. The belief that we can is one of the things that has driven us to this awful place. If insanity could be defined as having lost functional connection with physical reality, to believe we can have it all—to believe we can simultaneously dismantle a world and live on it; to believe we can perpetually use more energy than arrives from the sun; to believe we can take more than the world gives willingly; to believe a finite world can support infinite growth, much less infinite economic growth, where economic growth consists of converting ever larger numbers of living beings to dead objects (industrial production, at its core, is the conversion of the living—trees or mountains—into the dead—two-by-fours and beer cans)—is grotesquely insane. This insanity manifests partly as a potent disrespect for limits and for justice. It manifests in the pretension that neither limits nor justice exist. To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation. And it is to have paid absolutely no attention to the past six thousand years.
One of the reasons we fail to perceive all of this is that we—the civilized—have been inculcated to believe that belongings are more important than belonging, and that relationships are based on dominance—violence and exploitation. Having come to believe that, and having come to believe the acquisition of material possessions is good (or even more abstractly, that the accumulation of money is good) and in fact the primary goal of life, we then have come to perceive ourselves as the primary beneficiaries of all of this insanity and injustice.
Right now I’m sitting in front of a space heater, and all other things being equal, I’d rather my toes were toasty than otherwise. But all other things aren’t equal, and destroying runs of salmon by constructing dams for hydropower is a really stupid (and immoral) way to warm my feet. It’s an extraordinarily bad trade.
And it’s not just space heaters. No amount of comforts or elegancies, what that nineteenth-century slave owner called the characteristics of civilization, are worth killing the planet. What’s more, even if we do perceive it in our best interest to take these comforts or elegancies at the expense of the enslavement, impoverishment, or murder of others and their landbases, we have no right to do so. And no amount of rationalization nor overwhelming force—not even “full-spectrum domination”—will suffice to give us that right.
Yet we have been systematically taught to ignore these trade-offs, to pretend that we don’t see them (even when they’re right in front of our faces) they do not exist.
Yesterday, I received this email: “We all face the future unsure if our own grand-children will know what a tree is or ever taste salmon or even know what a clean glass of water tastes like. It is crucial, especially for those of us who see the world as a living being, to remember. I’ve realized that outside of radical activist circles and certain